New Discoveries about the Destiny of Two Geniuses

“In August 1941 the Nazis burned downtown Kyiv to the ground. There was such thick smoke that you could not see the sun even in the daytime. My mother, aunt, my newborn daughter, and I were being deported to Germany. Mother had hidden in her bodice the gold watch and earrings that Gogol had brought from Rome for his sister Olga. At the railway station there was a doctor standing among the German officers. Before the war, he lived next door to us on Velyka Zhytomyrska St. and knew that we were Gogol’s relatives. Explaining that my daughter had typhus, he advised the colonel in charge not to put us in a heated goods van. We were sent to an isolation typhoid barrack; in a common barrack we would have been infected and died. When we returned to our apartment after the liberation of Kyiv, there were six families living there. Out of all of Olga Gogol’s furniture, only a mahogany writing desk had survived.”

From a jewelry box Ms. Olena took some gold jewelry that belonged to the writer’s younger sister and his mother’s pearl brooch “Maria”.

“To thank you for helping us obtain a beautiful three-room apartment in Podil, 25 Mezhyhirska St., I would like to donate these things to the great Ukrainian writer’s museum in the village of Hoholeve, Poltava oblast. Our family has been keeping them for 140 years.”

I hugged Ms. Tsyvinska and sincerely thanked her for the gift.

“Who had this portrait by Shevchenko of the 20-year-old Olga Gogol before the revolution?” I asked.

“Gogol’s sister presented her portrait to Mykola Bykov, Yelyzaveta Gogol’s elder son,” the great-granddaughter answered. I then set out for Poltava.

Bykov’s daughter Sofia Danylevska, 95, peered into the faces of Gogol’s relatives, whom the great Bard had immortalized in his 1845 paintings, and said, “You were right to identify the portraits of the Ukrainian writer’s sisters and mother as works by Shevchenko! Indeed, the poet eternalized my grandmother Yelyzaveta Gogol, married name Bykova, in the watercolor “An Unknown Woman in a Brown Dress” in 1845. Later, when she was visiting Vasylivka with her five small children, she received word that her husband had succumbed to his wounds near Warsaw. She could not get over her loss and died two years later, in 1866.”

The vagaries of fate in the lives of Gogol’s relatives really struck me. The writer’s mother was left with five children to care for after the sudden death of her husband in 1825. Olga Gogol brought up three orphans, and after the death of her daughter and elder son, she raised two orphaned granddaughters on her own. The husband of Sofia Danylevska died of typhus in 1921, and she too raised five children on her own and provided them with a higher education.

“In the painting that scholars have named ‘Granny with a Grandson’ No. 305, Shevchenko portrayed my great-grandmother and the writer’s mother, Maria Gogol-Yanovska. ‘An Unknown Man’ No. 306, as you guessed correctly, is the portrait of Pavlo Kosiarovsky, Gogol’s first cousin once removed. ‘An Unknown Lady in a Lilac Dress’ No. 128 is his daughter Kateryna Kosiarovska. I think the painting ‘Two Ladies’ No. 307 was also done in our Vasylivka. The girl who is sitting and reading is young Hanna Gogol, and the barefooted woman in the Ukrainian costume is her chambermaid. I remember all my relatives very well. In 1902, when I was 16, the well-known Poltava- based photographer Khmelevsky came to visit our manor. Father let him photograph all the portraits of Gogol’s relatives that were hanging in his study. Khmelevsky expressed his gratitude to my father in his album Gogol in his Homeland . Unfortunately, the originals were lost during the revolution.”

I showed Ms. Sofia the portrait now stored in the National Taras Shevchenko Museum’s repositories in Kyiv. Researchers have named it “Portrait of an Unknown Young Woman” and ascribed it to Gogol.

“This is the portrait of Olga Gogol!” Danylevska exclaimed with joy. “It was also painted by Taras Shevchenko when he was visiting Vasylivka. He stayed in a house by the pond, which had belonged to Gogol’s grandmother Tetiana Lyzohub.”

“Why do you think it is the great poet’s work?”

