The Ukrainian Pysanka: Traditions and the Current State of the Art is the name of the exhibition of pysankas (traditional Ukrainian ornately decorated eggs —Ed.) organized by the Museum of Folk Architecture and Ethnography of Ukraine and held in October at Kyiv’s House of the Teacher. The museum ethnographer Yevheniya Hayiova and Kyiv-based pysanka-makers Tetiana Vlenenko and Liubov Ktytorova presented a stylized exhibition of pysankas from a number of Ukrainian regions from private and museum collections.
The Ukrainian pysanka is associated with both Christian and Old Slavonic paganism motifs and the customs of our people. Ancient signs and symbols on eggs date back to the times of the Trypillia culture and Kyiv Rus. From the outset, the symbols of pysankas expressed philosophical ideas along with a mythical and poetic comprehension of the world, rather than specific phenomena. Our ancestors discovered the ideas of an integrated world, the triune and contradictory structure of natural and human elements, in artistic and mythological form. The circles, crosses, triangles, and spirals symbolizing the fire-sun, water-primeval mother, and the world tree, disguise the formulae of world genesis out of the chaotic water pierced with the world tree, and the formulae of the renaissance of life and the facets of life and death. Plant and animal symbols, for example, cherries and snowballs, horses and fish, are magical symbols of the advent of spring, female beauty, enchanted love, long life, and wealth. Later on, the pagan symbols become associated with the Christian world view: the sun with the resurrection of Christ, the cosmic trinity (the sky, earth, and man) with the Christian Trinity, etc. The pysanka is a magical thing with which people greet the spring revival of nature and human life and which will also protect them from thunder, lightning, evil, and woe. Eggs are decorated over on the eve of spring feasts, exchanged, or kept at home as talismans.
This is why pysankas that are skillfully made but lack traditional symbols and ornaments lose their spiritual and cultural sense. They become only a pretty decoration. The purity of ancient symbols has been best preserved in the pysankas of Kyiv, Poltava, and Kherson oblasts. And it is no accident that they are made in a strictly traditional manner.
This layer of national culture is almost unknown to the modern city. Pysanka-making has long been localized in the rural hinterland for ideological reasons. Claims that pysankas are only archaic ornaments and their purely decorative nature are clearly unjust. Of course, the perception of ornamental painting is subject to change, but this means changed coordinates of cultural senses, when the people preserve their life spiritual experience. The experience of our history and the uncertainty of our reference points, including those in politics, proves the high extent to which we lack the firm bases of folk culture and its moral power. What we need is a breakthrough in the revival of Ukrainian culture. The question is about the return of the pysanka to the cultural field of society. In Kyiv, for instance, there are a few pysanka-making groups and a private school, but this is obviously not enough. Mesdames Vlenenko and Ktytorova believe that one must organize interest groups in schools and include pysanka in the folk studies syllabuses. There is already some experience in doing this. But, unfortunately, for example, the television pysanka-making program called A Thousand Lessons was canceled last year. The Podil-based (in Kyiv) Sunflower Studio is losing its premises. It all adds up to striking lack of thought.







