A Tango of Letters: New Book Reveals Soviet Shadows and an Artist’s Bid for Freedom

18 November, 2025: On a crisp November evening, the Danylo Husar Struk Program in Ukrainian Literature unveiled a story that feels part romance, part thriller, and wholly human. It Takes Three to Tango: The Correspondence of Ivan Ostafiychuk and Natalka Husar, a newly released volume from Rodovid Press, pulled an audience of sixty into a world where art and longing intertwined with political oppression and crossed time and continents.

The event gathered together celebrated Canadian artist Natalka Husar; Dr. Natalia Khanenko-Friesen, director of the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies and author of the book’s introduction; and Lidia Lykhach, head of Rodovid Press. Dr. Taras Koznarsky, director of the Struk Program, guided the conversation.

Husar transported listeners back to 1969, when she was just seventeen, as a newly graduated and curious young woman stepping for the first time onto the soil her parents had fled. Her arrival in Soviet Ukraine was a shock: She spoke for example of how Lviv Intourist Hotel mistreated her family, who were not allowed to even approach the hotel, yet alone enter it.  But it was also then that Husar met Ivan Ostafiychuk, a decade older and already a prominent artist. Their spark became the beginning of a peculiar, deeply creative duet carried entirely through letters. 

Those letters would become a unique escape and a space of creative engagement for the two. Ornate, calligraphic, sometimes adorned with drawings, they traveled across the ocean at a time when every Ukrainian intellectual lived under the watchful eye of the KGB. Together, the two artists staged a fictional romance that was tender, imaginative, and convincing enough, they hoped, to persuade the authorities to let Ivan emigrate to Canada. Eight years of correspondence passed before the Soviet system delivered its verdict: Ivan would not be allowed to leave. The dance ended, nearly abruptly. 

Dr. Khanenko-Friesen placed these exchanges into their historical and chilling context: an era when surveillance in Soviet Ukraine  infiltrated not only public life but the private corners of the mind, and the times when the two Ukrainian worlds, of homeland and diaspora, were forced to stay disconnected. Dr. Koznarsky highlighted how survival under colonial control required mimicry, and how Ukrainians learned to write between the lines, to speak in symbols, to hide truth in margins much like Ivan tucked drawings into his.

Lidia Lykhach spoke about the creative aspects of putting together this unique album of letters, a book that escapes any definition, a meeting place of art, writing, and epistolary engagement between Ukraine and its diaspora.  

Natalka Husar saved the most intriguing part of this story for last, returning to the fate of her own letters to Ivan. Believed lost, soon after the inaugural book launch in Lviv a few months ago, they were eventually traced to a sprawling landfill nearby. The frantic search that followed, and the improbable recovery of the box, felt like a miracle snatched from a dystopian landscape. It may yet become the subject of a future Rodovid volume.

As the formal program ended, attendees lined up to meet Husar, speak with the scholars, and hold the newly printed book in their hands, grasping a physical trace of a duet composed across borders and against the weight of an empire.

A young artist meets a celebrated painter. The Cold War hums. The KGB listens. Two people attempt to outwit a system with ink and imagination.
Did the ruse work?
Did the artists fall in love?
Did Ivan escape the Soviet Union?

The answers now live between the pages of It Takes Three to Tango—and with those who survived the dance.