The Ukrainian liberation movement of the twentieth century in the comics of ukrainian emigrant artists

Abstract

Comics undoubtedly include not only cultural, artistic, and entertainment components, but also reflect and comprehend certain political and historical events. The first Ukrainian comics were created by emigrant artists Leonid Perfetskyi ("Ukraine in Struggle," 1953, 1971) and Omelian Koval ("Murders by Order of the KGB" (Krylati, № 5, 1978); "The Youth of Stepan Bandera" (Krylati, №3, 1981) and were based on historical and documentary sources, used historical facts, depicted historical figures, and were as serious as possible, devoiding a comic component. The authors of the comic understood it primarily as an opportunity to affirm the Ukrainian national idea and to artistically recreate historical events. The comic strip “Ukraine in Struggle” by L. Perfetskyi is formed from a series of paintings that introduce the events in Galicia in the late 1930s and 1940s, in particular the activities of the URA. There is no protagonist here, and the central image is Ukraine and the struggle for independence. In the next two comics by O. Koval (“Murders by Order of the KGB” and “The Youth of Stepan Bandera”) the central figure is Stepan Bandera and the myth about him created among Ukrainian nationalists. The first comic focuses on the image of Bandera's murderer, Bohdan Stashynskyi. He appears as an instrument of murder, and those who gave the orders are recognized as the real criminals. The next comic book, aimed at a teenage audience, combines features of the historical and adventure genres, as it tells about the adventures of a nine-year-old boy, Stepan. The figure of young S. Bandera is depicted with conscious ideological accents and only positive features necessary for a leader that model a one-dimensional artistic image, but with a clear, consistentidentification that can be easily superimposed on the propaganda of the national idea. Thus, the first Ukrainian comics syncretized elements of documentary presentation of events with their artistic interpretation, and formed heroic images of the URA and S. Bandera, that became components of the national idea.