Ukraine: The Spilled Blood of Margarita Polovinko

She won't have time to eventually become famous. "Beautiful, talented, and courageous," Margarita Polovinko, a young Ukrainian artist, had just turned 31. Putin killed her.

Should we, once again, speak of a "sacrificed generation"? (1) She had just turned 31 on March 24. Like many artists of her generation, Margarita Polovinko put her "artistic career" on hold to defend her country, Ukraine, in the aftermath of the large-scale offensive launched by Putin's Russia on February 24, 2022. Staying on the sidelines, how could that be possible? She first went to the Mykolaiv and Kherson regions to help rebuild destroyed homes. She joined rescue teams evacuating wounded soldiers in the hottest areas of the front line, and finally joined a brigade's mechanized battalion, where she assembled drones.

Margarita Polonivko, Pencil drawing, March 2022

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Margarita Polonivko explained that she began drawing a lot at the beginning of the war, when the first news of children dying in Irpin appeared: "I painted a girl who flew over the houses like an angel. She flies over the ugliness of the world. My first perception of the Russians was that they were monsters who came and fought with people."

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Margarita received her artistic training at the Dnipro Higher Theater and Art School, and later at the State Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture, where she specialized in easel painting. Before the war, she worked on the themes of post-industrial society, marginalization, and loneliness. Her heroes were mythological "outcasts," symbols of people on the margins of society. During the war, her art was transformed: she began keeping a diary and drawing with a simple pencil, and later with blood: "I would like to give people the opportunity to erase the blood from these works, so that only a trace remains that cannot be washed off. When I start painting, the blood is bright red. So is the memory of the trauma. Then the work fades, turns brown or even green. The memory of the trauma also remains, but it changes saturation, color," she explained.

Margarita Polovniko, Paper, Blood, February 2022

The color of blood before it dries, red was also associated, for Margarita Polovinko, with Kryvyi Rih, her hometown (the same as Volodymyr Zelensky, heavily targeted by Russian bombing), surrounded by red mineral quarries: the "blood of the earth."

Margarita Polovinko, Paper, blood, 2023

Margarita Polovinko will no longer draw. She died at the front, in circumstances that have not yet been clarified. "Margarita died protecting us all. She was very beautiful, talented, and courageous. Never forget," wrote one of her artist friends, Inga Levy. She will be buried this Friday, April 11, at the Kryvyi Rih cemetery, on the "Walk of Fame." Putin, who is truly a monster, did not give her time to become famous.

Jean-Marc Adolphe

(sources: Ukrainian press, and secondaryarchive.org )

(1). We speak of a "sacrificed generation" in connection with the "shot Renaissance": in the aftermath of the 1917 Revolution, a new generation of men and women of letters in Ukraine, carried by a hope of national emancipation, inaugurated a "Renaissance" of Ukrainian literature. Thus, in the 1920s, the number of works published in Ukraine multiplied like never before; we also witnessed the emergence of several literary groups, the most famous of which was Vaplitè, the Free Academy of Proletarian Literature. The Bolshevik repression that followed in the 1930s caused these writers to disappear from the Ukrainian cultural field either following their assassination, or following their literary death, as a consequence of their (self-)censorship or their exile.

Nota bene - in the Pantheon of writers and artists who have died since the start of the war in Ukraine, Margarita Polovinko joins the young Ukrainian writer Victoria Amelina, who died in a Russian bombing in June 2023, to whom the humanities immediately paid tribute (read HERE ). While Flammarion has just published Watching Women Watching War. Ukraine. Journal Interrupted , a meeting around Victoria Amelina, organized by The Europe-Eurasia Research Center and the Ukrainian Institute in France, takes place this Thursday, April 10 at INALCO, Paris 13th, from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m., in the presence of Oleksansra Matviichuk ( HERE ). On this occasion, we will publish tomorrow, exclusively, a selection of poems by Victoria Amelina.

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