The Roads that Choose Us

Peter Yemets. “Grandpa Maxim’s House”. 1986.

In the outgoing year, the world had two epoch-making dates: the fifteenth anniversary of the explosion of the fourth power unit at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant named after V.I. Lenin and the first anniversary of the shutdown of the last operating reactor at the same station. Recently, the President of Ukraine visited the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant Zone, once again confirming that he was taking personal control over the solution of all problems related to the elimination of the consequences of an atomic catastrophe. The thirty-kilometer Alienation Zone, which is popularly called “thirty,” has changed beyond recognition over the years of its existence. Despite the fact that the objects located here are subject to protection, and not because of their materials of value, for there is no such thing, but in order not to release objects contaminated with radiation from the Zone, almost everything has been stolen here.

Today, the “thirty” really looks different than in the first years after the disaster. The opportunity to look at it through the eyes of the liquidator of the accident and at the same time the artist Peter Zakharovich Yemets will help to visualize the scale of the tragedy in order to prevent this from happening before. For this is our land.

Peter Zakharovich doesn’t like to talk about himself. ‘Look at my paintings, and you’ll surely find out much more about me than I can tell,’ the artist avoids the direct answers.

His works really say a lot, despite the restraint of the palette. They can be found in the largest museum collections in the world: in France, Italy, Japan, USA, Russia, in many private collections. And it is not by chance. It is today in the Union of Artists of Ukraine there are about fifty masters who paint their works on the Chernobyl theme from “nature”. But it is known for certain that in 1986-1987, Yemets was the only professional artist who worked in the Chernobyl NPP Alienation Zone. And it just happened that his friends and he went to Pripyat to get away from the daily routine. That April of that year was warm and sunny... The news of the accident caught him the next morning. Even a little earlier. Something alarming was in the advancement of countless columns of military and special equipment. He thought is was the war. And Peter Zakharovich went straight to the Chernobyl District Military Commissariat to ask what to do without a mobilization prescription. Thus, the Chernobyl epic, in my opinion, quite comparable even with the most terrible war, began for him.

The paintings of the Master, and without exaggeration, hundreds of them, despite their unconditional artistic value, are of documentary nature. So, they belong to the bygone era and... the future. Looking at them, our descendants will study what happened many years ago in the Ukrainian Polesye.

Once I asked Peter Zakharovich what shocked him during his stay in the “thirty”.

‘I was amazed at the incredible ability of people to work, the lack of arrogance and meanness among the liquidators of the accident. They probably didn’t know the great danger that was waiting for them at every turn, but I am sure that if they knew the whole truth, they wouldn’t refuse to do their duty’ answered the Master. By the way, he not only worked with cardboard, brushes and paints in the Zone. Together with other dosimetrists, Peter processed the contaminated equipment.

Peter Yemets. “Self-Portrait”. 1987.

‘Actually, the Zone cut off petty people immediately, from the very first moments,’ the artist states. ‘Somehow it immediately became clear who is who. Pseudo-stalkers left the Zone very quickly. And we continued to work. Once, having received, so called, ”time off”, I went to the village left by people, not far from the ”Skazochny” pioneer camp in which the liquidators then lived. I went into the yard overgrown with weeds, saw the rose bush lost among them. This terrifying beauty told me that I needed to sketch it so that others could see how it was there for real. I looked at the rose and was stupefied. The spikes grew not from the stem, but protruded from the petals. It was August 1986. The press sounded all over that the inhabitants of these places would soon come back, and here it is! I picked few flowers. Since then, I show them to those who don’t believe. And in the winter we cleared snow from our boots, using amazing brooms. These were pine branches with needles up to forty centimeters long. Can you imagine it?

There was a lot of weird. But I had a much greater impression from communicating with local people who, by hook and by crook, penetrated into their former homes, stubbornly wanted to go back, were crying for a long time, inspecting their economy, which had managed to run wild in just a few months.

This is how a cycle of paintings written from life in abandoned villages appeared. It was extremely difficult for me to work then. All the time I felt bitterness and injustice towards this harsh, but beautiful land. To its people, whose ancestors conquered it from dense forests thousands of years ago. Pantheons are preserved on local graveyards, where there are graves of the 16th century. It’s amazing!’

The work of Peter Yemets attracts not only true connoisseurs of art, those who personally saw the image on canvases, or simply inquisitive ones. Several times during the solo exhibitions in the prestigious and protected halls, paintings were lost. Subsequently, some of them were found abroad. The artist does not like to talk about it. But restoring something painted directly from life is the same as creating a copy, which, in the artist’s opinion, will no longer have such a powerful energy charge as the original.

Despite the wide palette of colors and shades that generous nature gives us, only two of them, in my opinion, penetrate deeper into the minds of Ukrainians: red and black. These are the colors of joy and grief, love and sadness. These two colors are fully present in the life and work of Peter Yemets. The birth of his daughter Ivanna, who is of the same age as the Chernobyl disaster, and the tragic death of his wife Katerina, the sincere support of friends, lifetime fame and speculation around the artist’s name... Yemets’s works almost never coexist with the paintings of his colleagues in the workshops on thematic exhibitions. They say that pseudo-Chernobyl painters are trying in every way to obscure the value of Yemets’ creativity in order to gain more laurels, medals and medallions. Perhaps that is why Peter Zakharovich is even embarrassed that he has a certificate of a participant in the elimination of the consequences of the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. ‘What kind of liquidator am I?’ he asks himself. ‘We just did the work...’

The heroes and traitors, geniuses and villains, jesters and obsessive, poor and rich, loafers and toilers, executioners and their victims were, are and always will be in our lives and in the lives of the future generations... But most often it happens that the inexorable story more or less objectively fills its scrolls with them.

In the modern history of the cultural life of Ukraine, Peter Yemets takes a worthy place, whose each painting is a part of the fate of our people, of our blessed, long-suffering, but not hopeless land.

Peter Yemets. “Chernobyl Madonna”. 1987.

I often go to the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant Exclusion Zone, I bring in foreign journalists there: newsmen, TV reporters, photographers... We inspect the septic tanks of contaminated equipment in Rossokh, where huge military helicopters are especially oppressed, we talk with the “samosely” (people who settle in the zone without permission – transl.) in Opachichi or Kupovaty, wander around Rudny-Veresne, the dead city of Pripyat, Novo-Shepelichy, in a word, visit places Yemets has visited many times. And then we return to Kiev and visit Peter Zakharovich. A world-famous artist lives in a standard apartment in Obolon and does not always have enough money to buy canvas and paints. Each time, Peter Zakharovich like for the first time, always restrained, but enthusiastically speaks about how in the distant 1986 he saved the little dog from inevitable death. They were then shot. One of the samosely sheltered it. Many years have passed since then. The descendants of this dog are running happily around the land of Polesye, reminding us that life goes on, no matter what.

Vasily Bereg.

Kiev.

Telegraph Newspaper, December 30, 2001