“That’s what Olga Gogol herself claimed! She was constantly bothered by visiting journalists. Among them, Horlenko and Chahovets were extremely bothersome. Since they were guests at my father’s house for a long time, I overheard their conversations. They kept pestering Gogol’s sister with questions. She lived on the other side of the pond. Every Sunday after church, my mother Maria Pushkina, the granddaughter of the great Russian poet, and I would drop by her house to pay our respects. We, the elder children in the Bykov family, befriended her orphaned granddaughters Hanna and Olha Zaturska. My father Mykola Bykov, as the eldest son of Yelyzaveta who was raised by Hanna Gogol, inherited his outstanding uncle’s library comprising 1,000 books, his portraits, unpublished letters, and paintings.

Ms. Sofia suddenly became upset, so I took her hands into mine and began to warm them.

“To save everything during the revolution, on the advice of the writer Volodymyr Korolenko, my mother, sister Tetiana, and I donated more than 2,000 of Gogol’s books, manuscripts, rough copies, and personal belongings to the Poltava Ethnographic Museum, which filled an entire room. In 1943 the Nazis, who were retreating from the city, looted and set fire to the museum.”

Ms. Sofia picked up the photo of Shevchenko’s portrait of Olga Gogol.

“I’ve been crying over this portrait for 40 years. You’ve brought me good news! You’ve brought me joy! Fortunately, Gogol’s letters and the drawings that he did in his youth and this work by Shevchenko were brought first to Moscow and then to Kyiv.”

Danylevska smiled.

“My father and mother were married in a church ceremony at Lopasne, the manor of our grandfather Aleksandr Pushkin, near Moscow in August 1881, and they inherited the hamlet of Stinka and a part of the Yanovskys’ estate beyond the pond, which has been known as Bykovska since then. Pushkin’s elder son had 13 children and father had 9. We spent our childhood and teenage years in Vasylivka. In 1902 Olga Gogol’s granddaughters Hanna and Olha graduated from Poltava’s Institute of Noble Women, married military men, and left the place. Father took over the care of Gogol’s 80-year- old unmarried sister. In gratitude, Olga Gogol gave my mother Pushkin’s gold watch. Zhukovsky had kept a continuous vigil by the bedside of the fatally wounded poet and stopped the watch when he died. Knowing how much Gogol loved his teacher, Zhukovsky later presented him with this watch. When the writer last visited Vasylivka, he entrusted the watch to his younger sister. In 1937 People’s Commissar of Education Bonch-Bruyevych sent mother a letter asking her to hand over this priceless item to the poet’s museum in Leningrad. As for another treasure, her own portrait by Shevchenko, she presented it to my father.”

“Contemporary scholars deny that Taras Shevchenko stayed at the home of Gogol’s mother,” I said to Yelyzaveta Gogol’s granddaughter.

“I don’t understand why historians allow themselves such attitude with regard to documents and our evidence. None of them has ever paid a courtesy call to me or my sister Tetiana Galina, who now lives in Moscow,” Danylevska exclaimed bitterly. “The researcher, Dmytro Kosaryk, visited me in 1943, on the day Poltava was liberated from the Nazis, and many times afterwards. He recorded everything I knew about Shevchenko’s stay in Vasylivka, as recounted by Olga Gogol-Holovnia and my father. He was the favorite grandson of the genius’s mother; he remembered a lot of things. Journalists keep asking the same questions. I also advised Kosaryk to consult Vsevolod Chahovets. In 1902 he was a longtime guest of my father and recorded his conversations with the writer’s sister. He also repeatedly visited Olga’s granddaughters, Hanna and Olha Zaturska, in Kyiv. They remembered much of what their grandmother had told him about Shevchenko’s life in Vasylivka.

Today very few people know that, according to the last will and testament of the writer’s younger sister, her son Vasyl Holovnia donated more than 2,500 unique documents belonging to the family of Ukraine’s great son in 1921 to the Institute of Manuscripts of the Kyiv-based V. I. Vernadsky Scientific Library, which comprised an entire section of what is known as “Gogoliana.”

More than 20 years ago I identified 6 portraits of Gogol’s relatives whom Taras Shevchenko immortalized in his paintings. Why specialists still refer to these Shevchenko works as portraits of an “unknown woman” is a mystery. Why do they ascribe the portrait of the 20-year-old Olga to Gogol, when in fact it is the work of Shevchenko?