THE LOST HEAD
“The Lost Head” is one of Roel Sauviller’s cycles of paintings that follow a story, or more precisely, the paintings themselves are a story. The storyline of these fifteen paintings is as follows:
Pauline is sent by her grandmother to a store to buy ingredients for pancakes. She is warned not to take a shortcut through the woods. Yet she takes it anyway. There she finds a severed but living head that begs her to take it with her. So said so done. While she is walking, the head narrates its unbelievable story of how it got to where it was found lying in the woods. When still attached to its owner, it was attacked, cut off, and taken away. Then the robber himself got into a fight with an unknown and was forced to drop the head so as not to lose the fight. There the head lay for a long time…it had no idea for how long. While the head talks to Pauline and Pauline is carrying it, it grows dark, and the cold sets in. So they start a fire, but at night the fire attracts all kinds of creatures…
Roel Sauviller (1960) is an autodidact who has been drawing and painting since he can remember. He often asks himself: “Haven’t I been a dreamer for too long?” Hence, the dreamlike quality of his work.
Sailor, artist, lawyer, and writer, Dmitri Bystrolyotov was one of a team of Soviet spies operating in the West between the World Wars. He seduced women to learn great secrets of foreign states, but was then arrested and tortured in the Gulag, where he began to document the crimes against humanity of the regime he had served.
This book features biographies of the author’s family members, detailing with the effect of the war on their lives.
The first bilingual collection of Ukrainian verse by Borys Khersonsky. In these poems, heaven is often the setting: Jews who perished during pogroms and in the Holocaust continue with their daily routines, whereas on earth, displacement has become a constant, and collective memory has been cleansed of the Jewish past.
