Irina Aleksandrovna Khoroshunova collection

Irina Aleksandrovna Khoroshunova was born in 1913 in Kiev. She had one sister, Tatiana. Her father, Aleksander Fedorovich Khoroshunova (1973-1922), graduated from law school at Kiev University. He continued his legal work both before and after the 1917 Revolution. He suffered from epilepsy though, and became ill and died at the age of 49. Her mother, Aleksandra Aleksandrovna Markevich was born in 1886 and attended Smolenskii Institute. She studied in the pedagogical department for German language, but did not become a teacher. Instead, she worked as a factory worker. Her mother also had health problems, and began receiving an invalid’s pension at the age of 46. In December of 1941 she was arrested, mistaken for someone else. She was never released. Irina Aleksandrovna Khoroshunova spent from 1919 to 1923 in a home for children. She was 28 years old in the summer of 1941 when the Nazi army invaded and occupied Kiev. During the Nazi occupation (1941-1944) she worked temporarily as a bookbinder and a dishwasher. During this entire period, Irina Aleksandrovna was connected to a local, underground reconnaissance group. After the war, she graduated from what was then Gorkii Pedagogical Institute of Kiev, Department of Russian Language and Literature, in 1951. She did not work in this field, however. Instead she worked as a stage designer and decorator, a profession she first adopted in 1929, continued even after her education. From 1947 to 1957 she worked as an artist in the Kiev branch of the Lenin Central Museum. From 1948 to the mid-1980s she worked for the Artists’ Fund of Soviet Ukraine. In January of 1967 she also worked on a project combining the arts of geology, botany, zoology, paleontology, and archeology into the establishment of a Central Scientific Museum in Ukraine. She also worked on other projects for the rest of her career.