This morning as I was passing through the Universityet Metro station, I noticed for the first time the beautiful and ornate artwork of this station. Most of the Metro stations are like underground public cathedrals, built during the Soviet era as kind of monuments to the state. Each station has a different motif and style. The Universityet station, I now see, has a literary theme in keeping with its name and proximity to the Taras Schevchenko University and other schools in the district. I was fascinated by a series of a dozen or more large busts which flank the two walls of the central underground chamber, and so I got out my digital camera and started taking pictures. An officer in a blue uniform with an officious little cap came running up to me, shouting for me to stop taking pictures. He didn't explain what the great harm would be in taking pictures of the busts of Pushkin and Tolstoy and other Russian writers, and I didn't ask him. I suppose that the stifling totalitarian mindset of seventy years of communist tyranny are hard to shake off. I only wish I had been able to take a picture of the little minion who reprimanded me.
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