W obronie krzyża

[center][/center]

Niedawno, dwa dni temu informowaliśmy o tym, że Television without pity porównał trzy produkcje o wampirach. Jednym z nich był Vampire Diaries.

Teraz, dzięki Anthrax możecie przeczytać ten artykuł po polsku!

Zapraszamy do przeczytania artykułu w tym miejscu.

Serwis Teleision Without Pity prowadzi ranking - konkurs w różnych kategoriach, m.in. Najlepszy Nieoczekiwany Zwrot Akcji (Best Unexpected Plot Twist), w których są nominowani bohaterzy serialu, jak i sceny oraz sam serial. Kategorii jest aż 24, jednak tylko 6 można znaleść The Vampire Diaries.

Kategorie, w których można głosować na naszych lubieńców to:

* Best Single Episode - Drama ( Nalpeszy odcinek - dramat) w tej kategorii mamy dwa odcinki serialu The Vampie Diaries

* Most Wrongly Underused Character (Charaker najbardziej niewłaściwie w pełni wykorzystany) tutaj znowu można głosować na Matta Donovana

* Best Unexpected Plot Twist (Najlepszy nieoczekiwany zwrot akcji) w tej kategorii mamy dwa zwroty z TVD

* Best Pop Culture Reference ( Najlepsze referencje pop - kultury) w tej kategorii możemy głosować na Damona mówiącego o "Zmierzchu"

* Best Line of Dialogue (Najlepszy dialog) tutaj natomiast mamy aż pięć możliwości do wyboru, wszystkie zaś są wypowiedziami Damona

* Best WTF Moment (Najlepszy moment WTF) tutaj możemy głosować na Katherine

I to już wszystkie kategorie, w których możemy głosować. A to jest link do strony http://www.televisionwithoutpity.com/tu ... minees.php .

Głosujcie na swoich ulubieńców.

John Karwatsky, a project officer (Canadian)

I am a Canadian, living and working in Ukraine. I was born and raised into an English / French- speaking family and was raised and educated in Canada. I came to Ukraine when I was twenty-seven and have been working in Kyiv for seven years. My work often requires my going on business trips to various regions of Ukraine and meeting new people. I see for myself what kind of problems Ukraine currently faces. I have learned the Ukrainian language well and have encountered plenty of Ukrainian experiences to be able to say that I have come to know this country extremely well. All the more interesting was to read a book about Ukraine written by a westerner, Borderland by the British journalist Anna Reid.

I was excited at the prospect of reading “a beautifully written evocation of Ukraine’s brutal past and its shaky effort to construct a better future,” as quoted by London’s Financial Times. The more I read the more obvious it was becoming to me that the book was by far not what I expected it to be. As a result I felt the need to say a few words about rooting out biases and doing away with misconceptions.

I strongly believe that in a philosophical sense all our lives are made up of certain biases, misconceptions, preconceived ideas and misunderstandings, some of which reflect the truth to a lesser or greater degree. The rock-steady belief in certain basic values and ideals accepted once and for all, make on the one hand our navigation through life simpler, but on the other hand hinder the development of the analytical approach to life and our search for truth, even our creativity is impeded. People in the west have some knowledge of what is going on in the post-Soviet states in general, particularly in Ukraine and this knowledge comes mostly from reading newspapers or from TV or radio broadcasts.

A book about Ukraine could be a welcomed insight into the life of this country, and it is a great pity that Anna Reid’s Borderland has fallen short of what it was intended to achieve. It seems to me that Ms Reid looked at Ukraine through the pages of outdated books published mostly in the west, with some biased or completely wrong assessments of the historical past and of the present day Ukraine. The author seems to have focused on some of the “current” issues, which indeed she happened to experience but did not go deeper into these experience and stayed on the surface. I found nothing in Anna Reid’s book that was factually wrong, but the correspondence to facts was only nominal. Stating things (and in this case, these things were chosen in a random, subjective and emotionally colored manner; the black-and-white photographs that go along with the text are of a very poor quality and of no informational value) without making an attempt at an analysis is hardly justifiable in a book of this kind, and can do more harm than good.

I don’t think it will be en exaggeration on my part to say that a book like Borderland cannot be successfully compiled and written in London without having spent a substantial amount of time in Ukraine. One could easily do so with reading materials published in the west or surfing the Internet and visiting some of the Russian sites.

My knowledge of Ukraine and the things that I have learned from the many people whom I have met allows me to say that understanding a country like Ukraine and passing this understanding on to others would take much more than dealing out a number of preconceived notions, random experiences and leafing through a number of outdated books.

And now probably the most important thing that I wanted to say. While reading Anna Reid’s Borderland I had a feeling that the book had been written by a person who looked at Ukraine and at Ukrainian people in a condescending, superior and shallow western manner. This attitude that dominates the book and the general gloom that permeates it, leaves the reader with a feeling that Ukraine, notwithstanding a millennium of an exciting history and culture behind her, and good prospects for the future before her, is doomed to remain “a borderland,” never reaching the full-fledged status of a European country.