Lethargy Under the Sign of Karma

Besides Babel the town on various occasions was visited by other celebrities - Shevchenko, Balzac, and, they say, Tsar Nicholas the Last. Dubno was mentioned by Gogol in his Taras Bulba.

The fortress built in sixteenth century by the Prince of Ostroh was never taken by Taras, whose reality has never been questioned by Dubno residents. Poles seem to believe in him also, for at one time they erected a monument to one of Bulba's sons - Andriy. Under the Soviets the monument was destroyed. And not the monument alone. In the place of the ancient Jewish cemetery the somber box of a central bus station now stands. Old residents of Dubno say that human remains under cover of darkness were taken by local authorities to the town garbage-dump. The brave KGB boys made their second trip not so long ago. It was just before the 1991 putsch when local members of Rukh chanced upon mass graves in the basement of the ancient Bernardine chapel. Mass shootings were executed by NKVD in 1945-1946 under the motto of fighting bandits. Skulls of children and women, spent cartridges of Mosin rifles found on the floor - everything was taken to the very same dump. The bulldozer operator got ten rubles for beer. An ordinary case. In the atheist mind of Homo Sovieticus there still can be found some fundamental necrophilia: the building of the state television center in Jewish cemetery in Kyiv, cemetery soil with bones for dachas of Dnipropetrovsk top officials - such examples in Ukraine are countless.

Perestroika and after has changed little in the life of the town and its residents, if one does not take into account dying enterprises and markets crammed with Turkish goods. Pants, stockings, horses, fatback, fake cosmetics, market slang, cardsharps, the radio mumbling something from the Gospel of Luke... Through the characteristic Volyn dialect the Polish language can be heard, and more seldom Hungarian. In the afternoon the place becomes quiet and people break up. Some go home, others - to a bar where they get thoroughly drunk and then sink into deep sentimentalism or tough fist-fights. After the third shot of the strongest locally made vodka one begins to understand that little has changed here since Taras Bulba's days and if you do not flee in time, all one's life can be spent in a wine-cellar under the terrifying sign Karma or in a similar filthy place across the road with the more hopeful name of Manhattan.