This is the story of a photograph that was famous even before it was exhibited. Taken on September 1, it shows a group of soldiers in the open air, gathered around a table, with their uniforms, helmets, weapons and a black dog. A yellow and blue flag rolled around a flagpole tells us that the scene is Ukraine. But which scene? In the center, a man is writing. All around him are smiles and laughter. No tragedy in sight. It's the most serene image of war, the opposite of what photojournalists are used to, so why did it become so popular in Ukraine in just a few days? Because it plays a direct part in the war of memory and culture between Ukraine and Russia.
It is the work of Emeric Lhuisset, a French artist born in 1983, known for his work close to contemporary conflicts. Two months after its release, he's still surprised by the response. "It went viral," he said. "As soon as I posted it on Instagram, there were over 100,000 likes in the first 24 hours. Since then, I've been getting offers all the time to make a stamp, stickers, posters and calendar covers out of it. It snowballed. I thought it would have some resonance, but I didn't expect it to be so strong so quickly."
The picture is not photojournalism, but the result of a calculated staging based on the great painting by the Ukrainian artist Ilya Repin (1844-1930), Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks (1891). The group shows a group of joyous men in brightly-colored costumes, carrying ornate sabers. It represents an even that took place in 1676: A Cossack hetman (warlord), Ivan Sirko, dictating to a scribe his reply to Ottoman Sultan Mehmed IV's letter demanding his surrender. Sirko called him "the greatest fool of the world and the underworld, and before our God, a moron, a pig's snout, a mare's ass, a butcher's hoof, an unbaptized forehead!" In conclusion, he invited him to "kiss his ass."
Repin, himself the son of a former Cossack and born near the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, saw those words published in a magazine in 1872. His first sketch dates from 1878, and work on the painting lasted until 1891. Repin accumulated documents and sketches, had friends pose for him and modified the composition several times. Its success was immense, and the painting was exhibited from Russia to Chicago. Tsar Alexander III bought it for his collection. In 1917, it was transferred to the Russian Museum in Saint Petersburg, where it remains to this day. Guillaume Apollinaire wrote a rhymed version of the letter, which he included in La Chanson du Mal-Aimé (1913) and which Dmitri Shostakovich set to music in 1969. The USSR issued two stamps of the painting, one in 1944, and the Ukrainian Post issued a new one in 2014. That's how famous it is.
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