| Sosnytsia (7,600 residents) is a district center situated on the right slope of the wide valley of Desna. For the first time the Ipatiivsky Chronicle mentioned it in 1234 as the settlement captured by Prince Danylo Halytsky during the war of dissension. The Mongols devastated in 1239 and during XIV-XVII c. the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Muscovy and Rzeczpospolita controlled it. In 1634, the newly built fortress upgraded the status to an urban settlement. World-famous motion-picture director Olexandr Dovzhenko was born in Sosnytsia and spent his childhood and youth here (1894-1956). The world knows him as the screenplay author and director of the Earth (1930), the glorious top-of-the-chart masterpiece. The main film studio of Ukraine in Kyiv, where his movie was made, bears the name of O. Dovzhenko. O. Dovzhenko was also a talented author of many cinematic narratives. His autobiographic story Charmed Desna poetizes native places; it is considered a hymn to Northern Ukraine. The literary-memorial museum of Dovzhenko was inaugurated in Sosnytsia in I960. The interior shows his home, when he was a teenager, while the literary exhibition is put up in the house next door. Sculptor I. Fuzhenko and architect I. Ignashchenko erected a showy monument in the central yard commemorating the 80th Birthday of motion-picture director (1974). There is also a wooden Patronage Church (1847) in Sosnytsia. |
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