Mykola Bondarenko, a graphic artist, was born 75 years ago

On November 15, 1949, in the village of Dmytrivka, Sumy region, Mykola Mykhailovych Bondarenko was born — a Ukrainian graphic artist and author of the artistic album of engravings Ukraine – 1933: A Cookbook. Human Memory.

Mykola Bondarenko created over a hundred works on the Holodomor theme, which were included in the abovementioned book. In this work, the artist offered an unusual perspective on the Holodomor, depicting it through images of plants and animals that people were forced to consume to survive. These illustrations, rendered in clear black-and-white lines on a dark background, are accompanied by brief descriptions and “recipes”— narratives about how those plants or animals were cooked for eating.

“I understood that the Holodomor theme should not be depicted ‘head on’ (starving people, skeletons, and the like), but through the food of that time. And I wondered: how was that foliage or root prepared? Did they just eat it as is? I asked people to recall how they cooked that food. Thus, these sorrowful recipes appeared, giving rise to the title Cookbook,” Mykola Bondarenko recalled.

In addition to engravings, the book contains testimonies collected by the artist and lists of villagers from Pisky who died during the Holodomor. They were preserved thanks to the miraculous survival of metric books documenting deaths in 1933. It also includes testimonies of fellow villagers, which Bondarenko began recording in the late 1980s during the Soviet era.

Mykola Bondarenko is also the author of numerous artistic projects, including the regional Memorial to the Victims of the 1932–1933 Holodomor in Pisky, a monument in the village of Chernecha Sloboda (Buryn district), a stele to Taras Shevchenko, a memorial to the Heroes of the Heavenly Hundred and local defenders of Ukraine’s independence, and a monument to the Destroyed Churches (in Buryn town).

Suddenly, the artist passed away on June 3, 2023, leaving a rich creative legacy. His works are housed in the Kimura Goro Museum on Oshima Island (Japan), the Ukrainian Orthodox Church Museum in the USA (Bound Brook), the Library of the Ukrainian Diaspora named after S. Petliura in France (Paris), museums in the Sumy region, and numerous private collections across Europe and America.