Serhii YAKUTOVYCH: The tragedy of history is caused by lack of love

In one of his numerous interviews to The Day the well-known graphic artist Serhii Yakutovych told about his father: “We went on foot with him from Kaniv to Korosten. When we got tired or when the night was falling, we stopped in a field and lay down near the stacks. I’ve remembered for my whole life those minutes of sky-gazing, observing the flight of an eagle, and the words of my father: ‘The one who has the wings never asks for a permission to fly.’”

During his last visit to the newspaper’s editorial office Yakutovych said that for him a family is a kind of fortress, which is protecting him on the one side and obliges on the other. The family memory, history of the kin is one of the topics we touched upon in our conversation with the graphic artist. Naturally, the communication was full of extremely interesting stories from the Yakutovych family, which show the history of the entire country.

During the complicated centuries of statelessness in Ukraine many families which used to be the cream of the nation were destroyed. A vivid example of repressions against the Ukrainian family was the Krushelnytskys, whose male representatives for the most part were killed in Sandarmokh. The great kin of Yakutovychs managed to survive. Serhii Yakutovych’s knightly manners and aesthetism are an example of what we all could have been and should be.

Ukraine has a critical need for the aesthetics executed by a man’s hand. It was not without reason that Ukrainian villagers brought the stage scenery created by Yakutovych for the movie Prayer for Hetman Mazepa to their houses from the shooting areas. There are practically none of his works in his studio. They are located in some other places, such as theaters, private collections, houses of simple Ukrainians. “I am in fact a people’s artist,” Yakutovych said, smiling. “At the same time I have never lived in a village. I simply love them much.”

In an interview to The Day Serhii YAKUTOVYCH speaks about the love to people and why the present-day Ukrainian intelligentsia lacks it, about the family as a stronghold of the nation and historical memory.

Viktoria SKUBA: In Den’s New Year issue we published the symbolical article by George Shevelov. He says that the main enemies of Ukrainian statehood are Moscow, Ukrainian provincialism, and Kochubei way of thinking. While you were depicting your heroes, you, so to say, transformed into Khmelnytsky, Mazepa, and Kuchubei, so you should understand Shevelov very well. In your opinion, where do these problems take root? Is Ukraine able to overcome them?

“First of all, I am an artist. Maybe not even an artist, but an interpreter or improviser of the texts. I have a feeling that history is not what has already happened to us, what is taking place at this moment and piercing you. One of the hugest problems of Ukrainians in their perception of history is that we have no heroes. If our consciousness makes a hero of somebody, the society becomes right away indifferent to this personality. We erect a monument – and that’s all, the topic is closed. And the topic of history cannot be closed. We cannot consider the stories of Bohdan Khmelnytsky or Ivan Mazepa over. I, first and foremost, treat them like people. It interests me greatly why they did one or another thing. For a political figure (though he always has an obligation before his people) is first and foremost a man. He was raised by a nanny, loved someone and aspired for something. When you identify yourself with a historical personality, you come to understand that this is you, with all the pluses and minuses, with your fear and desires. I have been recently called a court artist. Thank you, let it be. I wish we had an emperor then.

“But the elite, which resided on the Ukrainian territory, did not feel Ukrainian and independent for quite a while. This is by the way one of the reasons of the Ruin. The so-called Ukrainian elite did not possess the important feature typical of the Polish nobility or Russian aristocracy – it was not the stronghold of the state. The same refers to our current political elite.

“We have not understood as yet what is going on with us, because we cannot understand that we have never been a state. In the time of Kyivan Rus’ there was no Ukrainian nation as such. It was considerably later that the national states started to take shape in Europe. The Ukrainian nation, as far as I understand, was shaped in the 16th century during the war of Bohdan Khmelnytsky. But there was no state at that time. Therefore for over three centuries the Ukrainian nation has existed apart from the state. And all of a sudden we did receive a state. But we don’t have any historical experience how to work with the state mechanism.

“In my understanding the Sixtiers of the 20th century were the only nobility we had. They developed that kind of idealism without which you cannot live, because then you have no heroes, only varenyks with poppy seeds at best, not even with meat.

