In early December 1982 I paid a courtesy call in Kyiv to Ida Iofanova, sister of the renowned literary specialist David M. Iofanov (1904-1964). At the peak of a new smear campaign against talented “dissident” scholars, he was falsely accused of chauvinism and, unable to endure the fabricated charges and public censure, he died in the prime of his professional life. The all-seeing and all-knowing KGB officers seized the scholar’s unique archive, and the bottomless secret service repositories swallowed the invaluable documents that the researcher had collected during his lifetime.
Ms. Iofanova was very hospitable and when I was leaving, in gratitude for remembering her talented brother, she gave me a complimentary copy of the book N. V. Gogol: Childhood and Youth, published in Kyiv in 1951, which the researcher was preparing to republish.
Even today, 50 years after their publication, Iofanov’s works are prized by all young researchers. David Iofanov was the first to disclose earlier, unpublished original documents that were stored at the Kyiv-based Institute of Manuscripts of the V.I. Vernadsky National Library.
In his book on Nikolai Gogol, the author presented works that the literary genius had written in his youth, such as architectural sketches, portraits, and watercolors, which his descendants had lovingly preserved for 130 years, despite the hardships and dangers of the revolution, the Civil War, two world wars, and manmade famines.
What caught my eye was a picture on page 249, attributed to Gogol. The researcher titled it “Portrait of an Unknown Young Lady” and added, “I think she is a young peasant woman.”
Since I knew Gogol’s relatives very well, I concluded that it was a picture of Olga Gogol (1825-1907; married name Holovnia), the younger sister of the great Ukrainian writer and classic of world literature.
Documents prove that after the triumphant publication of the short story collection Evenings on a Farm near Dykanka in St. Petersburg and Moscow, the 23-year-old genius visited his ancestral home in July 1832. Olga was only 7 years old at the time. Gogol’s next visit to his family took place in May 1835, when his sister had turned 10.
Looking back on the happy days of her childhood that she spent with her brother, Olga wrote in her book From the Gogols’ Family Chronicle (Kyiv, 1902), “My greatest delight was somehow to please my brother; no one but me could so subtly grasp all his habits and the things he liked and disliked.
“Yes, we had a really good time in Yaniv when our cheerful and calm brother would visit. When he managed to work well in the morning, he would come to lunch merry and happy. After lunch he would jokingly ask his aunt Kateryna Kosiarovska (his mother’s sister — Author) to sing Little Russian songs to my accompaniment. He would pick up the tune, keeping time with his foot and snapping his fingers. He especially loved the old song ‘Oh, my little white jugs.’
“In those minutes everything would come to life in our house: mum would be smiling and faces of servants peeking at the door would be radiant.
“He would lend money to many people. Soon after, my brother mailed mother some money, so she could buy at least a calf for the peasants who kept no cattle; he also sent me fifty rubles so I could help the needy at my own discretion.”
In letters to his friends G. Pletnev, N. Pogodin, and N. Prokopovich, Gogol always speaks warmly about sister Olga, who was 16 years his junior, and is proud of the fact that she was taking care of the serfs in their village and nearby hamlets.
“I have a sister,” he writes from Naples to Stepan Shevyrev in Moscow on December 18, 1847, “a self-taught girl from the provinces. She doesn’t know foreign languages, but God bestowed on her the wonderful gift of healing the human body and soul. Since she was 17, she has been very successful in treating the sick with various herbs whose curative properties she discovered by herself, and she often prays to God to become sick so that she can test out on herself all the medicines she has concocted.”
On his return from Jerusalem via Odesa, Gogol unexpectedly arrived in his native village on May 9, 1848, his name day. There was an outbreak of cholera in Vasylivka and the surrounding area. Fleeing from the terrible disease, Gogol left for Kyiv to visit his closest friends, Oleksandr Danylevsky and Mykhailo Maksymovych.
“There are thousands of sick and dying people everywhere. Cholera is raging in Poltava itself and the province,” he wrote on June 8 in a letter to Moscow-based writer Sergei Aksakov (1791-1859).
“The gloom is all-pervading, for I don’t feel like making the slightest intellectual effort: even light reading is beyond my abilities,” Gogol again complained to him on July 12, 1848.
I doubt very much that Gogol would have found amusement in painting his sister’s portrait when he was exhausted from illness and the sweltering heat that had totally scorched the entire crop, leaving the peasants facing the prospect of a wide-scale famine.
When Gogol last visited his ancestral estate together with Maksymovych in August 1850, his sister Olga was 25 years old.
