One of my most disconcerting enemies is the remaining difficult days of “the rivalry of two wars” – from Lviv to the paintings of Taras Shevchenko. It’s clear that there’s not a lot of demand for an artist’s exhibition, which is what I think about my life. It’s also important that you have long been tied up in marriage with those with whom you may never get along for the rest of your life – this is what happens with great personal exhibitions of artists, where they collect works literally from all over the world. And here we are talking about the importance of paintings, which are found in tens of thousands on the walls of the National Museum of Taras Shevchenko - and in its halls, as a rule, there are not even a lot of exhibits, without seeming to talk about drawings.

But I believe that among those who came to the exhibition before the ZAG gallery, there were people who had never actually downloaded paintings from Kiev. Or maybe there are people who, in a completely different way, marveled at this creation in the interior of the current gallery - and discovered Shevchenko for themselves in a new way. And once again we can talk about the need for a “special” presentation of the creative work of Taras - both as an artist and as a poet, and about the underestimation of his creativity and specialness. So it happens - if a person is turned into an icon, its true scale begins to fall behind the canonical image.

The one who, having stood by this Lviv Cherka, might have crossed over yesterday, who sacrificed Shevchenko for the sake of his dream about Ukraine and the Ukrainian people, what an inexorable gift of gifts, what a subtle psychology. And so, they bought him from bankruptcy, I don’t regret the important share of the peasant lad, but instead I buried him in front of the scale and prospects of his talent. But Shevchenko’s sacrifice was not an artistic one, but a political one – because for the sake of Ukraine there would be a conflict with the empire itself. And a thought about those who from Taras may have been, as if not a soldier and exiled, a great artist (a great Russian artist, obviously), and Viyshov may be great, or Ukrainian (or provincial) sings - this is a typical imperial tradition, yet.

The focus is that in the hours of his life Shevchenko was not some kind of provincial singer for the simple reason that the ideology of the empire recognized the founding of a single Russian people with Great Russians, Little Russians and Belarusians. At any time, for his companions, Shevchenko was not just a “Little Russian Kobzar”, but a scribe of the Russian Empire. And this approach until the new one - and only until the new one - having continued to bloom throughout and in the Radian hour. The Ukrainians, it would seem, would no longer have the right to found themselves as an independent nation, and Shevchenko – until the collapse of the Radyansky Union – continued to be taught a school course on Russian literature. And so, there was no more desirable non-Russian writer in this course. Why?

One can, of course, say: because Shevchenko was a genius, and the Russians, as they often deal with them, wanted to appropriate him - Gogol was not enough for them. But the Russians have enough great writers in their iconostasis to not lay claim to Shevchenko. Nutrition here is not about genius, but about scale. Because before, and even more so after, the collapse of the Russian Empire, there was no writer with such a clear and blatant anti-imperial program. There was no person capable of diagnosing Russia with such clarity, capable of diagnosing the plight of the “foreigners”, capable of realizing that until such time as Russia becomes an empire, it will lose its invisible.

You won’t find such a thought among Russian followers of Shevchenko. The “most progressive” would like to be sympathetic to the unfortunate villagers or to describe the cruelty of the Russian army in the Caucasus – or to be sympathetic to the goals of the empire. Russia, its army, its special services committed incredible atrocities against the peoples who lived in the shadow of the empire - and the whole history of atrocities passed through the “great Russian culture”, and. Of these writers, who spoke about the evil of the empire in the empire itself, deprived of only Shevchenko - and the Russian Bolsheviks simply happened to include his work in the course of powerful literature, because of their writers, who? "

This is due to its scale and prophecy (and even Shevchenko’s view of the Russian Empire is relevant today), the presence of Taras in someone else’s school course allows for another stereotype to arise - the myth about Shevchenko as a. No, he was not a village poet, and this is also obvious in his artistic exhibition. Thus, they were born among a rural family and a large part of their readers were rural (which is also phenomenal for the current Russian Empire, where Nikolai Nekrasov only died, so that the villagers read. Ale Shevchenko, without being a singer, focused on the reality of rural life - he literally rose above. Over history, over everyday life, over religion - this was one of the first such successes in secular literature, and the Ukrainians were literally blessed that their first national classic Volodya was such. Perhaps, who would not have been born, if Shevchenko had marveled at the world of only the eyes of a singer - and in the same way he would have marveled at the eyes of an extraordinary painter. Painters, whose paintings are in stock for the Ukrainian people, the drawings are being collected for hours - because now people know where to go.