Mockery Over Our Great People Is Outrageous, Write Students (09/24/60)

Mockery Over Our Great People Is Outrageous, Write Students

Recently the Literaturna Hazeta published in Kiev, Ukraine, printed a letter from some Lviv students. Here is what they wrote:

"Try to find in Lviv stores portraits, post-cards, bas-reliefs or pins with the image of Taras Shevchenko, Ivan Franko, Lesia Ukrainka, Mykola Lysenko, copied from the works of the popular masters. They appear once in a while, but very rarely, although the demand for them is great. Yet the Lviv sculpture-ceramics factory proudly produces sloppy statuettes of children, sportsmen, and deer which clutter up all the city's parks and squares.

"Inactivity of the specially appointed managers is used to the advantage by the various shady characters and hustlers. In the corners of the city, and often in its very center, where there are always many people, young and healthy youths pretend to be deaf and dumb, and trade in vulgar post-cards with doves over pairs of lovers, sell paper carpets showing palefaced maidens with loose hair, etc.

"Recently one could see bas-reliefs of writers sold in the city's department store, the paint on which was still wet. These bas-reliefs had very little resemblance to the masters of the world. Such mockery of the memory of our great people is outrageous. But these 'creations,' it is sad to say, are being bought, because there are no well-made artistic products in the stores. All this in Lviv, the city, where masters of brush, woodcarving, and sculpture, known throughout the country and far beyond its borders are living and creating."

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