“Her Highness Yelyzaveta Skoropadska-Kuzhym, 76, departed this life, sharing in a foreign land the destiny of her parents and members of all Ukrainian independence-oriented groups who failed to find a common language in the native land and within the limits of the existing Ukrainian state in 1918, a favorable year for our nation,” says the obituary on the death of the hetman’s daughter that occurred on February 16, 1976, in the German municipality of Oberstdorf. At the time, the statist and political side of the outstanding lady prevailed over the cultural and value-related one in the public perception of Ukrainians, although whoever knew Hetman Skoropadsky’s middle daughter closer had ample grounds to note her rich spiritual and ethic nature. But people would only take a cursory look at her artistic talent, usually in a narrow value-related context.
“THERE MUST BE A SPACE IN THE SOUL”
Yelyzaveta was born on November 26, 1899, in St. Petersburg. She spent her childhood in Ukraine, mainly in the Chernihiv region, at the family estate of Trostianets with a gorgeous park. The adult Lili, as her kin called her, often recalled this locality through the prism of her early romantic inspirations. In another estate of the Skoropadskys, the village of Poloshky near Hlukhiv, whose outskirts were famous for the rich deposits of kaolinite clay, the artistically-minded girl took a great interest in modeling and began to make, together with her peers, various figures, combining this work with singing folk songs. She said the following striking words about that period of time: “There must be a space in the soul, and thoughts should whirl in it like winds in an open field. People open windows to let in fresh air and the sun. Likewise, the soul should be open to air and the sun, and there should be no morbid and closed places in it, for this is a poison that brings death to the soul” (from the publication “Hetman’s Daughter, Sculptor, ‘Our Lyzaveta’” (2015) by historian Tetiana Ostashko). The parents noticed Yelyzaveta’s inclinations and, after she had graduated from a state-run girls’ school, supported her aspiration to study to be a sculptor. St. Petersburg-based master Maria Dillon, admittedly the first Russian professional female sculptor, was the mentor of the 14-year-old Ukrainian girl. Yelyzaveta managed to learn some basic approaches to the arrangement and lyrical interpretation of nature from her first professional mentor. She interrupted her studies when World War One broke out, only to resume them in 1918 in Berlin and then in Florence with the noted sculptor Libero Andreotti. It is here that the hardworking Ukrainian artist managed to abandon the seclusion of sculptured images and enter the search space of late symbolic plastique which emphasizes the form and enlarges artistic themes.
At that time, in the 1920s, not only family friends, but also exhibit visitors in Berlin and other cities of Europe noticed her gift. She began to be commissioned to execute sculptural portraits. The young author did her with inspiration. The German and then the Dutch and the Finnish press began to write about Ukrainian young lady’s talent. In 1927-28 Yelyzaveta visited Holland, where she was commissioned to do many portraits and even “busts of characteristic local residents.” Ukrainian masters also discovered Skoropadska as a sculptor in the 1930s.
LAPLAND
In addition to works commissioned by private persons in Bremen, Oberstdorf, and other cities of Germany, the sculptor created the portraits of her father, Hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky, her elder sister Maria (in marriage as Countess Montresor), a family friend Ms. Korostovets, and, later, some of the well-known Finnish people. Her plaster- or bronze-cast works adorned the rooms of Ukrainian and European nobles. In the fall of 1938 she traveled to Lapland at the invitation of a Finnish woman who resided in Germany and then described in detail this journey in the Lviv magazine Nova Zoria. These travel notes amply reveal her personal qualities, penetrating observations of nature and people, and moral principles. The reader is also in rapture over her description of Nordic landscapes. Also of interest are the following, perhaps important to her, observations: “All the honest and nationally-aware people gather in volunteer guard units. Every village has its own associations aimed at increasing the level of cultural life, educating people in the national spirit, and warning about the Red threat. Almost all the Finnish young patriotic people in the countryside are organized into guard units. They constantly gather for exercises and shootings. They are ready to defend their homeland, settlements, and families from foreign and domestic enemies.”
