St. Andrew’s Night at Ivan Honchar Museum
On St. Andrew’s Night the Ivan Honchar Museum was packed. This folk cultural center was marking its 50th anniversary, launching a jubilee exhibit, setting up an ethnic club, and holding an ethnodisco directed by Oleh Skrypka.
Says Petro Honchar, son of the celebrated author and director of the cultural center: “We learned about this date from archival materials not so long ago. I remember our moving into this building in 1960. I thought that was the beginning, but then it transpired that my father considered Nov. 15, 1959, to be the date of the museum’s foundation, for it was then that the first items on exhibit appeared.”
At first, Ivan Honchar kept them as a private collection, but after visiting various museums where the displays illustrated only class inequality, he realized that his collection, with many items that were generally regarded as trash or vestiges of the past — consisted of “live, energetic” witnesses of the Ukrainian nation with its ancient and rich culture. It was thus Honchar’s home turned into what people came to know as a public museum and where he brought family clothes, pieces of needlework, kitchenware, and books from their home libraries.
The museum reflected an undistorted picture of Ukraine in miniature. Ivan Honchar dedicated his life to creating a true museum that could be freely visited by people. The late Roman Korohodsky wrote, “It was an individual effort on the part of an enthusiast who was fanatically dedicated to culture and struggled against the massive effort to ruin it… Ivan Honchar acted as an emergency management minister, to use today’s terminology, at a time when the communists exposed the defenseless Ukrainian culture to the elements: fire, flood, and blizzard. He struggled to rescue and preserve whatever he could, and he rescued and preserved for posterity a great deal.
“He did it single-handedly, without any help from the Society for Preservation of Historical and Cultural Monuments, from any of the existing creative unions, unaided by young Octobrists, Pioneers, or Komsomol members who were taught by atheists and who became ones. In 1970 he witnessed a group of young people (most likely Komsomol members) vandalize a church in Chaiky, a village in Bohuslav raion. A church that had ornamented girders, a rare artistic phenomenon. Ivan Honchar was a lonely warrior on that battlefield. None of the [Soviet] creative unions wrote something like The Story of a True Man or Death in Kyiv. True, a film was made and then banned.”
The jubilee exhibit includes an exposition based on historical materials illustrating the creation of the museum: excerpts from Ivan Honchar’s diaries, photos, and charts of his travels across Ukraine. Copies of letters to authorities, entries in the guest book totaling 12 volumes (!). “You are unmatched / On your own level, / One in a hundred generations. / Your lofty wrath lifts you to heaven, / Yours was perhaps a stream, / Not a deep river, but far too hard to cross…” Vasyl Stus wrote on Dec. 19, 1969, with a postscript: “These lines are from psalms about Kostomarov. I thank you [Dear Mr. Honchar] once again. “You are unmatched /On your own level!”
Dreamland, the traditional art display, was scattered all over the place and looked like a Christmas Eve fair. It served as an aperitif before the ethnodisco. A small Christmas tree was decorated with toy straw horses, windmills, fences, cherubim, and bells, all bound by red ribbons. A minimum combination of green, yellow, and red colors looked very stylish. This turned out to be an old Ukrainian Christmas tree decorating tradition, with each decoration serving as a symbol: the horses as wishes for everyone to be always in the saddle; windmills as wishes of well-being; fences for protection against ill-wishers; bells as good news, cherubim as guardian angels, and the ribbons for longevity, the red meaning the sun.
Later, Christmas trees in the cities were decorated with Easter eggs. According to Natalia Bilous, a student of local lore, there are various Easter egg patterns: krapanka (dotted), krashanka (dyed), and maliovanka (painted). The maliovankas were made at monasteries and workshops. Instead of traditional patterns, they portrayed religious and secular scenes. Glass balls for Christmas trees were introduced later.
Says Valentyna Berdnyk: “I first visited Ivan Honchar’s museum 37 years ago, on Easter Eve. My friends and I were immediately invited to sit at a festively laid table. Afterward Ivan Honchar showed us his collection of antiquities. I think it was then that I decided to embark on a Ukrainian cultural quest.
‘Later, after I married Oles Berdnyk, we would visit the Honchars together. The museum was a shelter for all of us. It made us feel on solid ground, among true friends. It rid us of the fear of being alone. If you have this fear, you can get scared and even break down. It is so good to know that the museum is looking for new forms of activity. I’m happy that we have combined efforts with Oleh Skrypka, because he has such strong magnetic energy. I think that young people are now looking for new sources of energy, which is rooted in our old traditions.”
Setting up an ethnic club has become one of the museum’s new forms of activity. It is designed to serve the devotees of traditional Ukrainian culture. The club’s next event will take place on St. Nicholas’ Day (for more on this see www.ethnoclub.com.ua).
Even as the soiree was drawing to a close, the flow of visitors grew. They stepped in from the cold, pink-cheeked, exchanged loud greetings, embraced, and immediately struck up conversations, discussing business, New Year and Christmas festivities, and the upcoming elections. The whole thing reminded one of a scene from Taras Shevchenko’s Nazar Stodolia, with the elders singing with the well-known Homin Choir, the middle-aged taking an active part in the fair, and the younger people enthusiastically performing the Kalyta round dance, flirting, and enjoying themselves to the accompaniment of Oleh Skrypka’s ethnodisco. Ivan Honchar dreamed that his museum would be full of life, gathering under its roof people of various ages who would be keenly aware of their vast cultural heritage.
