Dovzhenko without Makeup

Archival findings, documents, letters, and memoirs collected in this book allow seeing the biography and work of Oleksandr Dovzhenko in a new light. A Petliurivets or a Stalinist, a revolutionary romantic or a rational pragmatist, a Soviet spy in Germany or a Ukrainian diplomat defending the interests of Ukraine? It is not easy to find unequivocal answers to all these questions. Dovzhenko's correspondence with Varvara Krylova, Olena Chernova, Yuliia Solntseva, and Valentyna Tkachenko, complex collisions of intimate relationships, stories of love and renunciation, betrayal and loyalty unfold.

The still unpublished memoirs of contemporaries allow us to look into the creative laboratory of the artist, to understand the origins of his directorial ideas, the autobiographical basis of the plots of "Arsenal", "Zemlia", military prose, and to trace the peculiarities of life in Ukrainian culture of the author's myth of Oleksandr Dovzhenko.