Opanas Zalyvakha

A prominent nonconformist Ukrainian artist, Opanas Zalyvakha was one of the most active dissident intellectuals of the 1960s generation (shistdesyatnyky) in Ukraine. He worked both in easel format and on monumental-decorative art such as stained glass, mosaics, and interiors, as well as book graphics, and was a representative of the Ukrainian cultural revival of the mid- to late twentieth century. Although he was completely isolated from the global art scene, like all Soviet artists in the 1960s to 1980s, his work in the style of national modernism paralleled the most contemporary artistic innovations of the West.

In the early 1930s, Zalyvakha’s family fled to Siberia from their village in the Kharkiv region in order to escape the Holodomor—a mass famine aimed at the genocide of the native Ukrainian population that was engineered by the Stalinist regime in 1932–33. Zalyvakha spent his childhood and youth in the Ussuriysk region of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (now Russia).

After World War II, Zalyvakha attended a secondary art school affiliated with the Academy of Arts in Leningrad, and from 1953 to 1960 he continued his studies at the Leningrad Ilya Repin Institute of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture (now Saint Petersburg Ilya Repin Academy of Arts) in the painting workshop of Viktor Oreshnikov (1904–1987). There, as the Ukrainian art critic Vorodymyr Pidhora noted, Zalyvakha was introduced to European art, philosophy, and literature, and his early artistic inspirations were “the work of Van Gogh and Cézanne, the philosophy of the 20th century, and the great literary masters—Camus, Sartre, Hermann Hesse.” [1]

In 1957 Zalyvakha participated in a summer student program in the town of Kosiv, in the Ivano-Frankivsk region of Ukraine. This trip marked his first significant encounter with his homeland—its language, ethnography, and spiritual life—and the experience had a profound impact on his worldview. Upon returning to Leningrad, he delved into Ukrainian literature and studied the language. In 1959 he returned to Ukraine, traveling along the coast of the Sea of Azov and in the Chernihiv region, documenting folk songs and exploring the local culture.

Having received a rigorous academic artistic education in Leningrad, Zalyvakha worked for several years at the Art Fund in Tyumen, Russia, where he also served as the chairman of the Art Council. In 1961 he presented his first solo exhibition of paintings in Tyumen, showcasing portraits and landscapes in the style of poetic realism such as Портрет журналістки [Portrait of a Journalist], Дівчина в блакитному [Girl in Blue], Портрет студентки [Portrait of a Student], Портрет художниці Сосновської [Portrait of the Artist Sosnovskaia], Могила Павла Грабовського в Тобольську [Grave of Pavlo Hrabovsky in Tobolsk], Річка Тура в Тюмені [Tura River in Tyumen], and Монастир в Тюмені [Monastery in Tyumen] (all 1961). Some of Zalyvakha’s works from the exhibition were acquired by the Tyumen Art Gallery and the Khanty-Mansiysk Museum.

Driven by a deep connection to his Ukrainian roots, Zalyvakha permanently relocated to Ivano-Frankivsk in December 1961. From 1961 to 1965, he worked at the Art Fund there and frequently visited art exhibitions in Kyiv. During this period, he joined the Suchasnyk (“Contemporary”) Creative Youth Club in Kyiv. This association brought together patriotic intellectuals who aimed to promote Ukrainian spirituality, restore folk traditions, and revive deep national memory. The club also played a significant role in exposing its members to the vast cultural heritage of the Ukrainian people and fostering understanding, reinterpretation, and incorporation of these traditions into their own creative endeavors. There, Zalyvakha befriended young Kyiv artists, including the charismatic Alla Horska (1929–1970) and her husband Viktor Zaretsky (1925–1990), then head of the club, who deplored the prevailing ignorance of the authorities. Zalyvakha also met a constellation of talented nationally minded poets and writers in the group, including Ivan Drach, Yevhen Sverstyuk, Ivan Dziuba, Vasyl Symonenko, and Lina Kostenko, all of whom were already well established in literary and artistic circles.

Zalyvakha quickly became a prominent nonconformist artist through his close association with many leaders of the 1960s movement, including the well-known Ukrainian human rights activists Ivan Svitlychnyi, Zenoviy Krasivskyi, and Vasyl Stus.

