ABSTRACT
The subject of the analysis is the sculpture Bitter Childhood Memories by the Ukrainian artist Petro Drozdovsky, created in 2009, which is located at the Holodomor Memorial to Holodomor victims in Kyiv. It depicts a little girl with big eyes and a tiny thin body affected by malnutrition, her arms crossed over the chest. She keeps in her hands several spikelets of wheat. It is one of the most recognisable symbols of the Great Famine in Ukraine, which, triggered by the policies of the Soviet communist authorities, claimed nearly four million victims. Copies of the sculpture Bitter Childhood Memories can be found in many places in Ukraine. The significance of the sculpture is analysed in comparison with both the testimonies of people who survived the tragedy of the Great Famine. They contain a record of the children’s experience of the Great Famine. They see it as a process of transition from fear and anger in relation to the introduced collectivisation, to a state governed by the desire to satisfy hunger, turning into mental numbness, apathy, suppressing the propensity to revenge and the will to obey everyone who helps to survive. The works in question are treated as a manifestation of the historical trauma associated with the Great Famine. Its individual stages of development are traced: from the earliest one, in which the record of the original experience of the tragedy was the most important, to the shaping of its cultural representation, from collective memory to cultural memory, from image to media icon.