“Of all post-Soviet states we are the most Sovietized. This is terrifying, because the ‘sovok’ absolutely levels a personality in respect to the society. For a Ukrainian it is an absolutely normal thing to say ‘I,’ this is the result of living in isolated farmsteads. In spite of geography, this individualism is only coming to being. And it coincides with the notion ‘Ukraine.’ I don’t like the name ‘Ukraine,’ I would prefer the real name, ‘Rus’.’ But the people living in the center, west, and east of the country suddenly understand that the state does not need either their hands or minds.

“Real Ukrainians are conscious people. For the state is based on the state nation, rather than on ethos. You won’t become a Ukrainian only because you were born in Lviv or somewhere else, but only when you deliberately came to this Ukrainianness. This awareness is much more precious, because you will give your life for this understanding.”

UKRAINIAN INTELLIGENTSIA LACKS CONTACT WITH THE PEOPLE

V.S.: Lina Kostenko said in her time that there are no people left to whom the high-voltage spiritual line should be passed. What should happen, in order to consolidate the contemporary, absolutely different Ukrainian intelligentsia around the idea of statehood?

“The modern Ukrainian intelligentsia, again, remains Sovietized, i.e., it is not ready to undertake responsibility. The very word combination ‘Ukrainian intelligentsia’ does not sound convincing. However, we pronounce the names, such as Lina Kostenko, Oxana Pachlovska, Ivan Dziuba, and Ivan Drach with quite a different intonation. These are people who have always undertaken the responsibility and continue to do so. I have just reread for the third time Reporting before Apostle Peter by Yurii Illienko. No matter how people treated this grandiose personality because of his superhuman qualities, he was a Ukrainian genius in terms of creativity. With all his drawbacks, the horrors of his soul, the intensity of his thinking, the desire to bring even to colleagues what he can say. But we don’t understand that we lose these qualities namely in our souls.

“Lina Kostenko has kept silence for 20 years, not because the time was bad, but because no one believed her. Time is always bad. The time can become beautiful only when wonderful people making deeds are living in this time. The time of Kostenko, Dziuba, Illienko, and Mykolaichuk is epochal. It does not matter as much what was happening to them and why they burnt out. Maybe, it is for the reason that I grew in their milieu and they were young, so I don’t know how it can be different. They set the bar of perception of one’s history and time.

“Maybe I am not doing good deeds, maybe, I am ‘omnivorous,’ because I take up all kinds of work. It is because I feel scared when I don’t have any work. Unlike them, I am not an artist, I am an interpreter: there should be a manuscript or script on my desk. Otherwise I feel sick. But once you have some work to do, you can work without sleep for three days.”

Nadia TYSIACHNA: And you feel good.

“This is pathology. I am lucky, because Yurii Illienko all over sudden revealed cinema for me when I was about 50 years old. I had worked in Spain before that, I painted 159 pictures, and suddenly I lost everything. I came back here – I had nothing to eat, I had no job. Then Illienko called me and said: ‘I am starting to shoot Mazepa and I am inviting you.’ ‘In what capacity? I am not a professional cinema artist.’ He replied, ‘As Serhii Yakutovych.’ And suddenly I revealed things I dreamed about long ago and could not afford. The ‘Kingstons’ of my consciousness and artistic desires opened in me.

“I have been working as a professional graphic artist since the age of 14. I have painted only pictures for five years. I did not show them to anyone, I even don’t remember how I was living. I wanted to paint pictures, all the more so I understood that nobody needed those pictures, because the formal things were in the foreground. And I had a series of, for example, anecdotes about Ukrainians, which I invented myself. I knew that the form I created would never offend anyone, because people came and said: ‘This is museum art.’ However, at the exhibits of that time the abstract works did not give me any contact with the audience. And because I am an illustrator, the contact is very important for me. By the way, this is what our intelligentsia lacks, the contact – not with the audience, but with the people. They talk a lot about the people, but they have no contact.