He embarked on creating epic oil paintings (with motifs such as an archetypal steppe Cossack woman beside a saddled but forsaken horse) based on the songs of the Ukrainian singer and poet Marusia Churai (1625–1653); the poems of Taras Shevchenko, the national hero of Ukraine; and lyrical ballads about the Cossacks by Vasyl Symonenko (1935–1963) such as Полтавчанка [Poltava Woman] (1962–64), Шевченко-бунтар [Shevchenko the Revolutionary] (1964), Козацька мадонна [Cossack Madonna] (1970s), Катерина [Kateryna]  (1985), and Козака несуть [They Carry the Cossack] (1989). At the same time, he created small mosaic panels that were sketches for monumental mosaics, including Борітеся – поборете! [Keep Fighting—You Are Sure to Win!] (1964) and Пророк (Чи буде суд?) [Prophet (Will There Be a Judgment?)] (1964–65), and also worked on illustrations for the books Bolesław Prus and Orphan's Fate (published by Veselka publishing house in 1965). Zalyvakha created the monumental mosaic sketches—plaster-covered panels on plywood, each about two meters high—with the intention of exhibiting them at the Union of Artists in Lviv in the early 1960s, but they were ultimately rejected for ideological reasons. One of the mosaics, depicting a Kobzar breaking free from chains with his arms raised, was kept for years in the studio of the artists Viktor Zaretsky and Alla Horska before it was stolen.

Although the artists in the Suchasnyk club were more focused on creative innovation than political opposition, the authorities viewed them as Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists, with Zaretsky and Horska at the epicenter, and all came under the scrutiny of the KGB secret service. In 1964 Taras Shevchenko University commissioned five artists from the club who were shaped by the nonconformist ideas of the 1960s generation—Zalyvakha, Alla Horska, Lyudmyla Semikina (1924–2021), Halyna Sevruk (1929–2022), and Halyna Zubchenko (1929–2000)—to design a stained-glass window for the lobby of its main “Red Building” on the 150th anniversary of Shevchenko’s birth.

Its creators conceived of the epic stained-glass triptych, featuring a portrait image of Shevchenko and characters from his works, not only as a vehicle for a new formal and artistic language in monumental art, but also as a civic and philosophical manifesto of the Ukrainian nationally conscious intelligentsia as voiced by Sverstiuk: “The very idea embedded an explosive confrontation in the image of Shevchenko, who asks at the entrance to the state university: ‘Will there be a judgment? Will there be punishment?’”  [2] However, upon the orders of the Communist Party leadership, a commission was convened that labeled the triptych an ideologically flawed work, and it was destroyed on the night of March 9, 1964. Horska and Semykina were expelled from the Union of Artists of the Ukrainian SSR, and in late 1965 Zalyvakha was swept up in a wave of arrests of Ukrainian intelligentsia on trumped-up charges of separatism, nationalism, bourgeois nationalism, anti-Soviet agitation, and espionage.

Sentenced to five years’ imprisonment “for anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda,” Zalyvakha was held in a harsh prison camp in Yavas, in the Russian region of Mordovia. Denied permission to paint, he worked as a loader and a stoker. While in exile, the artist secretly practiced small-form graphic art—bookplates and greeting cards rendered in ballpoint pen or pencil—which came to embody a distilled essence of visual minimalism and archetypal vision.

In 1970 Zalyvakha returned from exile and moved first to Kyiv and then to Ivano-Frankivsk. Even after his release, he remained under administrative supervision and his house was repeatedly searched, but he was finally allowed to return to painting. As he studied global art history and rethought Ukrainian national artistic tradition (including the Ukrainian avant-garde and the work of Mykhailo Boychuk [1882–1937] and Heorhyi Narbut [1886–1920], as well as folk songs and folktales), his works evolved from academic artworks, to fauvist, post-cubist reminiscences and nonnarrative paintings, to an innovative near-abstract figuration with a pronounced emphasis on color harmony, as seen in Козак Мамай [Cossack Mamai] (1969), Старці [Old People] (1975), Калина [Viburnum] (1973; 1979), Ніч [Night], Пісня [Song] (1975), Леся [Lesya] (1978), Іван Світличний [Ivan Svitlichnyi] (1983, 1988), Пам’яті Зеновія Красівського [Memory of Zenoviy Krasivskyi] (1978), До джерел. Портрет З. Красівського [Back to the Sources: Portrait of Zenoviy Krasivskyi] (1981), and Пам’яті Вернадського [Memory of Vernadsky] (1980s).

