“Do not forget the past – it is the teacher of the future.”
The Oles Honchar Museum is a structural unit of the Institute of Philology of Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv.
The museum was created with the direct support and active participation of the writer’s family (wife Valentyna Danylivna and granddaughter Lesia Honchar, writer, and granddaughter’s husband, sculptor Ruslan Naida), as well as with the assistance and support of the President of the Minor Academy of Sciences, Academician of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine Stanislav Dovhyi.
The format of the museum is innovative, as it is a forum museum – a space open for communication, which provides for creative meetings, thematic discussions, and other events aimed at popularizing Honchar’s work. By the way, a museum of a similar format exists at the Polytechnic University of Zurich (Switzerland): it is the archive of the German writer Thomas Mann, which is mainly composed of his manuscripts and valuable books.
On the day of the museum’s opening, Leonid Vasylovych noted that we should remind ourselves and everyone else of the writer’s life: “The whole world knew him, first of all, as a great Ukrainian, a great artist of the word, who glorified his people and fought for his country. He was among the first to create the Ukrainian national movement, the Ukrainian Language Society. He was the first writer to visit our students during the events you know as “on Granite events”. He was the first to open the first session of the Verkhovna Rada of independent Ukraine. This was the kind of person he was. Oles Honchar lived and worked with love, and we, his contemporaries, should learn to do the same – to live and work with love.”
The museum at the Institute of Philology is designed not only for readers, connoisseurs and experts in Oles Honchar’s work, but also for those who want to learn about the outstanding figure in the history of Ukrainian literary criticism, the history of the Ukrainian state and world culture. After all, there is really something to see in the museum!
“The study is like a laboratory of text, where a writer creates eternal worlds through stories… To enter the writer’s study is to touch the very mystery of creativity. And the museum guests have such an opportunity…” Lesia Honchar commented on the idea of creating a museum room.
The museum room is modeled after Oles Teryentiyovych’s study in the Rolit House (an abbreviation of the name “Literature Worker”), a multi-story building of the Literature Workers’ Cooperative at 68 Bohdan Khmelnytsky Street, where the writer and his family lived in Kyiv in the late 1920s. The family donated the writer’s desk, chair, armchair, library, and personal belongings to fully convey the atmosphere in which Oles Terentiyovych worked. Each thing here is special and has its own memory. For example, in 1991, while working in this office, Oles Honchar learned that the Ukrainian diaspora was nominating him for the Nobel Prize, to which he just smiled and continued writing. At this table, the author of The Cathedral wrote an emotional letter to the then President Leonid Kuchma about the need to restore St. Michael’s Golden-Domed Cathedral as a center of Ukrainian spirituality. And, as you know, this idea was finally realized, but after the writer’s death. The doors of this office have always been hospitably open, and over the past 50 years, thousands of guests and visitors have come here-colleagues, friends, people of various creative professions, and foreign guests. Among them are John Steinbeck, Mikhail Sholokhov, Rasul Gamzatov, Kaisyn Kuliyev, Chingiz Aitmatov, Yuri Shevelev… In recent years, Oles Terentyevich worked at his unchanged desk most of all on editing texts, cleaning and adding what was previously not allowed by the system.
But perhaps the greatest value of the museum is its library, which has more than 840 (!) copies of books. It contains everything that Oles Honchar loved and admired (both foreign and Ukrainian literature, some Russian), of course, the writer’s works, volumes, journalism, and criticism about the writer’s life and work. A significant part of the library’s collection is made up of translations of Oles Teryentiyovych’s novels and short fiction into various languages (currently there are more than seventy of them!), books autographed by Ukrainian and foreign colleagues. By the way, among the translations of the famous novel “The Cathedral” in the museum’s exposition is an English translation by Professor Leonid Rudnytsky of La Salle University (Philadelphia, USA). It was Professor Rudnytsky who was one of the initiators of Oles Honchar’s nomination for the Nobel Prize, which the writer never received.
