PERSPECTIVES

by Andrew Fedynsky

The heights of artistic courage

Nearly 50 years ago, Prof. Leonid Bachynsky founded the Ukrainian Museum-Archives (UMA) in Cleveland, an institution he and others endowed with wonderful treasures, especially his collection of more than a thousand "Kobzars" and books on Shevchenko. A while ago, I was browsing through the collection and came across a "Kobzar" the size of a coffee table book with lots of full-page drawings illustrating quotations from Shevchenko's poems. It was published in Kharkiv and Kyiv in 1933, so I thought it was worth a closer look.

One of the first drawings I came across was on page 197; it depicts a group of people sitting in a cafe at a long table piled with food. Huddled on the sidewalk below and screened off by a wrought iron fence and landscaping are four emaciated children. The caption reads:

... The prince carouses, the guests carouse
The palaces on high are full of revelry,
While in the village famine groans

... My jaw dropped. This was from 1933, when famine truly was raging throughout Ukraine. On average 2,000 people a day were dying of starvation and here, in the midst of tragedy and horror, illustrator Vasyl Sedliar and editor Andriy Richtytsky collaborated on "Kobzar" with an unmistakable reference to the Terror-Famine. But the reference on page 197 wasn't the only one. Take page 117. It has just two lines: "Upon the apostolic throne/The friar sits well fed." Accompanying the quotation is a drawing of a fat, scowling prelate in miter and robe. The figure is clean-shaven, but draw in a mustache and it's Joseph Stalin.

And so it goes, 48 drawings in all: people hung from gallows, gravediggers dragging bodies, armed guards driving peasants into exile, shackled prisoners digging for gold, jack-booted police bending back a ragged man's arms, a funereal figure in a silent cry of horror, a mother surreptitiously taking grain from a wheat field to feed her son ...

The book in the UMA collection is the second edition of a "Kobzar" that was originally published in 1931 - that was year three of the first Five-Year Plan, the blueprint for Stalin's collectivization policy, one of whose goals was to "liquidate the kulaks as a class." In Ukraine, primarily a peasant society at the time, that was nearly everybody. To accomplish his objectives, Stalin unleashed an army of activists who went into the countryside to drive people from their land, enforce ruinous grain quotas, conduct arrests and deportations - in short, to use whatever force was necessary to create the collective farm system. By 1930, according to Robert Conquest, every village had a jail and they were used frequently.

Coinciding with "dekulakization" was a campaign against Ukrainian culture. Two months after the adoption of the Five-Year Plan in the spring of 1929, 5,000 Ukrainian academicians were arrested. These were editors, critics, linguists, poets, professors, historians, painters and priests. Nearly a year later the Soviet government conducted a show trial at the Kharkiv Opera House. Everyone confessed and was sentenced to labor camps. The trial also provided the pretext to close the Linguistic Institutes at the Ukrainian Academy. In 1931 there were more arrests, but this time, no trial - victims were simply sent to Siberia and the Far East.

This was what was going on when the illustrator, Vasyl Sedliar, and the editor Andriy Richtytsy, took on the "Kobzar" project. The drawings, to my untrained eye, were done with a bold, highly skilled hand. Many drawings have an agitated, hurried quality - understandably. In 1931, when this "Kobzar" was published, artists didn't know when they might be arrested. Many realized that art was too dangerous and took up some other line of work. Others capitulated completely and harnessed their talents to Stalin's bandwagon. Thousands, tragically, were murdered or sent to labor camps. Many took their own lives - a high price to pay for art. Sedliar and Richtytsky were two of a handful who decided to remain true to their artistic vision.

Given the grim reality of 1930s Ukraine, their "Kobzar" project is one of the most amazing creative enterprises ever. It gives new meaning to the concept of "artistic courage." The same is true for everyone who was involved in the publishing and distribution of the book in 1931. Even more staggering was the decision to go ahead and publish a second edition two years later during the height of the Terror-Famine. That's the copy in the UMA collection.

Late last year, the UMA welcomed a delegation of high-ranking officials from Ukraine. I showed them the Famine-"Kobzar." They could hardly believe it. None of them had seen anything like it, or even suspected such a work existed. Having grown up in the Soviet era, they were familiar with censorship and political terror. They all agreed that few, if any copies of the book still exist in Ukraine or anywhere else. After all, it was common practice for Stalin and his successors to deliberately destroy these kinds of books. That way, there would only be one version of history - the one the party and state wanted people to know. Having cleansed Soviet society of any evidence to the contrary, it was even possible for the authorities to cover up and deny the murder of millions of people. One of the victims was the editor of the "Kobzar," Richtytsky. They shot him in 1934. Another was the illustrator, Sedliar. He was executed in 1937.

Because they believed people should know the truth, Prof. Bachynsky and other collectors dedicated their lives to preserving works like the Famine- "Kobzar." Now, using the miracle of the Internet, the UMA is offering everyone a chance to see Sedliar's drawings. They're posted on the UMA website: www.umacleveland.org.

The Famine-"Kobzar," though, raises a lot of questions. Are there any other copies of the book available? And what about the originals of Sedliar's drawings? Are they in the KGB archives in Kyiv, at the Ministry of Internal Affairs in Moscow, in a museum, or a private collection, or were they destroyed? Fortunately, the book survives and it testifies to one certainty: few artists have ever borne witness to the truth the way Sedliar and Richtytsky did. The drawings they bravely published in 1931 and 1933 should be displayed not only on the Internet, but on the walls of the great art galleries of the world, for if truth is beauty and beauty truth then they are among the most precious works of art ever created.

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, February 25, 2001, No. 8, Vol. LXIX

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