Karlo Zvirynskyi and his «Underground Academy»: Reflections of Cultural Memory

Karlo Zvirynskyi (1923-1997) was an outstanding personality and great artist. His influence on the Lviv cultural environment in the 1960s–1990s was indisputable. Zvirynskyi was a quiet man rooted in his own research fields, but the awareness of his actions formed a strong environment in the aesthetics of the European art and ethical norms of Christianity. The artist's undiverted view on European culture was related to the understanding of processes that cannot be guided ideologically, as well as the realization that culture exists in continuity, and reflects aesthetical and ethical forms of human activity. His search for a European cultural tradition and the reprobation of foundations of socialist realism played an important role in the formation of his “underground academy”. Zvirynskyi’s primary goal was the education of creative young people as citizens, whose consciousness would enable them to remain artists in defiance of the enticing society. The circle of his students embraced Zinoviy Flinta, Andriy Bokotey, Oleh Minko, Liubomyr Medvid, Roman Petruk, Ivan Marchuk and Bohdan Soyka. Our task, for now, is not to embalm the legacy of his “underground academy”, but create the cultural space, where intellectual reflections can take place. Karlo Zvirynskyi understood his stand in life as “I look at life through the prism of a book” and his artistic position as “all my painting is a prayer”. Attitude to his own life as a part of a holistic cultural flow has formed his worldview. The cultural memory of generations that accumulates “modernity” played for the artist a territory of freedom, which has always been a criterion of human nature for Zvirynskyi. Realizing that memory about Karlo Zvirynskyi is a kind of tuning fork for the moral health of the nation, this article is an attempt to bring knowledge about the master from the chamber community, which resembles the mechanisms of catacomb culture, in a wider and more open space that will use his name as part of the national cultural landscape