A Place for the Dragon

(місце для дракона аудіокнига слухати)
In Yuri Vynnychuk’s fairy tale-novella “A Place for a Dragon,” everything is turned upside down. This is how it’s supposed to be: The dragon is a bloodthirsty beast that devours villagers and “finishes the job” with young maidens; the Prince—the savior, the support of the poor and unfortunate; and, for completeness, a couple or three knights without fear or reproach.
But not everything is so simple in this novella.
No matter how you look at it, in each of us lives our own Dragon, and our own Judas. And they sleep only until the moment when the imposed circumstances force each of them to wake up at their hour.
And in everyone there is a Secret Adviser. He knows how to speak high-sounding words—with the right intonations. After his speeches there are no doubts left that killing—if it is properly justified—is not such a crime at all, and, maybe, almost a feat. Armed with thoughts about the fate of the State, and declaring someone an enemy, one can do any number of vile deeds without shunning any methods. After all, the goal is sacred.
For the full effect, the author made the Dragon more than just a harmless character. Dragon Hryhoriy, eight years old, loves people, writes poems, and tends flowerbeds. In his soul there is so much love and purity that he consciously walks toward the slaughter, for the sake of the one whom he had considered a friend—because of the pseudo-holy purposes imposed by that “friend.”
The book makes you think about the substitution of truths. How often we elevate our own personal necessities into absolutes, turning them into lofty goals. And the trouble is that the one who will come to the path with love and purity will fall first victim to our trickery with our own conscience. The book is piercing to the point of heartache, and honest to the point of cruelty. And its leitmotif echoes the dreadful lines from Shakespeare’s play “Richard III”:
Sometimes a beast is fierce, yet it knows pity too.
No pity lives in me; so I am—no beast.