Last night's dinner party was everything I'd hoped for: food came out well; conversation was lively and rich; poets were delighted not to be talking about their own poems. It felt festive, really, as if there were some occasion drawing us together.

And yet Ukraine was on my mind, as it always is these days. So I read my friends this excerpt from Susanna Braund's introduction to Sarah Ruden's translation of Virgil's Aeneid:

The Aeneid has been taken as the model or template for dozens of epic poems in European languages. Episodes from it, especially the story of Dido and the sack of Troy, have been reworked in many different literary and musical forms, serious and comic. For example, the founding work of modern Ukrainian literature is the 1798 travesty of the Aeneid by Ivan Kotlyarevsky in which the Trojans are depicted as hard-drinking Cossacks; this in turn inspired operas in the early twentieth century by Yaroslav Lopatinsky (Aeneas on His Wanderings, 1906) and Mykola Lysenko (Eneida, 1910), a 1985 rock opera, also entitled Eneida, by Serhiy Bedusenko, and a full-length animated movie by Volodymyr Dakhno released in 1991, the year in which the Ukrainian parliament declared independence.

In other words, Aeneas' fixation on loss, homeland, and lineage is the foundational narrative, the national myth, of Ukraine.

I wanted to know more about that "1798 travesty," so I did a quick Wikipedia search for Ivan Kotlyarevsky and found this quotation by him . . . though I'm not sure which of his works it appears in: 

Where the love for the Motherland inspires heroism, there an enemy force will not stand, there a chest is stronger than cannons.

Apparently, a university in Kharkiv is named after him, as are "numerous boulevards and streets in Ukrainian cities."

So. Ukrainian poets. Ukrainian badassery. Ukrainian devastation. All one big picture.