Discovering Cyrano de Bergerac in Ukraine

One recent spring evening, three years and six weeks into the big war, an attentive audience watched a performance of the nineteenth-century play Cyrano de Bergerac (directed by David Petrosyan) at Lviv’s Maria Zankovetska theatre. The play is about a dazzling swordsman and poet who battles on in life in utter loneliness. That evening came as something of a revelation for me. Days onwards, I couldn’t stop thinking about the significance of staging this play in Ukraine at this moment in time—a country fighting essentially alone, resisting the relentless assault inflicted on it by Russia. (The Sumy massacre came just one day after the play’s performance) 

That evening, ‘Cyrano’ seemed no longer so much about matters of the heart (it is usually seen as a tragi-comedy about love), but more about freedom, metaphysics, and how the heroic free spirit can perhaps only exist in a certain isolation.

I also started thinking differently about my own gaze on Ukraine, that of a ‘western’ European. Ukraine’s resistance has filled us, the supportive ‘westerners’, not just with a mixture of admiration (for Ukrainians) and guilt (for how our countries aren’t helping enough, nor fast enough). One day, we may also come to admit our deeper moral discomfort: perhaps, just like Cyrano, Ukrainian resistance is somehow ‘too good’ for this world. 

Cyrano de Bergerac is the absolute heroic figure, both in body and in soul. He single-handedly defeats a hundred men in a sword battle. He is also invincible in eloquence, poetic jousts, brilliant speeches, daring statements. Yet he is alone. The person he truly loves, and whose heart he wants to win, seems unattainable. His physical and literary bravado is widely admired, it makes him glow, it empowers him. Yet his heart aches. He is full of swashbuckling boldness, but deep down he walks the tightrope of despair and pain. 

We look with awe at his brilliance, we root for him, but he remains a strikingly lonesome figure.

I had decided to stay on and live in Ukraine after my fellowship at INDEX in Lviv because learning and understanding takes time, and adjusting one’s lens to new realities does too. Three decades of journalism mostly focused on the so-called ‘post-Soviet space’ hadn’t prevented me from missing much of what was important: on one side, the sheer scale of what I'd call the ‘Russian collective disaster’, and on the other, the determination and capacity to resist of the Ukrainians, who would be subjected to the full monstrosity of that collective Russian disaster in 2022. 

War is present in ‘Cyrano’. It is set in the 1640 siege of Arras. The main character is a poet-soldier. Chivalry and intrepidness are part of his code of honour. He is as skilled with the sword as he is with words. He risks his life daily to deliver letters to Roxane (the woman he loves) on behalf of Christian (the man she loves), crossing enemy lines for loyalty. 

Staging the play in Ukraine meant war became a central feature: it was not only a poetic drama, but something of a meditation about abnegation, sacrifice and the highest ideals. Stories of love, heartbreak and war are of course deeply present in Ukraine. And ‘Cyrano’ brings to mind the many Ukrainian poets, artists and writers who have gone to the front, entering a realm of other-worldliness, just like de Bergerac. 

It’s perhaps ironic that it took the performance of a French play for me to see some things more clearly. Our thinking and emotions are shaped by who we are, what we come from. Yet I would never have had that ‘Cyrano’ awakening without everything that had preceded, during the months of the INDEX fellowship: the discussions in situ with Ukrainians coping with war, the travelling to different cities and regions, the exchanges with students, scholars, creators - people who are not only going through the experience of war and profound loss, but manage to put great energy into reflecting on it, producing gems of writing, art, creativity. 

This vast self-documentation is no small feat, it is a testimony to the strengths of an entire society.

It will also continue to confront us ‘westerners’ with our own failings and confusion. Between 1999 and 2005, I reported on Ichkeria (Chechnya), arguably Putin’s first genocidal war (Washington’s Holocaust Memorial Museum placed Chechnya on its ‘genocide watch list’ in 2000). 

Chechens probably never had neither the time nor the means to build up their own homegrown capacity to fully bear witness to what they were enduring. Their history, their collective traumas and their aspirations to break out of the imperial clutch, were left largely untold at the time, or often overlooked. Chechen writers, artists and journalists were deprived of the space to emerge. Russia’s wars crushed a small nation, while the world looked away. 

Cyrano de Bergerac is a heroic poetic soul with a tremendous ability to express himself. But is he understood for who he is and what he stands for? While living in Ukraine, I also started looking at us, the ‘western’ Europeans looking at Ukraine… The war holds up a mirror to us too, beyond aid statistics and talk of ‘troops on the ground’. Looking at ourselves means gazing into our fickleness, our blind spots, our long standing ignorance of others across this shaken continent. It means acknowledging our capacity to turn a blind eye or betray, replete with historical antecedent. Think about 1939 and how France and Britain essentially waited out the Nazi and Soviet assaults on Poland, or before that, our inaction when Hitler and Mussolini’s bomber planes reduced Guernica to rubble. 

Think also about how easily we westerners accepted the Iron Curtain. On one side of it, our own societies thrived and the European project emerged, while beyond it, others were ‘kidnapped’ (to quote Kundera) and often forgotten. Will we ‘westerners’ be able to do more than we are currently doing against the militarily aggressive fascism now on the prowl in the midst of our continent? Will it take acute immediate danger to reach us directly, for that to happen? 

One day last Autumn, in Lviv, a young scholar from the Czech Republic, also a fellow at INDEX, told me she had shed tears after realising how fundamentally alone the Ukrainians were in their armed struggle. Her emotion laid it bare: we ‘westerners’ decided early on, in 2022, not to send troops. We would support the Ukrainians in other ways. Still, insufficiently. This friend also shared a childhood memory about how, in the 1990s, her father had one day shown her a group of workers on a construction site in her hometown. ‘Probably Ukrainians’, he’d said, ‘and probably highly educated engineers, or even professors’. I’m not sure a German or a Frenchman would have shown the same awareness or empathy as that Czech father. 

It is all part of the fabric of the Ukrainian experience these past decades, and of our ‘western’ difficulty to truly grasp it. I remember vividly how, in early 2014, in the midst of Maidan, a group of French Parliamentarians stared blankly with indifference or puzzlement when told that Ukraine was the only country in Europe where people were ready to die for principles that we ‘westerners’ claimed to stand for. 

‘Cyrano’, with all its verbal grace, is also a play about the difficulty of communicating truths.

I’ve had a few conversations in Ukraine where people confide in how acutely aware they are of the words or tone they choose when speaking to ‘westerners’, grant givers or aid institutions—and the gap between that language and what they actually feel or think. Never complain, never appear ‘hysterical’, always show gratitude… Being on the receiving end of assistance while paying—alone—a high price for freedom is a phenomenon we ‘westerners’ will need to open our eyes to a bit more. 

If Ukraine’s resistance qualifies as a ‘Just war’—and I share that view— then we still have to fully fathom how this struggle affects us in our definition of morality, not just our finances, our strategic concerns, or our networks of foundations and donations. In one of his fiery speeches, Cyrano de Bergerac mentions Socrates and Galileo as his soul mates. Like him, they were isolated among men, alone in the world, because of their very greatness. They were too good for this world. What Cyrano leaves us with is something moral. Ukraine teaches us something moral too.