YELYZAVETA SKOROPADSKA IN HER STUDIO
Of special interest are the lines about the journey’s artistic aspects. Yelyzaveta was commissioned to mold portraits in the family of a well-know local doctor in the town of Kittila. “…Everybody took a great interest in my work because none of the present had ever seen a head molded from clay. I always feel uneasy and embarrassed when somebody sits and looks on incessantly as I work. This makes me nervous and robs me of inspiration. But when I saw how delighted they were to help me arrange the table, find a suitable place, and how they were braced to see the product of my work, I hadn’t enough courage to tell them to leave me one on one with my victim. I was forced to muster all of my willpower to remove all the obstacles, and, besides, when I saw that the appearance of this head was quite an event in the life of the whole family, I strained every nerve to do my work very well. In general, the attitude to me in this family was so nice and touching that I was pleased to do them at least this little piece of pleasure. Shortly before I finished my work, my hosts began to invite their acquaintances to appraise my creation. It is always a very ticklish moment. I like good criticism very much, but there are very few good critics – criticism is usually out of place. There were no big connoisseurs of art here, but relatives and friends mostly spoke about the semblance of the bust. Everybody liked my work, and the doctor’s wife thanked me so movingly that I also began to feel elated, although I am never satisfied with my work.”
HER STRENGTH WAS IN HER SPIRITUAL ASCETICISM
Having such a valuable autobiographical document, it is somewhat easier to comment on the sculptor’s professional principles, taking into account a limited access to her works. As Natalia Polonska-Vasylenko noted, most of her sculpted portraits perished in the whirlpool of war. Only some replicas have survived. European publications about the Ukrainian master are also inaccessible. Therefore, only a few sources – including the book Ukrainische Kuenstler in Deutschland (Munich, 1960) and an article by Uliana Liubovych (Starosolska) in the emigre women’s magazine Nashe Zhyttia (1978) make it possible to visualize, at least partly, Yelyzaveta’s culture of sculpting.
The portrait of Hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky, one of the central works in Yelyzaveta’s legacy, made the author mobilize her rather bright inner expressive qualities.
A PORTRAIT OF HETMAN PAVLO SKOROPADSKY BY YELYZAVETA SKOROPADSKA
It is futile to seek any outer formal features of innovation, a repercussion of “contemporary” modernistic trends, in Yelyzaveta’s language of plastic art. Her strength was in spiritual asceticism as a figurative equivalent of her aristocratic essence.
The important political things her father was actively doing in exile caused her to forget her favorite occupation and help the hetman correspond with well-known Ukrainian politicians and intellectuals. Being a sincere follower of the hetmanite movement, Yelyzaveta was also addressing some public issues, particularly as a member of the Committee for Urgent Aid to the Starving Ukraine.
For this reason, it was only possible to understand the deeper inspirations of Yelyzaveta Skoropadska as a sculptor with due account of her world-view and moral-ethic complex. Besides, it is also worthwhile to recall some publicized details of her life story. “Elizabeth usually lived at home and took care of me more than the other brothers and sisters,” her younger sister Olena (Ott in marriage) reminisced. “She read me Kipling’s Mowgli in Ukrainian. Yelyzaveta also worked, albeit not on a permanent basis, as a commissioned portraitist sculptor. She began to perform the functions of father’s secretary much later, after Danylo’s departure for Canada and the US. The sister stayed for a long time in her upper-storey room which also served her as studio. When she did not model, she wrote or embroidered. For my sister Yelyzaveta, who fanatically loved father and embraced the Ukrainian cause wholeheartedly, the collapse of the hetmanate remained an unforgettable catastrophe throughout her lifetime.” In the opinion of Olena Ott-Skoropadska, Yelyzaveta innerly lived in a “world that did not exist,” but she was guided by really serious feelings and staunch ideological principles. For me, my father was not only the father. He was for me the same as he was for many Ukrainians, for every true hetman follower. He personified a great idea. And what is a human life if one does not embrace and live for the implementation of his idea?” Yelyzaveta wrote after the hetman’s death. Looking into complicated political issues and seeking an answer to why Ukraine lost its statehood in the “great hour of the nation,” she pointed out: “The lack of cohesion, true self-sacrificingness, chivalry, commitment and patriotism among the majority of Ukrainians – all this awfully depressed my father. It depressed him that there were too few people of wide-ranging enterprise, statists, people of action who could be relied upon under any circumstances, among the Ukrainians. We have a lot of excellent people, but many of them are short of inner discipline, staunchness, and endurance. We have excellent young people, but they not always consider the older, experienced, people as role models. Many of our current politicians cannot rise above petty personal ambitions.”
Having moved to the German municipality of Oberstdorf after her father’s death, Yelyzaveta fully devoted herself to political affairs of the hetmanite movement together with her husband Vasyl Kuzhym. The latter died in 1958, and she became the leader of the Union of Hetmanite Statists a year later (after the death of her elder sister Maria).
Roman Yatsiv is a Pro-Rector of the Lviv Academy of Arts
