“SHADOWS OF FORGOTTEN ANCESTORS”. Illustrations by Heorhii Yakutovych for Mykhailo Kotsiubynskyi’s short story

Dedicated to the 100th anniversary of the birth of Serhii Parajanov (January 9, 1924 – July 20, 1990)

“Slavery begins with silence…” S. Parajanov

“An artist who produces meanings and images that touch the sky and at the same time are grounded in the depths of the earth.” This is what film critic Serhii Trimbach says about Serhii Parajanov. This year we celebrate the 100th anniversary of the genius’s birth. Temperamental, carnival-like, free – an artist who can be called a renaissance man, because even in prison he discovered new facets of his all-embracing nature and deep artistic talent. People say that such people are eccentrics sent to us from other worlds to help us see the path we must take through our lives.

Serhii Parajanov really felt cramped in our world. He did not fit into any framework offered by the system and had no desire to limit himself in his work, inspiredly generating his own mythologies and blurring the boundaries between fiction and reality in an incomprehensible way. Parajanov did not appear suddenly and out of nowhere. Just as there is no date that marks the intersection of two lives-the life of the “ordinary” Parajanov and the life of the Parajanov-genius. Thus, the phenomenal film “Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors”, which later won 39 international awards and opened the era of Poetic Cinema in Ukrainian cinema, became Parajanov’s personal quintessence.

The film brought together many talented and remarkable figures. In particular, the director invited graphic artist Heorhii Yakutovych to be the production designer, knowing his love for the Carpathians. At that time, the artist had been working on illustrations for the book of the same name for several years. “He is not just an artist, but a thinking artist,” Parajanov said of Yakutovych, “You could probably find someone more talented than him, but not a more thoughtful one. He brought us to the Carpathians like a guide. He knew them. He saved us from paisanism, from falsity.”

The mini-exposition of the KhRAM presents 5 graphic works by Heorhii Yakutovych created for the novel “Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors”. The artist takes us into a mystical world created by a combination of elegant lines and folk motifs. He tells us about the world of the Carpathians, anchoring his graphic narrative with rich local folklore and sincerely inviting his characters to interact with this world. Departing from the established norms and at certain moments ignoring the laws of academia, the artist builds a personal flavor and throws the viewer into a new graphic reality. A reality where ethnicity organically and unobtrusively dissolves in every line and is reflected in every spot – like ice on a river in early spring melts under the sun, becoming a part of it and adding to the river’s flow.

Heorhii Yakutovych finalized the story two years after the film’s premiere, in 1966.

Polina Limina, cultural critic and researcher of the works of Heorhiy and Serhii Yakutovych: “Not all of the artist’s ideas were realized: many scenes, including Palahna’s wedding and fortune-telling, were not included in the publication. The design of the book is simple, laconic and structured. The methods of Yakutovych’s work on the film and the book differ primarily in their ultimate goal: while in the first case the artist had to literally illustrate the idea, the elaboration of the story required the author’s interpretation and a certain abstraction. That is why the results of the two approaches to the same work do not indicate a commonality of artistic motives, but a deep and versatile penetration into the subject of “Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors””.