Art historian.
From an intellectual Ukrainian family. Her grandfather, Ivan Ivanovych Rytiv, was one of the founders of the Katerynoslav “Prosvita” society and, along with D. Yavornytsky, founded the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church (UAOC) in the Sicheslavshchyna region. He was arrested in 1937 for participating in a “conspiracy to overthrow the Soviet government.” From 1941-43, he was the head of the UAOC church district and was ordained as a priest. After the war, he was interrogated again but was spared due to his advanced age (b. 1876). Her grandmother Lidiya, from the Nebesovykh family of priests, managed the 4th city women’s Troitske school in the early 20th century. Her father, Ivan Yatsenko (from the Poltava region), and mother, Mariya Rytiv, were also teachers. In their family home, located in the historic part of the city, icons and a portrait of Shevchenko were never taken down; the Ukrainian spirit of their grandfathers, customs, and furniture were preserved there.
In 1963, Lidiya graduated from the Russian department of the philology faculty at Dnipropetrovsk University. She was enthusiastic about the Sixtiers movement and was writing her thesis on “The Works of Andrei Voznesensky,” but this topic was banned after M. Khrushchev’s infamous meetings with the intelligentsia. Yatsenko taught school for three years.
From 1966, Yatsenko worked at the Dnipropetrovsk Art Museum, where Ukrainian was still the working language, but by the end of the 60s, it had become Russian. Yatsenko completed a correspondence course at the Leningrad Repin Art Institute, specializing in “History and Theory of Art.” She wrote poetry in Russian, with Leningrad students as her audience. Later, she wrote in Ukrainian: in 1974, she dedicated a poem to Ivan SOKULSKY, whom she met much later. Her poetry circulated by hand and was broadcast on Radio “Svoboda”. According to Yatsenko, she never breathed freely—she was constantly under pressure. She hid her poems in a box of laundry detergent, and some she never wrote down at all, only memorized.
At the museum, Yatsenko studied pre-revolutionary Ukrainian art, conducted tours, and engaged in scholarly work, including studying the correspondence of D. Yavornytsky and working with icons transferred from the Historical Museum. This was a bright time. But later, the Cossack theme was largely forbidden, and the icon exhibitions that Yatsenko prepared always met with a negative reaction. She compiled a catalog, *Unknown Portraits*, from the collection of the Dnipropetrovsk Art Museum, mainly from the Yavornytsky collection, and studied ancient Ukrainian parsuna portraits. She managed to publish a small article about the Ukrainian folk painting *Hopak*—a unique work of Ukrainian folk art from the Yavornytsky collection. She wrote about the Ukrainian works of Borovykovsky. In a museum publication, she published an article about the Ukrainian works of the artist Burliuk, which he donated to the museum in 1929 when he was already living in New York.
Among contemporary artists, Yatsenko was drawn to those who were either ignored or banned for ideological reasons, such as Yakiv Kalashnyk. When he died in 1967, Yatsenko wrote an article about him (published in 1969 in the journal *Mystetstvo*) and, together with director Valentyn Desyateryk, produced a television program in February 1968, where it was stated directly that the artist had been persecuted and driven to his death. She was immediately classified as a “dissident.” The then-leadership of the regional branch of the Union of Artists forbade the publication of her scholarly articles. The museum director, Mykola Skrypnyk, declared that Yatsenko had to leave the museum. But then Vira Andriivna Demydova, the wife of a department head in the regional committee of the CPU, became the director. Not being a specialist, she used Yatsenko’s intellect. Yatsenko organized exhibitions, created brochures, and compiled a catalog of Ukrainian icons. However, she was not promoted, earning only 75 rubles a month. She reworked some of her works dozens of times, but there was always something in them that did not pass censorship.
Yatsenko wrote about the repressed artist Mariya Kotlyarevska from the school of M. Boichuk (her exhibition was banned in 1980), about the artist Volodymyr Loboda, who was listed as a formalist and nationalist, and about the disgraced Vyacheslav Korenyev.
