Issue link: http://read.uberflip.com/i/1518405
4 riot of geometric shapes. The drawing is dated 21 st May, before the Bolshevik takeover, but it is difficult to imagine a more other-worldly view of revolution by any artist in any Western canon. Technically, Piskorsky, a man without artistic education, was a master, but his subject matter revealed a man battling his internal demons, Paradise, Anxiety, Funeral, Bliss, show the strife of Man to survive the all-encompassing horror of Civil War. His choice of the Brothers Karamazov for illustration make sense. Nowhere in Russian literature is the spiritual battle between extremes of Good and Evil more clearly writ and Lizaveta the Lethal (p. 13), the deaf mute who gives birth to the murderous, Smerdyakov, is a choice of character that only an artist of the tortured vision of Piskorsky could have made. As the continual changes of government threw Kyiv into further chaos, Piskorsky wrote the article, 'The Fateful Hour' and drew 'Ukraine Enslaved', where a row of geometric figures kneel before symbols of the country, the windmill, the thatched house and the church. This work was a gateway to what amounted to a series which showed an increased discontent with the Bolshevik takeover of which two controversial works, Cossack and White Guard, did not see the light of day until this century. Poles (p. 9) shows two storks, symbols of birth, a war with one another, and yet set in a heavenly embrace. Idol (p. 7) is from the same series and could be aimed at the increasing Cult of Personality prevalent in Soviet Russia or as a fantastic interpretation of the artist's inner, increasingly religious, world. With life becoming harder, the artist now married and with three children, the family was forced to live in one room and Piskorsky retreated further into his inner world. In May 1919, Piskorsky entered the studio of Heorgiy Narbut at the Kyiv Academy of Arts. The choice of professor was not coincidental, for Narbut was one of the finest, and most technically gifted, practitioners of graphic art in Ukraine at the time. Whilst studying at the Academy, Piskorsky, in order to save his three children from hunger, began working as a children's teacher in the village of Sovki near Kyiv where he founded a society devoted to the study of Taras Shevchenko, the first Ukrainian writer whose themes were close to the artist and whose work he illustrated (p. 20). In 1918, the artist wrote of the task of creating a, 'Map of Individual Human Life' - a philosophical tract about the relationship between human experiences, states and creativity with that of existence – named by Piskorsky as the, "Bio-meter of Life". "In the incomprehensible living infinity of being there are incomprehensible centers. The human personality is like that center - among a single moving substance," he wrote.