IT TAKES THREE TO TANGO: The true story of a fictitious romance in the correspondence of Ivan Ostafiichuk and Natalka Husar
3 October 2025
Headliner:
Natalka Husar, toronto-based artist who has explored diasporic and post-Soviet Ukrainian identity over her 48-year career. Natalka's paintings are in many of Canada’s foremost museums, including The National Gallery of Canada and the Art Gallery of ¾ÅÐãÖ±²¥, where her painting Edelweiss/Paradise is on view in the exhibition “Seeing and Being Seen.”
Panelists:
Oleksandr Pankieiev (moderator), Associate Professor and Kule Chair of Ukrainian Culture and Ethnography, Director of the Kule Folklore Centre, ¾ÅÐãÖ±²¥.
Natalia Khanenko-Friesen, Professor and Huculak Chair of Ukrainian Culture and Ethnography, Director of the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, ¾ÅÐãÖ±²¥.
Andriy Kohut, Director of the Sectoral State Archive of the Security Service of Ukraine.
About this event:
Meet Natalka Husar, an internationally acclaimed Canadian artist, and hear the story in person. Learn the perspective of scholars who study Ukraine and KGB surveillance. Read the newly published book containing Ivan’s letters.
The book can be ordered on the publisher's website:
About the book:
Fresh out of school, the young artist Natalka Husar travels to Soviet Ukraine, the homeland of her displaced parents. There she meets an already famous artist, Ivan Ostafiychuk. It is 1969, and the Cold War is raging. In great concern about the KGB cracking down on Ukrainian artists and intellectuals, the two engage in letter writing, for Ivan wants to escape the Soviet regime. For several years, letters crossed the ocean as the two artists staged a long-distance romance in order to convince secret services that they were in love and wanted to marry. Did they succeed? Did Ivan escape the Soviet Union? How did this romance with the plot of a thriller end?
We grew up with this ideology—that you sacrifice everything for Ukraine. So why not marry, why not make such a gesture to help someone emigrate? You do it because you’re lucky to live here, in a free country, while they are imprisoned there… It’s your civic duty, if you are a conscious Ukrainian woman, to help, to support whatever you can—financially, or by going through all that bureaucratic red tape. Especially when you’re helping not just family, but an artist. Because artists, like writers, must be protected. They carry cultural weight [for their respective national and group identities], and they can be destroyed! That truly touched the diaspora’s sense of guilt… and responsibility.
Natalka HusarThey summoned me to the colonel once every month or two. Meetings could last up to six hours—it was hard to endure. Back then, we lived under an oppressive cloud. I had a friend in Canada, we corresponded. And whenever the letters got through, we immediately burned them, you know.
Ivan Ostafiichuk