Turning the pages back... November 16, 1878 (11/14/99)

Turning the pages back...

November 16, 1878

Mykhailo Parashchuk was a sculptor who often came face to face with history, was fortunate to meet one of his craft's greatest geniuses, and left his mark on the cityscapes of eastern Europe. Born in the village of Varvaryntsi, Ternopil region of Galicia, on November 16, 1878 into a poor rural family, he dreamed of being an artist at the age of 12.

He was introduced to the Polish sculptor Stanislaw Wujcik, who Wujcik recommended him for work as an assistant to the sculptor and restorer Wawel Szopinski in Krakow, and off Parashchuk went for four years (1893-1896) in the former Polish capital, where he was strongly impressed by the Baroque style of the city's churches and palaces. At 18 he tired of being an assistant and journeyed to Vienna, where he was admitted to the Imperial Art Academy, and apprenticed with architects Hermann Gellner and Ferdinand Fellner.

He returned to Lviv in 1899 to study at the Polytechnical Institute with Prof. Anton Popel. There he joined the team working on the facade of the opera house, where he had particular input on the figure of the Muse "Tragedy." Popel was much taken by his student, who then exercised a decisive influence on the elder artist's main project - the monument to Adam Mickiewicz. A model was completed by mid-1902 (the monument was unveiled in 1905), and urged on by his latest mentor, Parashchuk left that fall for Warsaw. He now had an established reputation, accepted commissions and taught students. He made his first image of Taras Shevchenko in time for the poet's 90th anniversary in 1904. In the next two years, after returning to Lviv, Parashchuk created likenesses of the writers Petro Karmansky and Vasyl Stefanyk, and the composer Stanislav Liudkevych, among others.

In 1907 he travelled to Paris, attending classes at the Academie Julien and personally studying with Auguste Rodin at his atelier at La Rue de l'Université. He was encouraged to break free of his classicist Viennese style and adopt a rougher style, in Rodin's words, more true to the "Slavic temperament," which the Frenchman admired. Rodin praised Parashchuk's work at a public vernissage and the Ukrainian artist's reputation was assured.

In the fall of 1908 he accepted an invitation to teach sculpture in Munich at the Institute of Applied Arts. In 1911 he moved to Kyiv to take advantage of the growing freedoms in his homeland. He befriended the poet Maksym Rylsky and the composer Mykola Lysenko and participated in a competition to design a monument in honor of Shevchenko.

During World War I he was active in the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine in Vienna, and organized wood-carving, sculpture and pottery classes for Ukrainian prisoners of war in the camps in Rastatt and Wetzlar.

In 1918 he returned to Ukraine and joined the Ukrainian National Republic's government circles, eventually being appointed secretary, then head of the UNR diplomatic mission in Tallinn, Estonia. In 1921 he was sent to the Balkans as a member of an International Red Cross mission and from then on lived in Bulgaria, settling in the capital, Sofia, founding and serving as the first president of the Ukrainian-Bulgarian Society in the 1930s and '40s.

In 1928-1930 he built a large monument for the Jewish community; in 1932 he completed a likeness of Mykola Drahomanov for his grave in Sofia; in 1936 he cast a bronze portrait of Symon Petliura. He ornamented, designed and built a number of buildings and monuments in the Bulgarian capital, including a statue of Gutenberg (1944), leading a productive life until well after the World War.

Parashchuk died at his retirement cottage in Bania, Plovdiv province, in Bulgaria on December 24, 1963, and was buried next to Drahomanov in Sofia.

Sources: "Parashchuk, Mykhailo," Encyclopedia of Ukraine, Vol. 3 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993); "Dmytro Stepovyk, Dmytro Parashchuk: Zhyttia i Tvorchist "(Toronto-Kyiv: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, 1994).

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