To My Father's Village: The Last Days and Drawings of William Kurelek
4to. unpaginated. illustrated in colour & b/w. hardcover cloth. dw. (fine condition). [Montreal]: Tundra Books, [1988].
ISBN-10: 0887762204 / ISBN-13: 9780887762208
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Two months before his death from cancer in 1977, William Kurelek returned to his father’s village in the Ukraine. The Soviet authorities had allowed him to spend four hours there in 1970, and the desire to return had become an obsession with him. In his diary of that trip he wrote, “Let the authorities let me come back to spend six weeks painting the real (to me) Ukrainian people…Those peasants that we met in the collective farm’s fields, the vast rolling fields, speak to me as an artist…let me live with these people as an artist…let me live with these people, dress as they dress, eat their food, sleep on the peech.”