#i hope its readable im not proof reading any of that

[wszczebrzyszynie]

Could you tell us more about Mikita? He’s such an interesting character to me, and all of your artwork of him is beautiful :)

youre in luck because hes my darling son and i love him dearly. the titular "ghost" of the attic; in reality hes just a slightly depressed and very bad at socializing teenager. very prone to isolation and the physical embodiment of loneliness (which, as i said before, is one of the main themes of the story!). I summarised his personality in one of the pictures below, so to share something new (this will be long and mostly backstory! sorry):

although he was born in a pretty well-off family somewhere in the Minsk governorate, he spent most of his childhood in a private school in Vilnius. Hes blind (as in, his sight is blurry, cannot see in the dark at all and glasses dont help, but can for example read if the letters are big enough) and was around 7 years old when starting school, and therefore required some assistance in a completly foreign city, which was provided to him by Apolonia, a former governess (not the right word but i havent seen any reliable translations; a governess was a private teacher after the age of 6/7. What i mean here is bona, a woman who was hired to take care of and properly raise children aged 3-7, while also being their (usually foreign language) teacher) of the house. Apolonia always was a mother figure to him, and those long years in Vilnius only brought them closer. She was also very active in the artistic, anti tsarist national and cultural liberation circles (it is the latter half of 19th century after all, and Apolonia herself was raised durning the january uprising), sharing and distributing illegal literature, which is what got her arrested (and, consequently, killed) in the end. Because of their close bond, Mikita took a lot of his traits after her, both in terms of personality (god was he unbearable at 14 but thats what happens when no one liked him for who he was and his peers bullied him, the only person he cared about actively put him above other children, isolating him in the process even more, and it all created this miserable circle of isolation for protection, geniuine hatered for the world and complete dependance on one person he was actively shown he was loved by) and general identity (both of them come from mixed/polonised belarusian families and consider themselves belarusian, which is very important to them, and his surname is actually her real surname, as both of them at some point began pretending that he is her actual son). In the end she died of sickness (which he theorized was caused by infection from injuries) in prison and Mikita was expelled from school for owning illegal literature and few other things at roughly the same time. Unwilling to go back "home", he took the opportunity at his mothers "funeral" - Artur and Eliza Kowalewicz, close friends of his mother, believing he just lost his only family member, offered to take him in to their family manor (though by polish terminology it should be called a palace), somewhere in the middle of nowhere in congress Poland, for as long as he needs.