The Illustrations by Maria Kotlyarevska to the Poem “Germany. A Winter’s Tale” by Heinrich Heine (Part 2)

This second part of the article, dedicated to Maria Kotlyarevska’s illustrations for Heinrich Heine’s poem Germany. A Winter’s Tale, continues and develops the main motifs outlined in the first part. The article focuses on the socio-political dimension of the work of this 20th-century Ukrainian artist, whose style was shaped by the principles of Boychukism, and who studied under Ivan Padalka. Kotlyarevska’s most significant creative period falls in the 1920s, during the so-called Ukrainian Renaissance—a time when, on the one hand, memories of Ukrainian anarchist movements were still alive in society, and on the other, the policy of national communism fostered Ukrainization and support for literature and the visual arts. (The ideologists of this movement were later repressed in the 1930s, while Kotlyarevska herself was persecuted after World War II—sentenced to seven years in a labor camp.) The article examines her illustrations created during this period, as well as several works from her later creative years, for texts of Ukrainian classical and Soviet literature (Eneida by Ivan Kotlyarevsky, Trypillia Tragedy by Ivan Pervomaysky), Russian literature (The Bronze Horseman by Alexander Pushkin), and European literature (Jean-Pierre Béranger’s Le Roi d’Yvetot). These are compared with her cycle of illustrations for Heine’s poem. Kotlyarevska explores themes such as the afterlife (Eneida), the spontaneous energy of peasant rebellion (Trypillia Tragedy), Ukrainian reinterpretations of French folklore (Béranger), and the deconstruction of the Russian imperial myth (The Bronze Horseman). Her work reflects the hopes and fears, collective illusions and personal insights of the Ukrainian artistic intelligentsia of the first half of the 20th century. Her authorial style can be read as a sensitive cardiogram of the Unglückliches Bewusstsein (“unhappy consciousness,” in Hegelian terms) of an honest artist living in a strange and tragic time