Exhibition of Drawings by Euphrosyne Kersnovskaya

Exhibition of Drawings by Euphrosyne Kersnovskaya

Starting October 30, an exhibition of drawings by Euphrosyne Kersnovskaya—a former Gulag prisoner—will open in the Auditorium. A landowner from Bessarabia, Kersnovskaya lost her home after the region was annexed by the USSR; in 1941, she was subjected to repression and exiled to Siberia. A year later, she made an unsuccessful escape attempt and was sentenced to the death penalty, but her death sentence was ultimately commuted to ten years of imprisonment in a correctional labor camp.

After her release, though she had never been rehabilitated, Kersnovskaya created a handwritten book titled “How Much Is a Person Worth” and illustrated it with more than 700 drawings. This is a firsthand account of survival in the camps, combining documentary accuracy with the striking power of personal testimony. Work on the text and illustrations began in 1964 and continued into the early 1970s. Fearing that the manuscript would be confiscated and that she would be arrested again, Kersnovskaya made several copies of it. In the 1980s, the memoirs began to circulate via samizdat, and in 1990, the drawings were published in the magazine Ogonyok.

Duration

The exhibition will run from October 30 to November 13

Admission

Free admission

Vojvode Dobrnjca 48, Belgrade