The Indestructible Stars of Porcelain War
“I can’t be running back and forth forever between grief and high delight,” wrote J.D. Salinger, in a characteristic musing on the absurd tensions of human life. Had he seen documentary film Porcelain War (directors Slava Leontyev and Brendan Bellomo), and had he met the film's stars as I had the rare opportunity to do, I wonder if the choice away from grief might have become a bit more defined for him. I don’t think I have ever met a person so clear-sighted about doing good through unchosen violence during a time of evil as Slava Leontyev. It’s one of the eternal questions begged by the film: does this kind of goodness only become visible—can it only exist—in the face of such a depth of depravity as Putin’s invasion of Ukraine (and if so, what does that say about human life)? Porcelain War doesn’t answer those questions, of course—but it does thoroughly answer some others. Slava and his wife Anya Stasenko, both porcelain artists, and Slava now a former Ukrainian Special Forces soldier who trains civilians to fight on the front lines, have some messages they would like the rest of the world to receive loud and clear. “Evil exists,” for one, as Slava tells us plainly from his home just outside Kharkiv. It is evil that he and the Ukrainian forces are fighting, for another. And for a third, evil will not stop itself. “It will keep pushing,” and if Ukrainians don’t effectively stop this one, it will reach all the way to us. We know this already. We don’t seem to learn too well, collectively, across history. And it’s just this line of thinking that makes it so easy to run toward grief, to lament the world and its sufferings as they unfold over and over again. But on the other side of that same coin that is melting in the crucible of the Ukraine war, it’s exactly this kind of frustrated, detached grieving that meeting Anya and Slava has made it impossible to do. When the people at the center of the fight—their homes crushed, families torn, weapons in their porcelain-painting hands—when those very people tell you from the core of their being that they know why they are fighting, that there is a reason never to stop, that there is a goodness that they absolutely know is worth preserving—it becomes impossible to doubt that. There are very few evident answers in life. You will find one or two in Porcelain War.
