“In this picture [together with the OUN member Hryhoriy Fastovets] is my father, Vsevolod Yavorsky,” commented Hanna Kharchenko, a resident of Bohuslav, under the post about our next expedition. She is now a psalmist at the Church of the Intercession of the Mother of God of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine in Bohuslav, and before that, she worked as a kindergarten teacher near a cloth factory in Bohuslav.
We had arranged a meeting with Ms Hanna, and soon after we were in her cosy apartment in Bohuslav, looking together through old photographs and documents of the Yavorsky priestly family.
“My father was the son of an ‘enemy of the people’ – a priest. He was not allowed to work in one place for more than three or four months. His work record had forty-seven pages. My grandmother, Hanna Kyrylivna Tymoshenko, was also a psalmist and the daughter of a Medvyn psalmist, a teacher at a parish school. She also married a priest…
When the Soviets came to the village, my grandfather was told to renounce the church, and renounce God. They said, ‘You will have a job, you will have food, your child will not be an enemy of the people. And he said, “I will renounce the church, but I cannot renounce God”. To break him down, they took him naked around the village, poured all sorts of nasty things on him and threw feathers at him. And my father’s cousin, who was a sexton in that church, was taken with him. After this disgrace, this boy hanged himself. My grandfather was imprisoned with the whole family, and I have no idea how they survived with their child. They were imprisoned in 1928, and my father was born in 1924. They were there for nine months. Later they were released, but my grandfather Matviy Yavorsky was exiled…
My father was constantly anxious about us, his children. We were not allowed to bake Easter bread at home, we could not dye eggs, we could not tell a joke… People talked about Hryhoriy Fastovets, but secretly. He used to call him “Hrysha Fastovets”.
Before he was taken away to the front, my father received parcels from his father from different places with food, and stuff, but there was no return address on the parcels. And when he grew up, he found out that his father was in Donbas, he went to look for him there but did not succeed.”
Hanna Tymoshenko married for the second time, to her colleague, teacher Platon Trifonovych Salata, but he was shot in 1938, during the Great Terror.
Despite a terrible childhood and wartime youth and adolescence (Vsevolod Yavorsky served in the Red Army’s musical penalty battalion during WWII), he proved himself as a talented musician and photographer. He was a good painter and embroiderer.
“He played seven musical instruments. He learnt to play them all by himself on a paper keyboard. After the war, he graduated from the cultural education college and, at the age of 52, from the Kirovohrad Pedagogical Institute with honours,” says Hanna. “Vsevolod played in local bands and gave lessons in music and singing to schoolchildren. He also took photographs of exceptional beauty – portraits of family members, and landscapes of his native land, which graced the covers of “union publications”.
When we asked Hanna if she had any old photographs of her family, and she brought in four large albums and bundles of different photos. That’s when we realised we had found a real treasure. They contain photo chronicles of the city from the 1950s to the 1980s, pictures of scenic parts of Bohuslav, and artistic portraits of friends and family.
The self-taught artist not only mastered the art of photography and the peculiarities of working with various techniques but also created amazing images for photos himself. Vsevolod’s real muse was his gorgeous wife Antonina: he selected outfits for the photos, and designed and sewed various costumes and dresses himself.
When you look at the photos of this couple, you realise that freedom-loving attitude and rejection of the Soviet system remained with Vsevolod throughout his life. His family was the place where he created his own bright and colourful world in contrast to the imposed grey of the system.
These photos were left unpublished, in the Yavorsky family archive only, but they hold the history of our region and its people. And we would be honoured to share them with you. Immediately we came up with the idea of organising a personal exhibition of this extraordinary man. Now, with the support of the staff of the Museum of the History of Bohuslav Region, we are digitising this collection and looking for funding for it.
And Ms Hanna told us not only about the family history but also many fascinating facts about Bohuslav itself and its inhabitants. We recorded this story and will definitely publish it on our Facebook page and the YouTube channel, please stay tuned: https://www.youtube.com/@navkolonasua
