I have read Victor Hugo’s novel three times. The first was somewhere in my teenage years, and it felt like watching an adventure unfold. The second was while I was studying for my master’s degree in Leuven, and by then the book had stopped being an adventure and become philosophy, since I was going through an inner crisis after a deep organizational conflict and found in it, forgive me, not only in the Bible, some answers to my own questions. The third reading was around 2016 or 2017, after russia’s hybrid aggression in the Donbas had begun and before the full-scale invasion, and it was no longer an adventure or a piece of wisdom, but a mirror.
With every year of this war, and especially after losing Andrii and other members of our family, I recognize myself more clearly in Gwynplaine. All of us do: Ukrainian families with soldiers at the front, five of them ours, with the fallen, six of them ours, with the missing, with those in russian captivity. On all our faces, terror has carved the smile of Gwynplaine, a smile none of us chose.
Gwynplaine was a boy whom the comprachicos sold, and whose face was disfigured by royal decree, cut and reassembled so that he would always be laughing. Not because he was happy, but because it was more convenient for the people looking at him. His pain was turned into a spectacle and his tragedy into entertainment for the watching crowd.
Today I look at the families of our defenders and at families torn apart by displacement, and I see the same surgery performed without a knife. A wife whose husband is in the inferno of the front line goes to a parent-teacher meeting with the smile of Gwynplaine, or helps other children with their homework, because children should not have to pay for a war with their childhood, though they pay a brutal price anyway. A mother whose son was killed goes to work with that same smile, because life must go on, because there are three small grandchildren, because someone has to hold up the walls of a home that now rests on a young widow and on her. The family of a prisoner of war waits, calls, writes, fills out forms and smiles into the camera like Gwynplaine, because otherwise nobody will show their face at all. And the family of a person missing in action lives in the most terrifying circle of hell, the hell of uncertainty, wearing the same smile, where even grief is not permitted to become grief, because he might still be alive.
All of us whom this war has cut deep inside carry that smile. Not carved by the knife of the comprachicos, but by russian traditional values and by the sheer logic of survival.
When Gwynplaine finally receives the right to speak in the House of Lords, in the one place where his pain might at last become a word that reaches human hearts, he tells the truth. He cries out, and I paraphrase rather than quote: my lords, I have something to say to you. I am reality. I am a human being. I am the man who laughs. You are the happy ones, and I am the tragic one. I am the crime, and you are the judges.
And they laugh. The whole assembly roars at his disfigured face without listening to a single word, since his pain is one more spectacle to them and his truth one more performance.
Is this not close to what happens when Ukraine tells the world about ten million refugees, about hundreds of thousands killed, about tens of thousands missing, about abducted children, about torture chambers and filtration camps, and hears in reply: we understand your concern, but you have to be realistic, since perhaps life under occupation would be more pleasant than a state of war?
We are heard and often not listened to. Our wound is seen and often read as a grimace, an exaggeration, an undiplomatic tactic, sometimes with a hint that our toxicity gets in the way of a normal peaceful life free of upsetting news. The world is tired of news from Ukraine, and it grows easier to laugh like Gwynplaine, since a smile is more bearable to look at than what stands behind it.
But there is Dea in the novel. A blind girl who alone sees the real Gwynplaine and does not see, though she hears, the merry faces of the lords and the crowd. She cannot see the face the knives disfigured, and she sees his tender, vulnerable soul. She loves beyond the disfigurement rather than in spite of it, there where a real though wounded human being is still alive. She knows his true smile, blind as she is.
Dea, for me, is those friends and partners who are not frightened by our Gwynplaine laughter, who look at Ukraine, and at other war-affected countries, through our hearts and our disfigured faces rather than through a news screen or an opportunity to test peacebuilding theories that quietly abandon just peace and restorative justice. Who do not ask when we will finally make peace with russian Christians and forget the war, but ask how we are still holding on, and say they will stay beside us to the end, because they know the difference between our smiles.
And we in Ukraine are learning to be Dea to one another, to sit beside each other’s carved smiles without flinching, to touch each other’s disfigured faces with gentle hands and feel the fire burning underneath. We are learning the ministry of presence: not to fix the smile, not to explain it away, not to rush past it toward a premature hallelujah, but simply to stay. Because sometimes the most prophetic thing one Gwynplaine can do for another is to say: I see you. Not your smile. You.
The Book of Lamentations opens with a question: “How lonely sits the city that was full of people!” (Lamentations 1:1, NKJV). How did it come to pass that a city full of people now sits alone? That is not a question that calls for an academic answer at a scholarly conference where what matters is hearing both sides, Gwynplaine’s and the lords’. It is a cry in search of a witness.
Gwynplaine is the laughter of grief and solitude, and we are people trying to convey the truth about this war through a face that wears his smile, a laughter that is gladly received beyond our borders. And only blind Dea, touching that face with her gentle hands, feels the searing fire beneath her palms, behind the laughter that so entertains the lords.
But the smile carved by a war-knife is not forever. The day will come when my smile becomes real, not because the wound has healed, but because Someone sees me as I actually am, the way Dea saw Gwynplaine: the real face behind the face rather than the one that entertains a crowd into feeling comfortable. The psalms know this: “You number my wanderings; put my tears into Your bottle” (Psalm 56:8, NKJV). Every tear shed behind that smile is counted, and every silent scream masked by laughter is heard. The Eternal Dea does not applaud our performance and does not scroll past our pain, but touches the scar and calls it by its true name. And on that day the carved grin will fall away, not like a mask removed but like ice melting in spring, slowly and painfully and then all at once, and what remains will be a face we barely recognize as our own. Unhurt. Unsculpted by anyone’s knife. Smiling for the first time because we want to, and not because we have to hide from the question of how we are.
Until that day we walk and weep, scattering our tears along with Gwynplaine’s laughter like seeds. Every grain is a name: of someone who defended, who perished, who vanished without a trace, who waits in captivity, and of those whose families this war has filed away under a statistical category called displaced persons. A smiling Gwynplaine scatters the seeds, and a blind Dea calls out the names.
We are the people who laugh. I am the man who laughs. Our laughter brings joy to this world and to the peacemakers for whom peace is a weapon, and it feeds motivational stories about quick forgiveness and reconciliation, on condition that we renounce justice first. But our laughter is also a cry the world has not yet learned to hear, though russia’s aggression concerns more than Ukraine, since it concerns a new world order, and therefore concerns you as well.
In a few days, when the grief for Andrii that I postponed since July 2024 has burned down to ash and the pieces have been reassembled with the seeds and the names, I will laugh and smile again, knowing that the Eternal Dea sees my heart rather than my face. Our heart. The heart of families struck by this war: displaced, divided, fallen, missing, and in captivity.
Laugh on, Gwynplaines, since blind Dea can still hear the difference in our laughter. Taras Dyatlik, Ukraine
P. S. I recommend this book to anyone who has not yet read it. You will find much there about God, about yourself and about humanity, about hope and eternity.
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