The Ukrainian Apocalypse E-Book

Zacharias Mbizo

• Herausgeber: LiteraturPlanet
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

The atrocious killings in Ukraine are among the things that are usually said to leave us "speechless". On the other hand, the monstrous nature of the crimes committed there requires that we do not remain silent about them. So these literary miniatures are an attempt to speak about the unspeakable in spite of everything.

Leseprobe

Zacharias Mbizo

The Ukrainian Apocalypse

Literary Miniatures

Literaturplanet

3rd, expanded edition

Imprint

© Verlag LiteraturPlanet, 2024

Im Borresch 14

66606 St. Wendel

3rd, expanded edition

http://www.literaturplanet.de

About this book: The atrocious killings in Ukraine are among the things that are usually said to leave us "speechless". On the other hand, the monstrous nature of the crimes committed there requires that we do not remain silent about them. So these literary miniatures are an attempt to speak about the unspeakable in spite of everything.

About the author: Zacharias Mbizo, engaged in literature since 2015, belongs to the circle of the so-called "Ecartists" around the blogger Rother Baron and has already left numerous traces on Planet Literature.

Cover picture: Nicholas Roerich (Nikolai Rerikh, 1874 – 1947): The Last Angel (1912); Estonian Roerich Society / Wikimedia commons

Introductory picture: George Frederic Watts (1817 – 1904): The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: The Rider on the Pale Horse; ca. 1878); Walker Art Gallery (Wikimedia Commons)

Cover pictures for the individual chapters:

Prelude: Albert Chmielowski (1846 – 1916): Death and conflagration; central section of the triptych "Disaster" (after 1870); Warsaw, National Museum (Wikimedia Commons)

Outside view of the war: William Turner (1775 – 1881): The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons on October 16, 1834 (1835); Cleveland Museum of Art (Wikimedia Commons)

Inside view of the war: Viktor Vasnetsov (1848 – 1926): Angel hurling bolts of lightning in the Apocalypse; sketch for a painting  in the Vladimir Cathedral in Kiev (Kyiv); 1887 (Wikimedia Commons)

Occupation: Arnold Böcklin (1827 - 1901): The Plague (1898); Kunstmuseum Basel (Wikimedia Commons)

Aftermath: Adrian Hill (1895 - 1977): Ruins between Bernafay Wood and Maricourt (1918); London, Imperial War Museums (Wikimedia commons)

Death rains from the sky, every night feels like Russian roulette, life resembles a permanent volcanic eruption: Anyone experiencing the war in Ukraine must feel as if they have stepped into St. John's Revelation.

Witnessing the Apocalypse

Sometimes you sit down on one of the piles of rubble in the alley of ruins that used to be an alley of houses and look at the pile of rubble that used to be your church.

Your gaze searches for nothing, it asks for nothing. And yet, very quietly, perhaps unconsciously, the hope stirs within you that a secret power could flow to you from the place where your church once stood – something that could show you a way out of this spiritual stone desert, a beyond, however hazy, where life follows completely different laws.

Shouldn't something of the divine spirit have penetrated the stones that were once the house of God? But no matter how fervently your eyes pierce the charred ashlars, they remain a lifeless mass that is only filled with life in your memory. It is just like with any other grave – life is only outside it, inside eternal silence prevails.

Although your eyes are wide open, you have the feeling of wandering through a dreamscape. In your mind's eye, you see yourself stepping through a tall, darkly shining gate. You know that this is the entrance to a mysterious book and that you are suddenly a part of it.

Black angels circle in the sky above you. In their hands they carry bowls moulded as if from the deepest darkness of night. Their shape can only be recognised because they are surrounded by a bright halo, as in a solar eclipse.

All these bowls are filled with a mass that is a thousand times darker than the darkest night, but at the same time hotter than the hottest star. This mass is poured out by the black angels into the sky and across the land.

At the same moment, you feel a tremendous tremor in the air. The atmosphere seems to ignite all by itself. Burning clouds gather in the sky and spew their shower of sparks onto the earth. The smallest spark is bigger than the brightest fire you have ever seen.

Everything that is caught up in this storm of sparks loses its shape. Anyone who looks in its direction will go blind for the rest of their lives.

Even the rivers turn red from the all-consuming fire. Their blazing waters mingle with the bleeding breath of the creatures that exhale their souls in it. Stones are crushed in it like sand.

The fire seems to materialise in the rivers, shooting through the land as a liquid mass that extinguishes all life. As soon as this fiery mass hits the sea, you hear a tremendous hissing sound. The next moment, a tsunami of burning air rolls across the land, sweeping all the birds from the sky and stripping all the trees of their leaves.

When the flame tsunami subsides, the sea has vanished into thin air. The sun disappears behind huge columns of smoke, and the world is shrouded in impenetrable darkness. The breath that fills this darkness is hot, hot and poisonous like the breath of the one who has endeavoured to destroy Creation since the beginning of time.

Of course, you immediately recognise which book you have entered in your dream. Even while you are immersed in the daydream, you realise whose dark visions you have fallen into. After all, you have read from it often enough in your sermons.

And yet there is no feeling of familiarity. In no way does the earlier encounter with the dark images take away any of their terrifying power. Rather the opposite is the case.

Never would it have occurred to you that the horror, which you had always interpreted as a vision of man's final alienation from God, could become reality. But even if your daydream spoke to you in a different language than the reality in which you are trapped, its images are just another expression of what you have to live through.

That's why the long-familiar images are only now unfolding their true horror for you. In the past, you used to see them as an echo of God's wrath at people's turning away from him. Admittedly, that was not a pleasant thought either: What kind of God was this who in his wrath was capable of scourging his creation and the beings living in it in this archaic way?

However, you could always take comfort in the thought that God's wrath at least indicated that he cared about his creation; that he took an interest in it and that his actions – even if they extinguished human lives – were ultimately always aimed at preserving the essence of his creation.

But now that you are looking at the soulless pile of rubble that once was your church, everything is different. Now you almost wish God would spread the shield of his wrath over you to protect you from that other wrath that has come upon you like a man-made force of nature.

Only now do you realise that the true apocalypse does not arise from the wrath of God, but from his complete absence.

The Ten Commandments in War

1. I am your Lord, the God of War. You shall carry out my every command unconditionally.

2. You shall kill, slaughter and murder. The more indiscriminate and uncompromising your killing, the more worshipful your deeds.

3. You shall honour your Fatherland and Mother Homeland. You can do this by expanding your Fatherland and offering human sacrifices to Mother Homeland.

4. You shall not allow yourself hours of leisure. Every day on which you serve your Lord, the God of War, is a holiday for you.

---ENDE DER LESEPROBE---