Trafika Europe 7 - Ukrainian Prayer

Yuri Vynnychuk

surprised at how it came to be that he had become a teacher despite the fact that he had hated that profession when he was still in school. He would come home tired, and the only thing that could motivate him to do scholarly work was wine. The first glass took away his daylong tension, the second freed his thoughts, tore off all the chains from them, and then his pen would begin to fly across the paper as though it were mad. Only it lasted for not more than about two hours, but then tedium would fatigue him, and he would lie down to sleep with his head filled with ancient hieroglyphs, clay tablets and papyruses; the complete disdain of his wife and in-laws of his scholarly work added to this feeling; they considered his work nonsense, a waste of time, but he would never complete his scholarly work, so hewas, therefore, destined

not dealing with a complete panorama of literary life back then, but just with fragments that miraculously managed to make their way to us, that miraculously had been decoded and read, but not all of them, because no one had grasped the Arcanumian language, and an opinion about their literature had been formed from Hittite and Hurrian sources. And it was the latter issue that excited Yarosh so much that he cast aside all the remaining ones and took to decoding Arcanumian texts. Many scholars had tried to do this before him, but failed. Arcanumian cuneiform was unlike any other. Finding time for his scholarly work just in odd moments, Yarosh seriously began to contemplate the sense of his family life. The stupid routine of work in school oppressed and tormented him; he was

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