The jubilee of the most famous 20th-century Ukrainian artist is being widely celebrated. There are numerous exhibitions (with six opened or planned in Kyiv alone), commemorative two-hryvnia coins have been minted, and there is even a postage stamp featuring a reproduction of her legendary painting Flax...
“It all is being done on the initiative of the people themselves, not due to the orders from above. For me, it is thus particularly valuable. I have a feeling that with her art, Yablonska now ‘sprouts through asphalt.’ That is, she reaches people despite current lack of true culture, cynicism, harshness, and brutality,” Yablonska’s daughter and chief promoter of her creative legacy Gayane Atayan, who is an artist herself, commented on the situation for The Day.
The jubilee year, which the painter was not that far from living to see (she died in 2005, aged 88), offers a good reason to take a fresh look at the life and work of the great master. Opportunities for it are already emerging, and not only through the efforts of art historians and museum staff. Still, the large-scale commemorative exhibition “Both, Memories and Dreams” (curator Oksana Barshynova) hosted by the National Art Museum of Ukraine, will most likely become a momentous event. Yablonska’s memoirs and diaries, compiled by Atayan, are to be published soon by the Rodovid publishing house. This means that the myth of the “Soviet Cinderella,” which still hangs over her biographers and historians, will soon meet its end. With the permission of Atayan, we will make public today for the first time a few fragments from these records as we are remembering Yablonska.
Clearly worrying about “sugariness” of the propaganda myth she saw constructed about herself, Yablonska wrote as follows in 1994: “When looking from the outside at my life, my ‘glory,’ my titles, it seems as if my life has always involved only joy and endless success, often undeserved. ‘She is very lucky!’ people would say. Many believed me to be a social climber who cleverly adapted to the demands of the authorities. All this is not so.”
Tetiana Yablonska
But what did actually happen? Let us focus on a few stories and facts. Totally un-“proletarian” origin of the artist is now well-known. Her mother, noblewoman Vera G. Vargasova, graduated from the Smolny Institute and taught French at the Smolensk Gymnasium before the 1917 Revolution. Her father, Nyl O. Yablonsky, came from a family of priests and studied at a seminary and a theological academy. “I do not know which one,” Yablonska admitted. Expelled from the academy in 1905 “for revolutionary activities,” Yablonsky graduated from the history and philology department of St. Petersburg University and taught Russian language and literature at the Smolensk Gymnasium. By the early 1920s, the teacher pair already had three children. Tania, the oldest one, was born in 1917, followed by Liolia in a year, and then Dmytryk. Yablonsky studied for a year at the Vkhutemas art school in the early 1920s, since he dreamed of becoming an artist. However, his family was experiencing great hardship in the revolutionary Smolensk (instead of teaching the ‘bourgeois’ French, which was now unneeded, his wife Vera had to learn to sew skirts for peasant women). On his return home, Yablonsky taught a drawing class at the local Proletcult branch for some time and sketched portraits of “front-rank workers” for the local newspaper Rabochiy Put. Besides, he created the Smolensk Art Gallery, housed in a now-empty church building, for which he collected artworks in ruined noble estates... By the way, the Yablonskys taught their children at home (Tania spent a total of one year in the Soviet school, all in the last grade): “My father did not send us to the Soviet school, because he feared Communist influence. We stayed essentially isolated from the general public. We had a very limited circle of approved friends in childhood. Many were not allowed into this circle. My father and mother taught us themselves, with the father teaching mathematics, German, Russian literature, history, and even religion, that is, ethics, while the mother was responsible for lessons of French and Russian (dictations and grammar). They directed our games and other activities as well.”
Yablonska had surprisingly good writing style and might well have become an author. (We learn from the memoirs that she was also predicted a career in mathematics in her youth.) It is precisely great prudence and obvious intellect of the narrator that leave no doubt regarding her real attitude to what was happening in the “homeland of all working people.” (By the way, she repeated her caustic characterizations of that ‘paradise’ several times.) The artist’s story of her family’s two consecutive failed attempts to escape from the USSR only enhances the impression.
“And then the fear began. Every knock at the door brought fear. It increased with time,” Yablonska wrote describing the years following the failed attempts to escape from Joseph Stalin’s ‘paradise.’ Later on, in 1936-37, the Yablonskys fled from Kamianets fearing that someone would inform the authorities about their attempts to cross the border. The father and the mother moved to Luhansk, Tetiana and her sister Liolia having already entered Kyiv Art School by then. When it was closed during an education reform, they transferred to the local art institute. However, they did it just as the institute’s authorities were combating the so-called “Boichukists.”
THE TWINS (1958) IS KEPT IN THE COLLECTION OF THE LVIV MUSEUM OF UKRAINIAN ART
How did it happen that the daughter of a “fellow traveler” Kantianist with a seminary diploma and a noblewoman became almost an epitome of good Komsomol girl and Soviet woman in the eyes of several generations of compatriots? Yablonska answered this question herself:
“...We even grew torn in two. What were political opinions of my classmates, I do not know. It was then ‘unfashionable’ to discuss politics. We did not talk about the famine either. We were blind and deaf, or more likely, just that cautious. Even as children, we understood where we lived, what was allowed and what was not.”
Yablonska’s true nature, her attitude to reality and moral rules were reflected not only in words, but in deeds as well. For example, the following two stories with many unknowns took place when the artist was already 30.
Yablonska’s painting teacher, the legendary artist Fedir Krychevsky died in Irpin in the hungry year 1947, disgraced by accusations of collaboration with the Nazis, despite even the secret police failing to find any evidence of it. Most likely, he was simply slandered by his enviers, who resented his great influence in Art Institute before the war. Exile in those days was almost tantamount to civil death... Still, young Yablonska was among the few who were not afraid to regularly pay visits to Krychevsky and help him. She taught painting at Art Institute since 1944, when she returned from evacuation.
In 1949, Yablonska was predicted to win the Stalin Prize for the painting Before the Start (1947). Instead, the newspaper Kultura i Zhyttia published on October 31, 1949 an article by critic A. Kyseliov, titled “For Socialist Realism in Painting,” which accused Yablonska of formalism (“in her paintings, realism is sacrificed on the altar of the so-called ‘picturesqueness,’” he wrote). Following the publication, an all-Union assault on the artist ensued. However, the critic included some passing praise for Yablonska in his next article, published on January 31, 1950. After that, Kultura i Zhyttia published a ‘repentant’ letter from the artist on February 11, 1950. She regretted it for the rest of her life! In her memoirs, she wrote that after that incident, she “completely forgot all objectives of painting.” Still, she did survive...
We know that Yablonska would return to the “picturesqueness” and “expressionism” only many years later. Her next great creative success after Before the Start was the famous Bread (1949). Meanwhile, accusations of Ukrainian nationalism in the 1960s would become the next “story,” again bringing the artist to the brink of losing everything...
The entire print run of her joint book with Ivan Drach was destroyed (by cutting up in tiny pieces) in 1969. The author’s copy of it has been miraculously preserved (it is kept in Yablonska’s archive).
“It is possible that the need to fight and resist pressure all the time steeled my will. Perhaps if not for this constant oppression, there would be no resistance. Indeed, ‘for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction,’” wrote the master. Life and fate of the great artist, who is now famous the world over, was not a series of lucky strikes. Above all, it was a story of strong will, belief in one’s mission and struggle, accompanied by an immense talent...
I thank Ms. Atayan for the advice she offered and items from Yablonska’s family archive she allowed me to use in this article.
