Софія Налепинська-Бойчук

Activity: Culture
Date of birth: July 30, 1884
Date of death: December 11, 1937, Kyiv
Navigator: World Wars

A Ukrainian artist of Polish-French origin. Wife and associate of Mykhailo Boichuk, representative of the Executed Renaissance.

Sofia Nalepynska was born into the family of a Polish father and a French mother. She studied art at Jan Ciągliński’s art school in St. Petersburg, continued her education in Munich in 1908, and a year later left to study at the Académie Ranson in Paris, where the most fateful acquaintance of her life took place.
In Paris, Nalepynska first met the artist Mykhailo Boichuk. Feelings immediately flared up between them, and the couple married without much hesitation. Sofia’s love for her husband grew into a passionate love for his native culture — and she herself began calling herself Ukrainian. In one of her letters, Nalepynska’s younger sister Anna wrote: “Sofia had already renounced, so to speak, her nationality; she sang only Ukrainian songs, spoke Ukrainian, and was completely under Mykhailo’s influence and power. She visited us, dearly loved the family, was like a mother to me — but with all her soul she already belonged to Mykhailo, and it was known that she would never abandon either him or his creative ideas.”
In 1917, Sofia and her husband moved to revolutionary Kyiv, and the following year their son Petro was born. From 1919, she taught at the Myrhorod Art School for three years, after which she headed the woodcut workshop at the Kyiv Institute of Plastic Arts. In 1925, she began teaching at the Kyiv Art Institute, where she founded a school of engraving. She combined her own work with collaboration alongside her husband: she played a leading role in the Association of Revolutionary Art of Ukraine (ARMU), worked in Boichuk’s monumental art workshop, and co-authored many frescoes and monumental works that were later destroyed after the condemnation of “Boichukism.”
In 1936, Mykhailo Boichuk was arrested and, after torture extracted a confession of participation in the mythical counterrevolutionary organization of Ukrainian nationalist-fascists, was executed by firing squad. In June 1937, one month before her husband’s execution, Nalepynska-Boichuk was also arrested as the “wife of an enemy of the people”; she was accused of espionage, participation in the same counterrevolutionary organization, and failure to report her husband. She spent half a year in prison but never signed a confession. The transcript of her interrogation recorded the following exchange:
— You have been arrested for participation in an anti-Soviet nationalist-fascist organization, where you conducted espionage activities in favor of foreign states. Do you plead guilty to the charges brought against you?
— I do not consider myself guilty of the charges brought against me. I did not participate in any anti-Soviet nationalist-fascist organization and did not conduct espionage activities.
— You are lying; the investigation has information that you took an active part in the anti-Soviet nationalist-fascist organization led by your husband, Boichuk. We suggest that you provide detailed testimony about your participation in the organization.
Having failed to obtain any “detailed testimony,” the NKVD sentenced the artist to death solely on the basis of her acquaintance with other persons previously convicted of counterrevolutionary activity. She was executed on December 11, 1937.

Author: Olha Herasymenko