Paraska Plytka-Horytsvit

Paraska was born and lived in the village of Kryvorivnia in the Ivano-Frankivsk region. Thanks to her father she knew several languages; in 1943 she hoped to study at university in Germany, but her dream went unrealised and she returned home.

She helped the Ukrainian Insurgent Army and was arrested and sent to Siberian camps for ten years. On her return she lived in seclusion, shunned by neighbours building a “bright communist future” — and this became the impetus for her art: handwritten, self-made illustrated books of philosophical reflections, folk tales and legends, and the history of Kryvorivnia.