“When we were shooting Prayer for Hetman Mazepa, we were living all the time in the village. People were stealing my works, they simply tore them out of the scenery. And I had a friend in that village, a coffin maker. I asked him once, ‘Mykola, why are they trying to tear everything out? Is it because they need fiberboard to cover a barrel or something?’ ‘Of course, not. They tear it out, because it is beautiful. I have a collection at home.’ Then I understood that I am truly a people’s artist. At the same time I have never lived in a village. But I love them greatly. And they feel this love. Trust and love. In my opinion, this is the very task of the people who consider themselves intelligentsia – to feel the love of the people and their place in this people.

“Once my father was asked, how he managed to speak so greatly with the youth. He said, ‘I love and trust them, and that is all.’ This is very simple. However it is very hard to do. But all tragic things in our history are caused by the lack of love. Because love is sacrifice. And people are much afraid of this sacrifice.

“I have worked with a fantastic man, Roman Korohodsky, a 100 percent Jewish, who always spoke only Ukrainian. Owing to him we have 20 volumes of modern Ukrainian literature of the 20th century. He raised the money for all those books kopek by kopek from the whole diaspora. I received 20 dollars per book, for 20 illustrations, but I simply knew I had to do this. He was the first to publish Shevelov’s books, he published three volumes of Dziuba’s works for the first time. Korohodsky revealed for us the Ukrainian modern literature of the 20th century. Namely these people should be present in the Ukrainian culture space.

“I believe the words of Lina Kostenko who said, ‘Now the time for poets and artists has come.’ Neither politicians, nor businessmen. It is our time. But if we won’t say what we have to say… For this purpose we have to figure out what we have to say, who we are, because, again, the intelligentsia is featureless. Will this scant time be enough for us? Many of us are over 80. It seems that they have plenty of time, because they have been silent for 40 years, or they were not allowed to speak for 40 years. But they will die tomorrow, one by one, and there will be no one to take up their cause. For nobody will follow them.

“History is a fixed flow of time. And we have only pieces which we want to gather.

“Currently I am teaching at the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute. I have 48 girls on the course. I cannot find any common language with them. I am not computer-literate, and they cannot draw. I know the history of art, and they – not.”

N.T.: Your father chose Ukrainian themes in art, Ukrainianness. You did so too.

“I did so in the sunset of my life.”

N.T.: Tell us about this way. You’ve mentioned consciousness. I know that your son is an artist and he resides in France. How can a Ukrainian artist preserve there his Ukrainianness, like Kruk did in sculpture?

“He has no Ukrainianness. In his words, he is a citizen of the world. But the topic of his creative work is very interesting. He tells about the feelings of a 12-14-year-old boy. But my daughter-in-law, a Frenchwoman by nationality, is a very passionate Ukrainian. I have worked on the play Urus-Shaitan in the Ivan Franko Theater, and finally they offered me an opportunity to sew wide trousers, which I invented and dreamt about. The young actors put them on and said: ‘We are going to Khreshchatyk in these clothes.’ And the trousers were made of flax, flax is like goffered tweed. I made a broad belt with four buttons, then there went something incredible, which ended on the knees, further there were jodhpurs. Try to shove usual broad trousers into boots, this is a terrible thing. As soon as you mount, they come out. So I presented Anton with those trousers. And Anton said to his wife, ‘Dad has given me broad trousers, I will wear them to the studio.’ And she replied, ‘What studio? You are going to wear them every day, because they are very beautiful.’ Now she has taken away these trousers and fastened them to the wall with small nails. People come to their place in Montmartre and see the trousers. My daughter-in-law is a musician, she has composed several fantastic things connected with the Ukrainian theme. She gathered yells, cries, the tread of horses, she specially recorded the Carpathian sounds.”

N.T.: Why is she so interested?

“Do you know how they met each other? Anton was living in Spain with me, only a mountain divided us from France. He had a friend, Prince Sergey Volkonsky, an artist, too. The Volkonsky family moved to Arles-sur-Tech and organized the symposium ‘Ost-West.’ Anton took part in it and made installations, when a girl approached him and said, ‘They say you are from Ukraine.’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Do you know what Hoverla is?’ ‘Yes, I do know what Hoverla is.’ ‘Have you watched The Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors?’ ‘I am a ‘grandchild’ of this film.’

