THE FORMATION OF THE PERSONALITY OF THE UKRAINIAN ARTIST AND DISSIDENT OPANAS ZALYVAKHA

Abstract

The purpose of the article is a comprehensive study of the features of the formation of the worldview and personality of Opanas Zalyvakha during the first forty years of his life. The methodological basis of the article was the principles of objectivity, historicism, comprehensiveness, continuity, as well as a complex of general scientific and special historical methods. The work used methods of analysis and synthesis, problem-chronological, retrospective, method of comparison of information from various sources. The basis of the source base is the memoirs of O. Zalyvakha himself, his relatives and acquaintances, the works of other dissidents – Vyacheslav Chornovil and Bohdan Horyn, as well as materials from the Sectoral State Archive of the Security Service of Ukraine (SSA SSU). The work traces the key milestones of O. Zalyvakha's life path during his childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood, which had a significant impact on the formation of his worldview and the emergence of the artist as a personality with a clearly expressed Ukrainian national consciousness. The author concludes that during his childhood and youth, O. Zalyvakha was under threat of being deprived of his national identity. Stalin's repressions and the Holodomor of 1932–1933, which were aimed at destroying conscious Ukrainianness, resulted in the lack of dissident`s access to Ukrainian cultural heritage for a long period. Nevertheless, even in the conditions of resettlement to the Far East of the Russian Federation, the artist managed to preserve both his ancestral memory and national consciousness. During the Soviet period, a dissident did not have the full opportunity to develop as an artist. The totalitarian system in the USSR hindered the process of O. Zalyvakha's obtaining a quality art education, not only complicating his life circumstances, but also imposing on the artist his own limited ideas about art. Significant obstacles were also created during the artist's professional career in the late 1950s and early 1960s, as the Soviet authorities, through bans on exhibitions, made the artist's artistic heritage inaccessible to the public. In general, O. Zalyvakha, despite his creativity outside the framework imposed by the totalitarian regime in the USSR, could only gain recognition among a narrow circle of people who also held nonconformist views.