In the 1970s, Yatsenko belonged to a narrow circle of dissidents: artist Volodymyr Loboda, art historians Viktor Solovyov and Nina Hryhorash, and the talented icon restorer Viktor Ilyutkin. One day, the 26-year-old Ilyutkin said, “The circle is tightening.” The next day, on December 19, 1980, he was murdered under mysterious circumstances on a city street. Loboda moved to Lviv, Solovyov to Moscow. Yatsenko took a two-year leave of absence because her child had died, and she had two other young children.
She returned to the Art Museum in 1984. For a long time after, a KGB agent named Oleh Sorokin would come there, giving instructions on “counter-propaganda.” Even in the early 90s, the museum was a center of stagnation. Some colleagues were outraged by Yatsenko's behavior: “She’s not here! She's at a rally! We’re going to fire her soon!” She felt as if she were behind enemy lines, like a foreign body. She never became a member of the Union of Artists, despite having many scholarly works.
In the late 1980s, Yatsenko joined the circle of I. SOKULSKY, who gave her a recommendation for the Ukrainian Helsinki Union and invited her to the editorial board of the journal *Porohy*. She published several of her articles there.
She joined the first Transfiguration community of the UAOC (which now belongs to the UOC-KP), became the head of the parish council, and was the head of the city's Brotherhood of St. Andrew the First-Called from its inception. She participated in a hunger strike in 1991, demanding the transfer of the Transfiguration Cathedral to the UOC-KP. She was a founding member of “Prosvita” and the Union of Ukrainian Women, joined the NRU, and collaborated with the Ukrainian Republican Party, attending its Constituent Congress. In the late 80s and early 90s, meetings of many organizations were held in her grandfather's house. These were the brightest times in the city's public life. She became acquainted with Oksana MESHKO and was friends with the writers Raisa Lysha and Yurko Vivtash. I. SOKULSKY introduced her to Patriarchs Mstyslav and Volodymyr (V. ROMANYUK). With the blessing of Patriarch Filaret, she published the catalog *Ukrainian Icon of the Late 17th – Early 20th Century in the Collection of the Dnipropetrovsk Art Museum* in 1997 (Dnipropetrovsk, “Dana” publishing house).
As early as 1980, Yatsenko, along with V. Solovyov, V. Ilyutkin, and N. Molchanova, completed the exhibition “Petrykivka Painting: Sources and Modernity” and compiled a catalog. But it was only in the journal *Porohy* that she was able to publish the article “The Fate of Old Petrykivka,” where, among other things, she showed that this was just one of 30 villages that were centers of decorative painting in the early 1920s, but which died out during the famine of 1932-33. She published articles in *Porohy* such as “Fine Art,” “The Spirit of Cossack Liberties” — about the art of the Dnieper region, about the artist V. Korenyev, and about the Ukrainian icon “Let God Arise,” which was reprinted in 1991 with some changes in the journal *Lyudyna i Svit* and was recognized as the best among that year's publications. Only from the late 80s could she write about what she wanted.
In 2000, she wrote forewords to I. SOKULSKY's little book *Letters to Mariyechka* and to his two-volume work *Letters at Dawn*.
Yatsenko’s daughter Mariya, b. 1981, graduated from the Metallurgical Academy, and her son Oles, b. 1982, from the Faculty of Philology and Art History.
Yatsenko is buried in Dnipropetrovsk.
Bibliography:
1.
“Reflection of Pure Gold.” // Sokulsky, Ivan. *Letters to Mariyechka: Selected Correspondence (1981–1987)*. Comp. O. Sokulska. — Dnipropetrovsk: Sich, 2000, pp. 3–4; The same: Kyiv: Smoloskyp, 2000, pp. 5–7.
“The World at the Dawn of a Sunday Morning.” // Sokulsky, Ivan. *Letters at Dawn: Book 1. Epistolary Heritage 1980–1982, documents, photographs*. Compiler M. I. Sokulska. – Dnipropetrovsk: Sich, 2001, 517 pp.; Book 2, 1983–1988, 2002, 507 pp.
Interview for KHPG, April 4, 2001.
2.
Natalya Staryuk. “A Voice from Paradise.” http//www.smakota.iatp.org.ua
Compiled by Vasyl Ovsiyenko, Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group. April 18, 2008.
Lidiya YATSENKO. Photo by V. Ovsiyenko, April 4, 2001.
YATSENKO LIDIA IVANIVNA