Oleksandr Ivakhnenko and Oleksandr Danchenko are the Illustrators of Oleksandr Dovzhenko

The article is dedicated to the illustrations of the prominent Ukrainian graphic artists Oleksandr Ivakhnenko and Oleksandr Danchenko for the prose of Oleksandr Dovzhenko, as well as the issue of the existence of auto-illustrations by the filmmaker himself. Oleksandr Dovzhenko (also known as Alexander Dovzhenko) is not only a world-renowned filmmaker but also an outstanding artist – a painter and a graphic artist. Besides his painted portraits and thematic paintings, graphic caricatures, cartoons, and portraits, his drawings for films («Arsenal» – late 1920s, «Shchors» – late 1930s, «Michurin» – 1940s, «Poem on the Sea» – 1950s) are well-known. However, the topic “O. Dovzhenko is the Illustrator of His Own Literary Works” has hardly been explored by researchers of the master’s heritage, although the drawing Little Sashko which is both a portrait of the author in childhood and an image of the hero of the film story The Enchanted Desna, inspires further archival search in the filmmaker archives. V. Yevdokymenko (1967), M. Kompanets (1973), V. Yefymenko (1976), T. Kushch (2006), and others are among the illustrators of O. Dovzhenko’s prose. Oleksandr Ivakhnenko’s etchings for the film story The Enchanted Desna (1975–1976) have become a notable phenomenon in Ukrainian graphics during the period of the so-called “silent protest” (the 1970s–1980s). Having chosen a favourite graphic technique of that period, the artist, however, remained indifferent to the extremely popular “de-booking” technique of the 1970s–1980s. The Enchanted Desna is a book that is well-thought-out and coherent. In terms of space, the illustrations occupy as much space on the page as the printed text, and in shape, they are very elongated horizontally, thus creating a kind of pictorial “film strip”, logical and natural for a “film story”. Oleksandr Danchenko’s cycle of etchings for the collection of stories Unforgettable. 1941–1943 (1980) is another example. The artist has addressed frequently the theme of World War II tragedy (Koriukivka. March 1, 1943 (1971), Adzhimushkai (1985), a cycle of illustrations for O. Honchar’s novel Standard-Bearers (1989)). At the same time, his illustrations for O. Dovzhenko’s stories are internally connected with O. Danchenko’s series The Liberation War of the Ukrainian People of 1648–1654 (1954) and Chornobyl (1988–1990), as well as with the etchings for Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy (1990–1992). All these works are based on the combination of documentary with epic, where elevation and poeticism arise precisely as a result of such a combination. The construction of the illustration as a frame, sometimes even a freeze-frame, is an artistic tribute to the creativity of the outstanding filmmaker.