OBITUARY: Georgiy Yakutovych of Kyiv, graphic artist, artistic director of films (11/05/00)

OBITUARY: Georgiy Yakutovych of Kyiv, graphic artist, artistic director of films

by Marta Kolomayets

KYIV - Georgiy Vyacheslavovych Yakutovych, a graphic artist, book designer and artistic director for a number of Ukrainian films passed away on September 5 at age 70 - 35 years and one day after the film "Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors" premiered in Kyiv. The premiere was broken up by militia and the KGB, as Ivan Dzyuba, Vasyl Stus and Vyacheslav Chornovil stood up and demanded the release of their friends Ivan Svitlychny, the Horyn brothers and others, who had recently fallen victim to the new wave of arrests of the Ukrainian intelligentsia after the Khrushchev thaw.

It was Georgiy Yakutovych (or Yura, as he was affectionately called by his friends), as artistic director of that Ukrainian classic, who was a driving force in bringing to life the legends of the Carpathian Mountains, the Hutsul traditions and beliefs, creating a film that has become a classic of Ukrainian poetic cinema.

And although Yakutovych was not the only person who helped make the film quintessential - the legendary director Serhiy Paradjanov and the talented cameraman Yuriy Illienko were the driving forces behind this film - it was the artist who brought the director and the cameraman to the scenic Carpathians and it was he who cast the then unknown second-year theater student Ivan Mykolaichuk in the role of the Hutsul, Ivan.

At Yakutovych's funeral on September 7, Mr. Illienko noted that every frame of the film was blessed by Yura before it saw the big screen. "And no one is given that right, it is earned by talent," he noted, explaining how Yakutovych's love for the Carpathians was an organic part of the artist.

"We all fell in love with the Carpathians and its people, through Yakutovych," he noted. For years, many thought that Yakutovych was a native of the mighty Carpathians as he talked about the mountains, the people, the climate. He even bought an abandoned house on one of the highest peaks in the 1960s and used it as his private getaway for years, as an escape from the harsh realities of communism.

Ivan Hawryluk, a well-known Ukrainian actor from the Ivan Franko Theater, was shocked to find out that Yakutovych was not a Hutsul, but was born in Kyiv in 1930, the son of a Soviet Army general, who traveled around the Soviet Union, serving in Moscow and Leningrad, with his wife and two sons. During the war, his family was evacuated to the village of Tonkino (Gorky Oblast), And when the war ended, one of the few possessions young Yakutovych brought back to Ukraine was a tattered copy of Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky's book "Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors," which he found in the Russian village when they were leaving. He returned to Ukraine after the war to study and graduated from the Kyiv Art Institute in 1952.

His son, Serhiy, who is also a well-known Ukrainian graphic artist, cannot explain why his father was so drawn to the Carpathians, or what he saw there that he did not see anywhere else, but he knows that his fatehr's love for the region was an integral part of his being. Even on his 60th birthday, he went back to the mountains to be baptized in one of the mountain streams that winds along the scenic landscape. He took as his godparents an elderly Hutsul couple who had befriended him during the filming of "Shadows" in 1963-1964.

There are quite a few unexplainable things about Yakutovych. At his funeral in Kyiv Vice Prime Minister Mykola Zhulynskyi compared him to the late writer Oles Honchar, saying that both men "were able to create fantastic works during an era that was not particularly benevolent to this kind of creativity."

"And, like Oles Honchar, Yura Yakutovych will be a canonized, classical figure in Ukrainian arts," noted Dr. Zhulynskyi.

Indeed, throughout his half-century of work, Yakutovych did not paint one portrait of Lenin or Stalin, did not illustrate one book on the great works of "infamous" Soviet thinkers, did not produce one Soviet propaganda film. And, although he avoided all socialist realism, opting to illustrate "Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors," "Zakhar Berkut," "Slovo o Polku Ihorevi" and "Yaroslav Mudryi," somehow he was also inducted as a member of the prestigious Union of Artists, taught at the Soviet Art Academy, won awards at Soviet book fairs for his illustrations and the 1983 Taras Shevchenko State Prize for his illustrations of "Tale of Bygone Years."

"He was a leader and lived his life with a full understanding of his mission," noted Ivan Drach, a longtime friend who worked on various later films with Yakutovych. Often that sense of mission allowed him to forge ahead with projects others would have deemed impossible." Through his illustrations and films, Yakutovych showed that Ukrainian arts are a part of world culture.

For him the story of Ivan and Marichka in "Shadows" was no less tragic than Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet," and "Slovo O Polku Ihorevi" was as epochal as Homer's "Illiad." For him, the themes of Kotsiubynsky and Stefanyk were world dramas that had not yet been discovered.

Thirty-five years and three days after the premiere of "Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors" in Kyiv, Georgiy Vyacheslavovych Yakutovych was buried in his native city. His work lives on.

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