Oles Honchar was a true connoisseur of Taras Shevchenko’s work, and thanks to this special attitude to Kobzar’s words, the museum now houses a collection of kobzars that the writer collected throughout his life. Here you can also see a rare edition of his most famous novel “The Cathedral” from 1968, a copy first published in the January issue of the magazine “Vitchyzna”. During the same year of 1968, the novel was reprinted twice more by the Dnipro and Soviet Writer publishing houses and was prepared for publication in Russian. However, shortly after the publishing house Druzhba Narodiv refused to publish the Russian translation, the work was sharply criticized. The novel was removed from libraries and destroyed, and eventually, for the next 20 years, it was removed from the literary process altogether.
Oles Honchar always had a telephone on his desk, as well as figurines of Don Quixote and Confucius. Interestingly, the image of Don Quixote was in tune with the writer. Oles Terentiyovych associated himself with him: windmills are what he fought against in the system, something that is almost impossible to overcome. And, of course, as with every master of the pen, the table was filled with notes, books, and essays. Of course, not everything is on display, but there are manuscripts with quite interesting content. Also on the writer’s desk is the German newspaper Frantfurter Allgemeine, dated October 9, 1968, which published an article by Ukrainian literary critic, professor at the Ukrainian Free University in Munich Yurii Boyko-Blohin entitled “Der verbrannte Roman” (i.e., “The Burnt Roman”) about the destruction of Oles Honchar’s Cathedral. This newspaper was donated to the museum on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Oles Honchar’s birth by the professors of the University of Leipzig, museum patrons Natalia and Helfried Böhner, who managed to find this rare copy in Germany and bought it from the library for 30 euros.
The museum became a partner of the project “Oles Honchar. Words as Weapons” project and joined the filming of the documentary “Oles Honchar. Notes from Captivity”.
The museum also carries out scientific activities. Together with the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, a scientific topic “Oles Honchar’s Transdisciplinary Scientific and Educational Portal” was opened (headed by Prof. N. Hayevska). As a result of the cooperation, the monograph “Problems of Poetics of Oles Honchar’s Creative Work” (2020) and the manual “Artistic Polyphony of Oles Honchar’s Work” (2021) were published, authored by N. Hayevska, H. Zhukovska, Y. Mosenkis and I. Prylippko.
In his third year of studying at the Faculty of Philology of Kharkiv University, a very young Oles went to war as a volunteer as part of a student battalion. Among the museum’s exhibits stands a carbide lamp, which was used to write “The Standard Bearers”, one of Honchar’s first novels, an unfairly forgotten work about war and youth, love and friendship, loyalty, devotion and duty, human honor and dignity, whose romantic and brave heroes also have the features of Don Quixote, but these are characters “written off” by the author from his own life, in particular, his peers, students who had to harden under hellish fire and grow up quickly in order to eventually go the whole long way of the liberators of Europe… At one time, the novel “The Standard Bearers” was among the most respected and recognized works of fiction by the Soviet party nomenclature, which automatically led to its being labeled “Communist-Soviet,” which was almost a verdict for this literary work. Although this novel was not removed from library collections or burned like “The Cathedral”, it still remains completely unknown to the younger generation of readers.
An extremely valuable exhibit for the family and the museum that speaks for itself is the book “Keeping the Light in the Soul” (from Oles Honchar’s diary entries), found, tattered, and read in the personal belongings of the fallen hero Leonid Dergach, call sign “Academician.” a company commander who died of multiple shrapnel wounds near Avdiivka on February 1, 2017, and transferred to the exposition of the museum-forum on the day of the writer’s 100th birthday by the hero’s military brothers (majors of the 72nd Mechanized Brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine – A. Kyrychenko and A. Honchar). From now on, the Oles Honchar Museum will keep this invaluable gift of our heroes, perhaps the most powerful testimony of human respect for the writer.
For a considerable period (10 years), Oles Honchar headed the Writers’ Union of Ukraine, was the chairman of the Ukrainian Committee for the Defense of Peace, a member of the World Peace Council, and one of the founders of the Ukrainian Cultural Foundation. He represented Ukraine at various international forums and was known throughout the world. In 1992, he was elected an Honorary Doctor of Literature at the University of Alberta (Canada). The museum has a gown that was presented to the writer at this university, as well as many gifts from his family (an icon of the Blessed Virgin Mary given by his sister Shura as a lifelong talisman), from fellow writers (a plate of now rare Mezhyhiria ceramics from Pavlo Tychyna), from Ukrainian masters (a Petrykivka painting by Fedir Panko: a painting, a vase and a mug), from leaders of other countries (a porcelain vase – a gift from the then President of Portugal), from readers and friends (a record signed by the famous opera singer Borys Hmyria).
