Kyiv bookstore announced the collection of books in Russian for their further processing.

The store recalled that it had already collected 57 tons of books in Russian, sent them to drywall, and an SUV for the Armed Forces was bought with the proceeds.

From the collection of new tons, another one will be bought, as well as things needed by the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

As an author whose books were banned in Ukraine back in 2015 and were sent back then for processing, I couldn’t help but think maliciously: if a book is read, there’s no way to scrape it out of a person.

At least burn it, at least cut it into small pieces and let them go to the wind.

Real read books live in us always.

I imagined the authors of these books – by association with those whom Ukraine has most actively overthrown this year.

Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Pushkin.

A metaphor was born in my head.

Rolled up in drywall, they are eloquently silent from the walls and ceilings in Ukrainian homes.

And then she imagined how an SUV exchanged for them rushes through the theater of operations and carries passengers, in whose hearts a tear of a Dostoevsky child does not knock.

Yes, they were beautiful metaphors.

But, as is usually the case, they were immediately shattered by the prosaic nature of reality when I looked into the account of the Kyiv bookstore and read the comments under the collection announcement.

There were quite a few people who wanted to get rid of the books “written in the language of the occupier”, and they all hurried to bring the books to the store in person or send them to Kyiv by “Nova Poshta”.

“Can thirty volumes of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia be?”

asked the manager of the store.

"You can," he agreed.

“Can old magazines be in Russian?”

others asked.

"You can bring everything."

— “Is it possible to bring books not by Russian-speaking authors, but translated into Russian?”

- "Take it."

If I had volumes of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia and deposits of old magazines, I might also want to get rid of them in a convenient way.

Who needs them now, when everything can be viewed on the Internet?

Once upon a time, the grandparents of these people defended many hours of queues in stores in order to purchase this encyclopedia.

And since they bought it in Russian, it means that they spoke Russian - according to the logic of the donors, their own grandchildren or children, in the "language of the occupiers."

According to the same logic, the donors themselves speak and think in the “language of the occupiers”, otherwise this encyclopedia and old magazines in Russian would not still be in their homes.

Surprisingly and to my joy, there was not a word about the books of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Pushkin or Chekhov in the comments.

And this whole action began to resemble the collection of waste paper, not literature.

Normal, by the way, Soviet, pioneer tradition.

And no matter what Ukrainians say, no matter how they get rid of Soviet encyclopedias, the Soviet is still very much alive in them.

The store management would have caught all these nuances if they had read books by great Russian writers.

There about all this is.

But it does not catch, because it measures books by tons and kilograms, and not by meanings.

And therefore, that Kyiv store is not a bookstore at all, but an ordinary waste paper collection point.

The point of view of the author may not coincide with the position of the editors.