In the picture that was first published in 1951 in David Iofanov’s book N.V. Gogol: Childhood and Youth, Olga is between 18 and 20 years old. So only Taras Shevchenko could have painted her portrait in Vasylivka, for he was the first artist who visited the writer’s mother in 1843-1845.
To confirm my hypothesis, I turned to Serhiy Pavlenko, head of the portrait department at the Institute of Forensic Examinations (16 Velyka Zhytomyrska St., Kyiv). “I know this work of Shevchenko very well,” said the prominent scientist, author of a unique system of portrait identification. “I have examined this picture before. Shevchenko painted the young Olga when he stayed at the home of Maria Gogol-Yanovska. Earlier, we managed to identify five watercolor portraits of the writer’s relatives, which Shevchenko executed in 1845. These works conclusively prove that Shevchenko lived and worked productively for a long time in Vasylivka, the ancestral estate of his literary teacher of genius.
I carefully wrote down the conclusion of the expert, who had 35 years of professional experience.
“It should be emphasized,” said Mr. Pavlenko, who is also a talented artist, “that the watercolor portrait of the 22-year-old Liza Gogol made by Shevchenko and classified by experts as ‘An Unknown Young Woman in a Brown Dress’ No. 110, as well as this portrait of the young Olga, shows a number of rare features, such as large cheekbones that are broad at the base and strikingly narrow at the chin, a thin nose, a beak-like nose tip, and a small, pointy, and round chin. Olga’s portrait was executed at a high professional level, while Gogol was an amateur artist. I have made a careful study of the specific features of Shevchenko’s paintings and drawings. I have examined a lot of his pictures for many years in my profession. So I can state authoritatively that the portrait of young Olga is an authentic work by Shevchrenko, not Gogol, as Shevchenko researchers still think. It is common knowledge that Gogol was a harsh critic of his own paintings. It is quite probable that he burned not only the second volume of Dead Souls before his death. This is why his relatives only had the sketches that he did in his youth.
Inspired by the expert opinion of this country’s most prominent scientist, I went to the Taras Shevchenko State Museum. “There is a unanimously accepted and, hence, the only correct version that Shevchenko did not know Gogol in person and never visited Vasylivka, so he could not possibly have painted portraits of the Russian writer’s relatives,” the curator told me categorically. Several senior research associates and departmental chairmen backed him up.
To confirm my “scientific discovery” a second time, I went to see Olga Gogol’s great-granddaughter, Olena Tsyvinska.
“You are right!” said the 73 year-old great-granddaughter.“An Unknown Young Lady’ is not a serf. This girl is the 20-year-old Olga, the younger sister of Ukraine’s writer of genius! She was born on March 19, 1825, in Vasylivka. As a child she had scrofula, which was then difficult to cure, and she was hard of hearing. This is why she only received an elementary education at home and lived in the ancestral manor her entire life.”
“Who painted this portrait?” I asked excitedly.
“My mother Hanna Tsyvinska and her sister Olha Mezhynska, nee Zaturska, used to tell the writers, journalists, and researchers who visited our house that the portrait in Iofanov’s book was made by Shevchenko when he visited Vasylivka. Orphans from early childhood, they stayed in the house of their grandmother, Olga Gogol, until they got married. The writer’s sister repeatedly pointed out that Shevchenko had painted the portraits of all of Gogol’s relatives. He also made several portraits of her and her mother. The poet singled out young Olga from among the elder sisters because she was very industrious. She would rise at dawn, enter the serfs’ huts without shame, and heal and give them money that Gogol had mailed her.
Ms. Tsyvinska opened the family album and removed two photos of her great-grandmother. One of them, showing Olga Gogol and her three young children, was little known, although it had been taken in 1875 by the famous artist Mykola Volkov in Poltava. The other one was very popular: Jozef Chmielewski included it in the album Gogol in His Homeland in 1902.
“My mother was 20 years old when her grandmother died. She inherited Gogol’s portraits, personal belongings, and letters he sent to his sister Olga. Mum also kept Shevchenko’s paintings, mostly landscapes of Vasylivka. But all this perished in Uman during World War II. My father, Oleksandr Tsyvinsky, was the artillery officer in the 14th Red Army Corps. My parents lived in a heated goods van that was constantly being shelled. To save their precious things, mother donated them to Uman’s history museum. When father was killed in 1921, mother came back to Kyiv. As for the Uman museum, the Nazis looted it and then burned it down.”
Ms. Tsyvinska stopped to swallow a lump in her throat.
(To be concluded in the next issue)
