Alla HORSKA: “May your soul stay forever young...”

It was in 1964, 50 years ago that Alla Horska joined fellow artists Liudmyla Semykina, Opanas Zalyvakha, and Halyna Sevruk in creating a monumental stained glass panel for the lobby at the Red Building of Kyiv University, which took them “days and nights of selfless work.” It depicted an angry Taras Shevchenko, who embraced a wronged woman (a symbol of Ukraine) with one hand and held high a book with his other hand. The   composition was supplemented with inscription: “I shall glorify these small dumb slaves, / I shall put the word on guard beside them.” The panel was deemed to be “ideologically incorrect” and brutally destroyed by order of the university’s rector Ivan Shvets, even before the arts council had a chance to look at it, while Horska and Semykina were expelled from the Union of Artists of the Ukrainian SSR... (A photo of the disgraced panel was printed in a relatively liberal Ukrainian Calendar for 1965, published in Warsaw by the Ukrainian Civic and Cultural Society.)

Horska was born on September 18, 1929 to Oleksandr Horsky and Olena Horska. Her father was among the founders of the Soviet cinema industry and managed the Yalta Film Studio. The family moved to Moscow in 1932 and then to Leningrad, where Horsky was appointed manager of the Lenfilm Studio.

Having survived a horrific famine during the siege of Leningrad and evacuation to Alma-Ata, the Horskys moved to Kyiv, where Alla entered the Republican Art School (RAS), from which she graduated with honors, and then the painting department of Kyiv Institute of Arts in 1948, studying in the class of Professor Serhii Hryhoriev.

Following her studies and successful defense of the graduate work, Horska and her artist husband Viktor Zaretsky regularly traveled to the Donbas in search of inspiration, and she was admitted to the Union of Artists of the USSR in 1959 for her mining-themed paintings. At the same time, the artist taught at the RAS and created a number of easel paintings, including Prypiat. Ferry, ABC, Bread, and Portrait of My Father.

Following the 20th Party Congress of the CPSU, famed for breaking Stalinist “ice” and starting the Khrushchev thaw, Horska actively participated in the national revival, which involved a younger generation of Kyiv’s creative intellectuals. Nadia Svitlychna helped Russian-speaking Horska to master the Ukrainian language. Together with Veniamin Kushnir, Les Taniuk, and Ivan Dziuba, she was a founder of the Creative Youth Club in 1962, dissolved by the KGB in 1964. According to Yevhen Sverstiuk, “it was a time when we searched for our souls, our sources and targets in the close group of young enthusiastic artists, writers, directors, inspired by prospects of genuine creativity and hopes of a cultural revival.”

Horska took an active part in organizing literary and artistic evenings, distributing samizdat publications, fundraising for artists in need. In particular, she organized Kurbas memorial evening, Vasyl Symonenko poetry evening, lectures on the history of Ukraine by Mykhailo Braichevsky and Olena Apanovych, lectures on the history of the 20th-century Ukrainian art (where the young artists first learned about Mykhailo Boichuk’s school from his students Ivan Vrona and Serhii Kolos), local history-themed tours of Ukraine with art historian Hryhorii Lohvyn, exhibition of Yurii Khymych’s church architecture landscapes, concerts by the first Ukrainian jazz musicians, and more.

Over this period, the artist created a series of portraits of Ukrainian culture figures, including linocuts of Vasyl Symonenko, Ivan Svitlychny, and Yevhen Sverstiuk, which combined expressive vividness and tragism, and drawings of Borys Antonenko-Davydovych, Les Taniuk, and herself, with the self-portrait featuring a bold look and confidence in her beliefs.

From 1965 through 1969, Horska cooperated with Zaretsky, Halyna Zubchenko, Borys Plaksii, Hennadii Marchenko, Volodymyr Smyrnov, and Hryhorii Synytsia to create a series of monumental and decorative compositions made in the mosaic and fresco techniques on the walls of public buildings in Donetsk (The Bird Woman and Prometheus), Zhdanov, now Mariupol (The Tree of Life and Bird) and Krasnodon (Flag of Victory and Coal Flower), for which she was restored as a member of the Union of Artists of the Ukrainian SSR. Some of these works, authorized and approved by official art councils, were distinctly colored by Soviet ideology, serving as “monumental propaganda” for builders of communism, while others were bright decorative compositions, clearly employing principles of the Ukrainian folk painting.

Working in Krasnodon, Horska made an interesting sociological discovery, described in her letter to Zalyvakha on August 3, 1969 as follows: “This land is old and crowned by coal waste heaps. People are strange. Even those who were born there do not remember the land where they first stepped barefoot, but rather the land where their parents came from.” (Perhaps this prophetic clarification, made 45 years ago, would provide a key to understanding the events taking place today in Donetsk and Luhansk regions – the locals do not see this land as their homeland, as it is not the land of their parents!)

However, the artist’s principled civic stance regarding political trials of 1967-70 (the trial of Viacheslav Chornovil in Lviv, open letter of protest by a large group of Kyivites decrying “violations of the Soviet socialist democracy principles and norms of socialist legality,” open letter to Literaturna Ukraina newspaper concerning slanderous article by Oleksii Poltoratsky, questionings by investigators in the Valentyn Moroz case in Ivano-Frankivsk, etc.) led to her second expulsion from the Union of Artists. She was found murdered in the basement of her father-in-law’s home in the town of Vasylkiv near Kyiv in the late November, 1970. She was murdered by “striking her head with a blunt object” on November 28, 1970 under still mysterious circumstances...

Horska was buried on December 7, 1970 under close supervision of the KGB undercover agents in a closed coffin at the newly-built Berkovtsi cemetery. Oles Serhiienko and Yevhen Sverstiuk delivered eulogies, Vasyl Stus read a poem dedicated to her, and Ivan Hel delivered a eulogy “on behalf of the citizens of Lviv” to honor “a loyal daughter of the Ukrainian Revival of the 1960s.” All of them had been persecuted by their superiors following “the nationalist funeral.”

Bohdan Horyn wrote in his Undelivered Eulogy: “Symonenko is dead, but his ideas remain. Leonid Kyseliov died, but his ideas have not. Horska perished, but her ideas are very much alive... From now on, Horska’s name will join that torch of our spirituality, which has been cutting through gloomiest darkness for many years with its composite body.”