Fight against the Russian Empire in Artur Grottger's drawings
The album "Fight against the Russian Empire in Artur Grottger's engravings" is the first publication in Ukraine of the artist's drawings dedicated to the January Uprising and the demonstrations in Warsaw that preceded it. They have been grouped by the author himself into the series Warsaw I, Warsaw II, Polonia, Lithuania and War.
In addition, the work includes reproductions of Artur Grottger's paintings on the subject of the uprising, including exact copies of paintings stored in the Lviv Picture Gallery and stolen from there in 1992. The whole work is supplemented by biographical essays by Prof. Grzegorz Bąbiak on Artur Grottger and Dr. Łukasz Adamski on the history of the Polish uprisings and their significance for the history of Ukraine.
Artur Grottger, born near Żydaczów in the Lviv region and buried in the Lychakiv Cemetery, as well as the January Uprising remain essentially unknown to Ukrainians. It is only in the last three years that the Ukrainian government and president have signed declarations stating that the uprising was a joint struggle of the entire population of the former Commonwealth against Russia. Meanwhile, the battles of 1863 were also fought in the lands of today's Ukraine - in Kiev, Volhynia and Polesia, where Romuald Traugutt fought - and they had quite an impact on the history of Ukraine. Suffice it to say that the Russian authorities, frightened by the agitation of the insurgents, banned the publication of books in Ukrainian in print, with the exception of fiction, stating at the same time that the Ukrainian language was essentially created artificially by the Poles for political purposes, and in fact "no separate Malo-Russian [i.e. Ukrainian] language existed, does not exist and cannot exist". After the defeat of the uprising, the Russification of Ukraine accelerated.