There are stands with copies of photographs, manuscripts with the most striking quotes that tell about the writer’s life, in other words, “Archive in Photos.” Here you can find photos from different years: of the writer’s family, the military, with interesting people, in particular: Indira Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Jean Paul Sartre, Yuri Gagarin, John Steinbeck (Nobel Prize winner), Nazim Hikmet, Rasul Gamzatov, Chingiz Aitmatov, Arthur Haley, Eduardas Mezelaitis, Guo Moguo, James Aldridge, Kaisin Kuliyev, and Irakli Abashidze.
Oles Honchar was a man with a keen sense of injustice and spent his life trying to help those who were about to be convicted for having opinions that did not coincide with the foundations of the political system. He wrote letters to various authorities and high-ranking officials in defense of dissidents, against the abuse of unjustly convicted people, and in every way possible to counteract repression. The stands include a letter to Petro Shelest refusing to participate in the Commission, which was scheduled to consider the preparatory materials in the case of the famous Ukrainian poet Ivan Svitlychnyi. In fact, it was the IED trial that was being prepared, but fortunately, it was not to be.
There is also a “cry of the soul” letter about the flooding of villages in Cherkasy region by the Kaniv hydroelectric power plant from the famous sculptor and ethnographer Ivan Honchar, who begs to save two villages with a long and interesting history. Unfortunately, it was not possible to save the territory. Ivan Honchar greatly appreciated Oles Honchar, respected him as a person, knew that the writer was fond of the Cossack theme, so he presented him with his own work, a relief of Ivan Honta, which is also on display in the museum.
As for the most common question: why did we open a museum at the university for this writer?
Oles Honchar belongs to the whole of Ukraine! Oles Terentiyovych deserves to be honored not only because, as a young writer, he left his student days to defend his native land from the German occupation forces, not only because he was the first winner of the National (then Republican) Taras Shevchenko Prize (1962), not because he was the winner of state awards for his novels, an honorary doctor of universities, an academician of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, the head of the Writers’ Union of Ukraine, and not even because he was a Hero of Ukraine (posthumously)…
The reason is quite different: Oles Honchar was heartbroken for Ukraine, being in the system, he always defended his native language, always spoke Ukrainian (even in Moscow), defended the identity of the nation, took care of national shrines throughout his life, the Writers’ Union of the Ukrainian SSR in his person became a collective member of the founder of the Ukrainian Society for the Protection of Historical and Cultural Monuments (1965), he opened the founding conference of the Taras Shevchenko Ukrainian Language Society (1989), the Constituent Congress of the People’s Movement of Ukraine, was the chairman of the Ukrainian Committee for the Protection of Peace (since 1973), one of the founders of the Ukrainian Cultural Foundation, and a member of the World Peace Foundation… Oles Honchar initiated the restoration of St. Michael’s Golden-Domed Monastery, was one of the first to support the hunger-striking students during the Revolution on Granite, heard their words and was the first to put his party ticket in front of those who laughed at the dream of young people to live in a free country. Throughout his life, he edited his works, adding what the censors did not allow to be published during the Soviet era, helped everyone – he supported young talents, and financially assisted the victims of the Chernobyl disaster. We believe that these are enough arguments.
As the Ukrainian linguist and literary critic Ivan Yushchuk (professor at Kyiv International University) aptly noted in his article “The Year of Honchar”: “Oles Honchar was neither a dissident nor a ‘Ukrainian bourgeois nationalist,’ but he perceived the world around him and the events in it through the prism of his native Ukraine. That is why he was hurt by any injustice against Ukraine and the Ukrainian people.“ (”Word of Enlightenment”, No. 4, April 5-11, 2018).
Oles Honchar was an optimistic fighter who, being in a hostile system, fought against the attempts of this system to destroy Ukrainian values.
Every thing in the Oles Honchar Museum is a moment or a permanent presence in the life story of the famous writer. We hope that every visitor will be able to feel it!
We invite everyone to visit the museum!