What is time, if not a whale that swallows everything, equalizing in its bottomless belly geniuses and failures, noble benefactors and political criminals. How many lives of extraordinary Ukrainians have become that swallowed plankton. They cannot be retrieved from oblivion unless someone among the living feels an urgent need to remember. In this novel, the forgotten great is Viacheslav Lypynskyi — a Ukrainian historian of Polish descent, philosopher, and failed politician, founder of Ukrainian monarchism. His life was a continuous struggle against the current, a sacrifice for an idea. But even he was consumed by the blue whale of Ukrainian memory. The author tells the story of this man through the voice of a young woman — the novel’s heroine, a contemporary of ours, who studies old newspapers to find her own identity and touch the past that was cut from her history like from a film reel.
