Sixties Artists

The Sixties movement (Shistdesiatnyky) was a wave of creative and national awakening in Ukraine of roughly 1956 to 1968, which arose on the tide of the Khrushchev "Thaw" after the Twentieth Party Congress. This was a generation of artists, poets and thinkers who sought to restore to culture truth, freedom of artistic expression and national dignity, suppressed by decades of Socialist Realism and repression. In the visual arts the Sixtiers revived interrupted traditions — Boychukism, the Ukrainian Modern, folk art — fusing them with a contemporary plastic language. The hearth of the movement was the Kyiv Club of Creative Youth. Its central figure was Alla Horska, a monumentalist and activist who, together with like-minded colleagues, created the famous stained-glass window in honour of Taras Shevchenko at Kyiv University (1964), brutally destroyed by the authorities immediately upon its completion; Horska herself was murdered in Vasylkiv in 1970, in circumstances that remain unexplained. The circle included Opanas Zalyvakha, imprisoned for his convictions, Lyudmyla Semykina, Halyna Sevruk and Veniamin Kushnir. The movement was broader than the visual arts: it was nourished by the poets Vasyl Symonenko, Lina Kostenko and Ivan Drach, and by the poetic cinema of Sergei Parajanov, whose "Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors" (1965) became its visual emblem. The Sixtiers combined artistic work with human-rights activity, the circulation of samvydav and the defence of the Ukrainian language and history. The authorities answered with arrests and persecutions, which intensified after 1965 and effectively rolled back the Thaw. Despite the repressions, the movement laid the moral and aesthetic foundation of Ukrainian dissidence and of the later national revival. Shistdesiatnyky proved that authentic, free art was possible even under totalitarianism, and became a symbol of resistance to spiritual assimilation.