“Always always traces of the past”
Two feelings are marvelously close to us,
In them the heart finds food:
Love of native ashes,
Love of fatherly coffins.
AS Pushkin
Academician D. Likhachev in his Letters on the Good and Beautiful wrote that memory and knowledge of the past, filling the world, make it more interesting and significant, that without the past, the world for people is empty. He called the knowledge of the historical past “the fourth very important dimension of the world.”
This knowledge begins with an interest in what directly surrounds a person. And first of all, this knowledge of your family tree, your roots. For me, these are not abstract concepts. I was told from my childhood by my grandmother about my ancestors, showing old black-and-white photographs. On the maternal line they were serfs. My great-great-grandmother, the daughter of serf Ukrainian peasants, is buried in a rural cemetery near Kharkov. My great-grandmother, a schoolteacher, is buried
In the old cemetery we have only women. We do not know the graves of great-grandfathers. And are they? It so happened that in our family two generations of women raised and raised their children without husbands. And not only their own: after ancestors who were serf and illiterate, all subsequent generations worked and continue to work in the field of enlightenment. Among my ancestors – rural and city teachers, teachers of universities and technical schools. I hope that I will not be an exception.
The past… Without it, as is known, there is no present, there is no future. A person is lonely if there are no people with whom he has a common past. “Life is not a momentary existence,” the old academician reminds the young.
Since the twenties of the last century, Ukraine was strangled by a communist, totalitarian regime, inhuman in its cruelty. This is known to everyone, it is estimated by almost everyone unequivocally. But there are those who, in these tough assessments, go very far. Yes, “homo sovieticus” was formed for those terrible decades, but I always object when it is called “homo hamus”. Perhaps this type of formed, but… Is it possible to talk about the world-famous scientists and artists of that time? Or about our soldiers, who on their shoulders endured a terrible war with fascism? Or about the millions of honest workers who stood by the machines, built, sowed and harvested? The people did not live “thanks” but “in spite of”: in spite of repressions and executions, in spite of the camps and prisons hammered to the brim, despite all the artificially created famines. They all christen “homo hamus” – this is to go against the historical truth, it means not to honor the traces of your past. It is necessary to be able to separate the grain from the chaff, not to blame the whole people for the atrocities of its far from the best part. History can not be rewritten. It must be known and correctly evaluated. To read from the past, if its historical estimates are not unambiguous, will only be that left a good trace.
Such good traces of the past and in the life of the country, its people, and in the life of each person are much greater than dark spots. Of those who do not know their roots, who are left without native soil, which keeps traces of the past, a real citizen will not grow up.
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