Anna Gorobievskaya, Happy New Year, Friends! c 1973
For the last few years, I have become increasingly passionate about the postcard art of the USSR, and increasingly interested in the Snihuronka figure, the Snow Maiden who is, perhaps, the grand-daughter helper of Did Moroz, the Rus Santa Claus-like figure, Grandfather Frost.
Recently, this work has taken an informal biographical bent—I say informal because the research, such as it is, cannot be properly sourced via Internet avenues only at this time, and it is not the time to travel to Ukraine to search for letters or surviving in print resources, even if that was a possibility. But here—the beautiful Anna Gorobievskaya.
Looking at the Soviet Era images of innocent childhood and expressive fantasy that were widely printed, traded, collected and sent, in a time when people still communicated over distance via the written word because long distance phone calls were too expensive, it is all too easy to forget the circumstances under which these cards were produced. Not only was the content strictly regulated. But the artists were, too.
Some took cover in works employing irony and in the (somewhat) safer terrain of children’s literature. By seeding children’s literature with values counter to those practiced by Soviet officialdom, selected writers and artists spread counter-values to a new generation. They worked with the guile of the fox, the flight of the firebird, and, perhaps, the recklessness of the Fool. By keeping alive Russian stories of wise Fools, sentient animals, and magical powers, their creators carried forward folkloric traditions barred from the reigning Socialist Realism. In doing so, they protected limited public space for artistic innovation.
Anna Gorobievskaya, born 1931 of mixed Polish-Ukrainian heritage, had a father, a member of the Polish Drama Company, active in Kyiv during the late 1920s-30s, who was shot in a labor camp in Siberia when Gorobievskaya was six years old—an age similar to that of the child in this picture, produced as a popular postcard in 1973, and perhaps Gorobievskaya’s best known, most widely circulated on the internet, work. Her Kyiv-born mother, an artist working for the same company, who had also been arrested, was freed, and allowed to return to work. When the Nazis invaded in 1942, Anna, along with her mother and her grandmother, were transported to Hungary “for work,” where Anna, just 11 years old, picked up the language quickly and worked as a translator. When the Soviets moved in in 1944, Anna, with her family members, were able to return to Kyiv. Following in her mother’s footsteps, she trained to be a painter.
Her work is notable for her depictions of ethnic minority children (Ukrainians included) in their traditional dress, whether Tatar sheepskin coats or Chuchki leathers, simultaneously light-hearted and serious, as children can so often be. She drew repeated versions of Snihuronka, the winter snow maiden, a figure of ambiguous symbolism; simultaneously a trite Soviet holiday trope and the figure of the winter goddess who holds the promise of life, and the possibility of the arrival of spring.
The Snow Maiden is the figure in Rus folklore who helps the little birds and animals survive through the winter—birds like the bullfinch, the bright, red-breasted spark of life that appears among the frozen branches to remind us all that, despite the season of Winter’s rule, something else remains.
In the last update I could find, written by her son, Anna was still living in the three bedroom apartment she had been assigned back in the 1950s, along with her son and his family.
Anna Gorobievskaya, Snow Maiden (1988)
She was largely blind and, in the I assume poorly translated description I found, “tethered to her bed.”
In Kyiv.
As I write these words, it is something like one week into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Is she still alive? Is she still in Kyiv, as Russians, and Russian artillery, advance?