Despite Soviet ideology’s repression of Ukrainian art and the artist’s difficult personal circumstances, the artist-philosopher Zalyvakha continued to strive to develop a visual and plastic language of his own that would retain the features of national identity as well as universal humanity. He formulated his artistic credo as such: “The artist is a mythmaker who expresses himself through an imaginative triad—individuality, nationality, and universality.” [3] His paintings include  complexly distorted and stylized images of folk types, proto-archaic signs and folk symbols, silhouettes of churches and bells, outlines of an ancient kobza (Ukrainian lute-like instrument), and images of the protection of the Mother of God, such as Блудний син [The Prodigal Son] (1970), Чумацька вечеря [Chumak Dinner] (1970s), Родина [Family] (1973), Червона калина [Red Viburnum] (1973), Дзвонар [Bell Ringer] (1980), Є і будемо [We Are and We Will] ((1980s), Молитва [Prayer] (1980; 1987), Катерина [Kateryna] (1985), Свічка [Candle] (1987), Мати-Берегиня [Mother-Protectress] (1986), and Пієта [Pieta] (1982, 1985, 1989 versions).

Sverstiuk writes: “Entering the artistic world of Zalyvakha is difficult: this is truly the art of the 20th century—stylized, symbolic, multidimensional. It is completely dramatic. . . . In the dark cultural vacuum of decades, the artist emerged in solitude, distanced from the sources of his native land and went steadily upwards, to the understanding of our national history and our sanctuaries: he created his world of images shaped by violence and enlightened suffering—a world beneath the images of the Protection. And maybe the main force that sustains and sets that world ablaze is a spirit that is not subject to the pressure of time.” [4]

Zalyvakha’s paintings articulated the defiant stance of a nationally conscious Ukrainian intelligentsia. His continuing reflections on the essence of human life and the philosophy of eternal search can be seen in the figurative metaphors of Christianity, Old Slavic mythology, and ancient Ukrainian ornamental motifs in his works of the 1990s such as XX вік [XX Century], Мироносиці [Myrrh-Bearers], Українська мадонна [Ukrainian Madonna], Початок [Beginning], Портрет Василя Стуса [Portrait of Vasyl Stus], and Портрет Шевченка [Portrait of Shevchenko].

Zalyvakha’s work finally achieved wide recognition in the final years of the Soviet regime, at the end of the 1980s, and his paintings were shown at personal exhibitions in many cities of Ukraine and abroad. He worked in the field of monumental and decorative art, designing the interiors of multiple coffee shops (Medivnia, Kazka, Kartoplianyky, Bilyi Kamin, and Skala) and the Dytiachyi Svit store in Ivano-Frankivsk (all 1989). He also returned to book graphics, designing the cover of the magazine Ukrains’kyi visnyk [Ukrainian Herald] (1987) and illustrating Yevhen Sverstiuk’s book Bludni syny Ukrainy [The Prodigal Sons of Ukraine] (1993). He also authored a section of the book Alla Horska: Chervona tin kalyny. Lysty. Spohady. Statti [Alla Horska: The red shadow of the viburnum: letters, memoirs, articles] (1996).

The artist was awarded the Vasyl Stus Prize in 1989 and the Taras Shevchenko National Prize of Ukraine in 1995 and was named Honored Artist of Ukraine in 1999.

Zalyvakha’s works are in the collections of the National Art Museum of Ukraine in Kyiv, the Andrey Sheptytsky National Museum in Lviv, the Ivano-Frankivsk Art Museum, and the Tyumen Art Gallery.

Zoya Chegusova

Translated from Ukrainian by Ada Wordsworth

Notes:

1. V. Pidhora, “Filosof ukrainskoi obrazotvorchosti” [Philosopher of Ukrainian art creation], Obrazotvorche mystetstvo, no. 1 (1995): 8.

2. Yevhen Sverstiuk,“Sviato neba i zemli” [Holy heavens and earth], Fine Art, no.2 (2008): 89.

3. Opanas Zalyvakha. Albom. Uporiadnyk Bohdan Mysiuha [Opanas Zalyvakha. Album / compiled by B. Mysiuha] (Kyiv: Smoloskyp, 2003), 132.

4. Yevhen Sverstiuk, “Myt’ na chumats’komu shliakhy” [A moment on Chumatsky Way], Obrazotvorcha mystetstvo, no. 2 (1990): 7–9.