“That was how they met each other. The Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors was her favorite movie. She says that this movie has the best soundtrack in the entire European cinema. On the whole, the soundtracks to Ukrainian poetic cinema are matchless. She asked about Hoverla because she wanted to go on an expedition to the Carpathians, to record old people, the music, the wind.

“The Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors pierce our whole life. My father had a Russian-language family. They lived in Andriivsky uzviz. But when my father was three or four, the family left Kyiv, because his father was a military man. They lived in various places after that: Finland, Brest-Litovsky, Moscow, Leningrad… My father’s eldest brother attended the first class of a Ukrainian school. My father asked him, ‘What is Ukraine?’ When he was getting mature, this was in evacuation in Gorkov oblast, in a village Tonkino, where they were living in an old house of a doctor. Everything was there like in Chekhov’s stories, the house, the hospital, and library in one and the same place. There they found a book without cover. My father’s brother said: ‘This is a book in Ukrainian. Let me tell you.’ And my father started to learn Ukrainian. As it turned out, the book was called Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors. Later his sister Olesia Danchenko sent to Leningrad Zakhar Berkut and Fata morgana.

“He died on the fourth day of shooting of Mazepa, I called Illienko and said that I could not work that day because my father died. He said, ‘A-ah’ and put down the phone. Later he told me that at the very moment I called, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors was on television, and trembitas started to play. So, it pierced his entire life.

“You know, talented people create a magnetic field. I am not talented, I don’t create any. But with them it becomes mystical. Everything is not so simple.

“I have a figure of Jesus Christ in my studio. We were shooting Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors. I was 11. They were shooting short scenes: a spring, a pipe, small things to show life in the valley. It was boring and I went for a walk. Suddenly I saw a completely destroyed cross on the road. I took the figure of Christ that remained intact and brought it to the shooting stage. This figure took part in the shooting. And when the shooting was over, Parajanov said, ‘You found it, then take it, let it be yours.’ Now it accompanies me all the time. One day a woman with a dog came to my studio. The dog had nothing to do, it was walking around, and then sat down in front of this figure. In 40 minutes the dog started to howl. And the woman asked me, ‘What is that?’ ‘I don’t know. Simply it is alive.’ The sculpture is alive. Why would a boy go there and find it? Why namely this thing, not anything else? These are specific things. I believe in fate.”

N.T.: In fate or God?

“I think in fate. We are not talking about God, this is a natural thing. Everyone has a destiny of his own. Despite how much my destiny hit me, and has given me some serious blows, I know it loves me. My father said, ‘Live in such a way that you did not wake up in the end of your life at night in cold sweat.’ So I am trying to live this way. But I know that the destiny is leading me and loves me, and I love it back.”

V.S.: You have told in a very touching way about your family. I have read that your great grandmother was Hrushevsky’s secretary. Is it true?

“She simply worked there as a typist in the typewriting department. In the Yakutovych family the Ukrainian theme came namely via my great grandmother. Via her great grandfather Senchyl-Stefanovsky, via Shevchenko’s letters they had at home. Great grandmother even signed up her son, my grandfather, to Plast member in 1919.

“My grandfather Viacheslav Yakutovych knew Taras Bulba by heart. Indeed, Ukrainian, Polish, and Russian was heard in their house in Andriivsky uzviz. This is absolute Kyiv. This came from my father. My mother had a different line, ‘the nobility, Decembrists, and People’s Freedom.’ My grandfather, my mother’s father studied in one class with Bulgakov in the First Kyiv Gymnasium. Their estate was in the farmstead Zlodiivka. Now the fourth reactor is located at that very place. Great grandfather built there a hospital, a library, a school – all those were demolished to build the fourth reactor. This is history piercing through you and you are responsible for it.

