It’s a nightmare, a barbaric farce. The city is first taken by Russians, then by Ukrainians, then by Russians again; foreign forces join the struggle, gangster hordes go on killing sprees, thousands are butchered, and a plague engulfs the survivors. It’s Kyiv. The year is 1918.
A young nobody called Konstantin Paustovsky (fisher, paramedic, student) has just arrived with an itch to write. He’s unusual: in the midst of the slaughter he thinks about happiness. Decades later he will be nominated for the Nobel prize for literature, but won’t, of course, get it. The happiness he thinks about is always the wrong kind.
