"Yes, we depart like shadows..."
V. Stus.
Borys Dovhan (photo from the website “Museum Space”)
Sculptor Borys Stepanovych Dovhan was born on August 4, 1928, in Kyiv. He was a participant in the Ukrainian human rights movement.
A member of the Union of Artists of Ukraine. He graduated from the Kyiv Art Institute in 1956. In 1968, he signed the “Letter of the 139” to the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU, L. Brezhnev, protesting the arrests of young intelligentsia in Ukraine and Moscow.
In the 1960s–70s, he created sculptural portraits of V. Stus, A. Horska, I. Svitlychny, and L. Hrabovsky, as well as the compositions “The Gulag Archipelago,” “The Poet and the Executioner,” and “The Sorrowful Muse.” The last one was installed near the Academy of Arts in Kyiv after the proclamation of Independence as a monument to artists who were victims of Bolshevik repressions.
Dovhan is the author of the monument to Pope John Paul II in Kyiv and the tombstone for Slava Stetsko. He maintained constant contact with Ukrainian human rights defenders. For his human rights activities, he was barred from working for a long time.
He passed away on April 30, 2019, in Kyiv.
B. Dovhan. Portrait of Vasyl Stus (1969)