Autobiografia (Jan 2024)
Between Political and Personal Crises: The Life Writing of Leon Getz
Abstract
The article deals with the phenomenon of shaping Ukrainian national identity in artistic works of autobiographical nature, created in conditions o of life crisis and oppressive socio-political situation. My case study is Leon Getz (1896-1971), a painter raised in a Polish-Ukrainian family in Lviv, who decided to identify with the Ukrainian minority, oppressed both in pre- and post-war Poland. After WWII, he was subjected to surveillance by the Polish Security Office because of his Ukrainian identity. That led him and his wife (also a Ukrainian) to a suicide attempt – unsuccessful in the case of the artist, fatal in the case of his wife. Getz wrote his memoirs twice: for the first time in the second half of the 1930s, then after his wife’s death in the 1950s. The first memoir expressed his loneliness in a predominantly Polish environment, but he did not keep it secret, even though he was not planning on publishing it. The second memoir dwelled on his personal tragedy and was created in secret, because the Security Office sought to intercept Getz’s notes as documents incriminating the officers. Both memoirs are subject to my analysis. I consider them in the context of the artist’s other personal documents and works, shaping his Ukrainian identity as, in his opinion, the main reason for his and his wife’s tragedy were their Ukrainian affiliations. I interpret these memoirs in two different yet complementary ways. First, as life writing at the time of a life crisis of a husband after his wife’s suicide. Second, as life writing in a situation of extreme oppression in a totalitarian state, under surveillance of the Security Office, whose deadly and faulty moves put the very subjectivity of the individual in crisis. The paper is based on Getz’s unpublished memoirs and works which are held in archives in Cracow (Poland) and Rome (Italy).
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