“People born in January have great talent and a good sense of humor. As neither the former nor the latter can provide a comfortable living today, they will live from hand to mouth throughout their lifetime. However, they will have a pompous funeral, and the grateful public will be delivering endless speeches over their grave.” This is a jocular horoscope from an almanac-calendar published in Munich in the now distant 1946 and spread among Ukrainians at the camps for “displaced persons.” The illustrations, as well as, hypothetically, the text of this horoscope, were done by Edward Kozak himself who could not resist the temptation of caricaturing himself even in such a radically ironic manner. Owing to the keen wit and bravery of an intellectual artist and patriot, he won the acclaim of Ukrainians all over the world, and his art is still battling foreign enemies and our national weaknesses.
Edward Kozak was born in the village of Hirne near Stryi, in the foothills of the Carpathians. Then the large Ukrainian-German family resided in the neighboring Duliby, where the child received primary education. In his adolescence, he went to high schools in Stryi and, occasionally, in Vienna. In the years of the Ukrainian national liberation movement, the 16-year-old youth enlisted in the Stryi Scouts Kish which was part of the 3rd Corps of the Ukrainian Galician Army. Wartime impressions were etched on his mind forever and were revealed later in hundreds of drawings and pictures.
In the first postwar years, Kozak had to wander with his family over many Polish cities, including Krakow and Lublin, exercising in drawing. In 1927 he entered Oleksa Novakivsky Art School in Lviv, at the same time earning a living by illustrating Ukrainian newspapers. It is in those times that he chose his genre – the caricature – in which he excelled very soon.
CEDING CRIMEA TO UKRAINE, 1952
Zyz was the first satirical and humoristic periodical to spread the fame of a new cartoon talent all over Galicia. When still studying at the noted pedagogue’s school, drawing sketches, and doing exercises, Edward Kozak (better known as Eko, after the author’s signature grapheme) would plunge into certain historical epoch as a fully matured characterizer and political scientist, taking a morally responsible stand on the diversity of societal life and relations between European nations.
To describe, at least approximately, Kozak’s artistic activities in Lviv in the late 1920s –the late 1930s, we must not forget his cooperation with Ivan Tyktor, owner of the largest Ukrainian publishing house. Kozak made hundreds of graphic headpieces, illustrations, and cover pictures for his periodicals Novyi Shliakh, Narodna Sprava, Nash Prapor, Nash Lemko, and Dzvinochok as well as books of the Ukrainian Library and Young People’s Library series. He also illustrated the military historical journal Litopys Chervonoyi Kalyny and its annual calendars-almanacs. It is here that the former Sich Rifleman placed his graphic reconstructions of the 1917-20 events as well as drawings based on popular Riflemen’s songs. Besides, Kozak was an active member of the Association of Independent Ukrainian Artists, taking part in its exhibits and other projects.
Yet cartoons became his leading artistic genre, which also left an imprint on his paintings and, later, animations. In 1933, Zyz gave way to Komar, the main brainchild of Tyktor in his publishing “empire.” The one who held sway here was Eko – merciless but fair. It is on the pages of Komar that the intellectual tension of relations among Lviv’s Ukrainians reached its acme in the 1930s.
AMERICANS HUNTING FOR STALIN, 1952
Here are just some of the motifs for Eko’s political satire in the 1930s: “Ukraine no longer needs secret police. People shoot themselves,” a Bolshevik says on the drawing the artist made after the suicide of Mykola Khvyliovyi and Mykola Skrypnyk. The cartoon “Maneuvers in Ukraine” shows an ironic scene of the arrest of innocent Ukrainian peasants. In 1933 the artist turned to the subject of manmade famine in Ukraine. “Come, guys, come! I’ll find you a place in Ukraine,” an allegoric figure with a Red Army cap on urges Russian settlers. The author described sarcastically the atmosphere of life in the Soviet Union in the compositions “Domestic Situation in the Soviet Union” (where two men drag each other to secret police), “The Soviet Constitution” (a quarrel near the gallows: “You, scum! Don’t you know there’s a constitution around and everybody is entitled to the same rope?”), “In the Red Kingdom” (two files of Red Army men stand in front of each other: “You scum! Why are you not shooting?” “Sorry, Comrade, but we didn’t know whether we must shoot them or vice versa”), “There is a Shortage of Supreme Soviet Candidates in the USSR” (Stalin with a fishing rod in hand: “This bloody fish caught the smell and won’t bite”), and a lot more.
Interestingly, after the Bolsheviks took power in Western Ukraine (late September 1939), the new, occupational, administration of the “liberators” decided to suppress the public memory of the immensely popular Komar by foisting an alternative – the magazine Krokodil na Zapadnoy Ukraine, Moscow’s propagandistic “brainchild.” But this ideological trick came unstuck because Komar’s fame had been deeply etched on residents’ minds, and some of the older-generation Leopolitans welcomed the now legendary Eko in 1990, when he arrived in Lviv from the country of emigration to attend the opening of his solo exhibit.
THE SOVIETS CHANGE THEIR VIEW OF AMERICA, 1955
In the first Soviet years, the artist and his family stayed in Krakow, where he actively cooperated with the Ukrainian Publishing House as designer and illustrator. He was also elected honorary chairman of Zarevo, an association of Ukrainian artists. During the German occupation, the Kozak family lived in Lviv, and Edward often exhibited his drawings and graphics. After the end of World War Two, the Kozaks had to sojourn at displaced persons camps in western Germany, as did thousands of other Ukrainian families. Again exhibits, membership in Ukrainian art leagues, and foundation of a new publishing project which attracted most of the artist’s attention in all of his remaining lifetime. It was Lys Mykyta, an heir apparent to Komar in a different historical perspective.
The first issue of Lys Mykyta, a new magazine of humor, satire, and caricature, came out in Munich, Bavaria, in 1948. This unique literature and art project was aimed at mobilizing the national spirit of all the Ukrainians in forced emigration all over the world. The magazine was published for almost two years until the Kozaks moved to the US, and it continued to come out from November 1, 1951, onwards in Detroit, Michigan, where the editor and publisher’s family chose to reside. The title page of the two first issues symbolically showed three cities – Detroit, New York, and Toronto, – which symbolized the common intellectual and spiritual space of Ukrainian emigration. The magazine was strikingly powerful – its best political satires and jokes spread rapidly in various Ukrainian locations in the US, Canada, Argentina, Brazil, Australia, and the European continent.
The themes of Kozak’s cartoons in Lys Mykyta need a separate and profound discussion. But thousands of cartoons and grotesques on its pages (for 40 years in America, with the last issue having been published in 1991 after the return to Ukraine) are only a fraction of what this great devotee of Ukrainian culture created. By the time he died on September 22, 1992, he had created hundreds of paintings, mosaic pictures for administrative buildings, and church murals, illustrated dozens of books and periodicals, particularly the children’s magazine Veselka. As far back as the early 1950s Kozak appeared at WWJ TV Channel 4 in Detroit as illustrator of children’s fairytales, and the American Teachers Association conferred the First Prize for Educational Films on him for making animated cartoons at Jam Handy Film Studio (1952-57).
