Ivana Nacherová

Marie Leontovyčová’s sculptures

“Do you have any life motto? – “I do. Nothing is random. Everything happens for a reason even though sometimes it might not seem like it.” – “Which was the best period in your life?” – “Probably when I was around six years old or something like that. I was already growing mature and I was with my grandpa Ivan Leontovyč a lot. And then when I started a family and was looking forward to the adult life. I married for love and I like to look back on it. And then also the time when I started working in the Central Bohemian Museum and had a great team of people around me. And generally speaking, I like living in this world despite the hardships of life. I wake up in the morning and I tell myself with this hope that the day will be nice. Right now, spending as much time with my mum as possible is what’s on my mind.”

“Our father had to leave the Academy of Fine Arts because he didn’t want to join the Party. He got an opportunity in Příbram where the senior doctor Šedivý helped him get a job in promoting the Příbram ore mines. Dad then did the socialist realism as well. Every time there were the miners’ days he casted small hammers and the miners’ symbols and took part in the cultural development of Příbram. The people were pretty decent, we used to go there and as a child I didn’t distinguish between Communists and non-Communists. Although the comrades sometimes patted each other on the back. But they considered dad to be an exceptional artist. So their relations to him were as like towards someone exceptional. He also charitably led different courses there. He prepared kids for their studies at the painting and sculpture studio.”

“Everything was complicated, and it was because of the regime as many things would otherwise be easily solvable. Like normally we would go visit our grandma and then we would return back home. As it’s done today. But nothing was done “normally” back then. You couldn’t go to church, you couldn’t buy what you needed – for that you had to shop around, nothing was done normally, nothing. So, one tried to find his own little world. I read a lot and painted.”

“My mother used to say: ‘So they came to see me again, I am so afraid they will lock us all up’ or ‘that they will lock me up’ … and grandpa Ivan Leontovyč would tell her: ‘Marjusa, always stay out of politics, it’s dirty business.’ That was a well-known slogan in our family. My mum would always play this ingénue. I was there once too but didn’t recognize it. I was her model for something. I am modeled as a girl with a ball somewhere. So, I didn’t understand what was going on, I just saw my mum being all different and naïve and giggling and saying: ‘And I don’t know, here’s my girl, here’s a dog and a giraffe...’ She talked to them like this, like she didn’t care about anything and somehow she got away with it and never got locked up. But they were interested in my parents and in the family for sure. In the bad way I mean. This family, they were never left at peace, but I don’t know about all that was happening there.”

“Mom cherished both her dad and her mum, and she loved her dad very much. She said that before they had locked him up they had already come for him twice to the villa in Břevnov where they had lived. My mom had hidden him in the cellar. She had suffered from water on the lungs back then and once the State Security agent poked her with his gun. They looked for Ukrainian sheet music, family pictures and stuff like that. It wasn’t easy, how they tried to catch my grandpa. They kept looking for a letter that they couldn’t find and then somehow they found a letter that no one had ever seen before and they arrested him based on that. He had still been exchanging letters with family and friends in Ukraine and was cementing the Ukrainian minority. So I guess they found something there that they considered to be an opposition to the then communist regime.”