- We are fighting for something that has no price in the world – for Ukraine. When I watch these soldiers die, I get cold with terror.
Alexander Petrovich Dovzhenko said that in the work on the script “Ukraine on fire” reflected his inner struggle of the screenwriter with the writer. On the one hand, strict observance of the canons of the professional script, and on the other hand, the desire to expand the topic, insert your thoughts into it, give place to lyrical digressions. That is why the genre of the work can and should be defined as a film story. The plot unfolds around the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of Tatiana Chaban (Zinaida Dekhtyarev), followed by the beginning of the war and the subsequent occupation by the Nazis of their native land – Topolivka. Conventionally, the film story can be divided into three parts. The narrative begins with the retreat of the Soviet army, into which the love story of Vasil (Yuri Fesenko) and Olesi (Irina Korotkova) is intertwined. The second part tells about life in the occupation and partisan movement. The epilogue of the picture is the offensive of the Soviet Army. This is just the shortest synopsis of the tape, which has almost the same tragic fate as the story told in the film.
Breakfast hate, lunch, and dinner. That's how we live.
The script “Ukraine on Fire”, which Dovzhenko finished in the summer of 1943, is the culmination of his literary work. The writer decided to tell the bitter truth about the Soviet bureaucracy and negligence that led to the deaths of hundreds and thousands of innocent people in wartime in Ukraine: Our land is Ukrainian, our martyr, you are in fire, in fire! But the film narrative was forbidden for publication and for production with the formulation that it was an attack against our Party, against Soviet power, against the collective farm peasantry, against our national policy. The book reflects the hostile ideology of the author. Now we understand that “Ukraine on Fire” is a special work, unlike anything else: piercing, real, alive. Not a single false word, not a single insincerity, only the truth about people, about history, about the crushed souls of war.
If you do not want to live, drink the medicine - revenge.
The script of the film story, after discussion in the Politburo of the Central Committee of the CPSU (B), received an extremely negative assessment of Stalin and was not accepted for production. After that, Dovzhenko began to have serious ideological problems with the authorities, about which Dovzhenko writes in his diary of November 28, 1943: "The prohibition of Ukraine on fire" greatly depressing me. I look gloomy and find no room. And yet I think: let it be banned. God be with them, it's still written. Word spoken. I know very well how the good attitude towards me from above will shake. Maybe I'll pay for it somehow. But I believe that despite everything, despite the death of a civilian... I wrote a story honestly as it is and how I see the life and suffering of my people.
I write these lines not with ink, but with tears of my heart.
It is bad that we have surrendered our Ukraine to the accursed Hitler and are releasing its people badly. We liberators have long forgotten that we are a little guilty of the liberated, and we regard them as second-rate, unclean, guilty to us, deserter-surround-adjusters. We are glorious warriors, but we lacked objective human kindness to these people. In this story I somehow half-consciously, that is, quite organically, stood up for my people, bearing heavy losses in the war. Who better than me to speak in defense when such a great threat looms over my miserable land? Ukraine is known only by those who were on it, on its fires today, and not by newspapers or fireworks counts its victories, sticking paper flags into a dead geographical map. Sad to me..."
- The page memory sheet ...
Alexander Petrovich Dovzhenko died on November 25, 1956 of a heart attack at his dacha in Peredelkin, not having time to realize much of what he wanted to tell people. But his case, fortunately, did not freeze, did not slow down thanks to his wife and faithful life partner - Julia Ippolitovna Solntseva, who managed to bring to the screen many ideas of the great master and great man. Now it is impossible to say how Dovzhenko himself would have filmed “Ukraine on Fire”: would he be happy with the result? Whatever we say now, it will all be speculation. And Solntova's work is here. Extend your hand, turn on the TV and touch the world in which Dovzhenko put not so much physical labor as heartache about his native Ukraine.