Quixote in Odessa
In his latest dispatch from Ukraine, published today in Dag og Tid, Andrej Kurkov reports that Minkus’s Don Quixote was performed, this week, at the Odessa Opera to a full house. To stage a ballet in the midst of war is an act of defiance, upholding the attainments of the human spirit in the face of brute aggression. One could interpret the choice of repertoire as high sarcasm. For this enterprise is not ‘quixotic’; it is bound to prevail. The spirit always does, in the long term. Last week, Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk remarked, continuing his exceptional wartime catechesis: ‘the cornerstone of any society is respect for the dignity of the human person and the sanctity of human life, from conception to natural death. Because it is from the dignity of a person that all other rights and responsibilities of a person derive.’ To be determined to counter ugliness with beauty is to display what dignity is, and so to spread hope far abroad.