“My mother’s father was absolutely fond of England. He was a White Army officer. He was arrested in 1935. Grandmother was the chief architect of the NKVD of Ukraine, and found him in Chita. My grandfather was truly fond of England. He should have played in Sherlock Holmes. So he was sitting in a cattle van full of criminals. And they said, ‘Georgii Aleksandrovich, I can go bring the boiled water for you.’”

N.T.: This is breeding.

“He never raised his voice. He was always calm. He was a gentleman. He was sent to prison – okay. He was released – okay. He died as a deputy minister, without being a party member. His subordinates were only Jews. Already back then they were fighting against cosmopolitism. On the eve of his anniversary his subordinates called him, ‘Georgii Aleksandrovich, is Achilles the enemy of the people or not?’ My grandfather replied, ‘No. He lived long ago.’ ‘Okay.’ Next day they brought a big writing set with Achilles’ bust. So, these family stories have no end.”

V.S.: You’ve just showed with your example how important the family memory is for Ukrainians. Many things are based on the family memory in our country. Den has recently held an event connected with memory. We held a roundtable with historians “The policy of memory and anti-totalitarian program.” During the discussion we heard an interesting opinion that the anti-totalitarian program should be realized on the level of mass consciousness by bringing history to the populace in the way of emotional images. What would you offer as an anti-totalitarian program for the society?

“First, I cannot advise anything to anyone. I can advise something to myself, but I still am aware that I won’t be able to fulfill it completely. My father has always educated us by his own examples. Only a comprehensive development of individuality can be anti-totalitarian, because personalities form the nation. Probably, such program should count on the comprehensive revelation of a personality in every person.

“When we are speaking about intelligentsia… There is no such notion in the West. There are only intellectuals and the middle class. We have only the intelligentsia which has so many pains but still is doing nothing. A middle class should emerge in our country. It is coming to being now. By the way, I am gratified that these people are educated, they know languages, they can travel freely in the world, they are focused on their families, they take an active part in educating their children who know languages from the early age, but not to leave their country. My niece’s husband had an opportunity to go to work to the Silicon Valley, but he does not go there, because he knows that his homeland is here. It pains him that this homeland does not become his fatherland.

“Therefore I am saying that the family memory is important. I have no root in the village. But I, too, originate from the middle class family from generation to generation. I understand how important this is. In our family only women in my father’s line have remained. The family is everything to them. My father died recently, my mother is very ill, and they take care of me. And all this is family. And you understand that not only are you a part of the kin, but that the kin is a project.

“My grandmother had a sister. She lived in Moscow and she was the main diagnostics specialist in the Kremlin hospital. Once she said to my mother, ‘Our great kin had to live and suffer for so long, so that Serhii appeared.’ I know she said so because she really loved me, but you have to live and bear responsibility for these words. I could be unwilling to bear this responsibility, but I have to. My father said, ‘You have been given so much love and talents that your lifetime won’t be enough to pay this debt. But you should repay the debts.’

“When I was six, my father took me to the Carpathians for the first time. He and his friend Hryhorii Havrylenko decided to go across the Carpathians on foot. I was an urban boy. It was extremely hard for me. But my father kept saying: ‘You have to.’

“And this obligation has stayed with me for my whole life, although I am a very lazy man. But you pull yourself together and do it. And you feel immensely happy when you understand that you have done something.

“We were shooting the last scene of Taras Bulba in Poland. We were saying good bye and I was going to Kyiv on my own. I was sitting in the plane and thinking: that’s all, I have no money, my wife is gravely diseased, I have a pile of outstanding accounts, and no order. Then I looked at this – I have done so much. I have done my work. And everything becomes really simple. Yes, there are many problems, but you have to resolve them. And I have resolved them, though my wife died. I did all I could in that year. It was very tragic, my wife and I had lived for 38 years together. And she took my word that I would go to Paris, to our son, on Christmas. We had such a tradition. And I went there. I was sitting in Paris, near the Seine. The New Year was about to come in two hours and I had a feeling that I did this. And this anger and obligation are the way your ancestors are leading you.”