I saw what you posted about Ivan Aivazovski and I have another artist to add to that list.
Everybody always calls Sholom Aleichem russian but he’s not. He’s Ukrainian.
Most of his stories are set in a fictional city based off of a real suburb of Kiev called Boyarka where he himself lived. Perchik - the love interest of the second daughter - is a student from Kiev.
Hey and thank you for mentioning Sholom Aleichem because there's definitely an interesting wider conversation about the Jewish community in Ukraine (and I'm Jewish Ukrainian, so-)
But I'm surprised people don't know he was born and spent most of his life in Ukraine, considering we literally have a street named after him in almost every major Ukrainian city: Kyiv, Lviv, Kharkiv, Dnipro (the Golden Rose synagogue and the Menorah cultural center are on that street), Poltava, Zhytomyr, Novohrad-Volynskyi, Chernivtsi, Bila Tserkva, Brovary. There are also streets in the cities of: Berdychiv, Brody, Korosten, Zbarazh, Pereyaslav, Nizhyn, Kherson, Uman, Novomyrhorod, Smila, Starokostyantyniv (Khmelnytskyi Oblast), Kamianets-Podilskyi (Khmelnytskyi Oblast), Slavuta (Khmelnytskyi Oblast), Derazhnya (Khmelnytskyi Oblast), Haisyn, Drohobych.
What you probably also didn't know is that there's The Sholem Aleichem Prize in Ukraine! It is awarded for the best literary and artistic works that popularize the spiritual and cultural heritage of the Ukrainian and Jewish peoples and contribute to the spread of a positive image of Ukraine in the world.
I know that Ukrainians call Sholom Aleichem a Jewish writer, and it feels weird to learn that someone calls him russian, but I'm not surprised. From what I know, he had quite a lot of sympathy for the Ukrainian people.
(also, please call the city Kyiv, because "Kiev" is based on the russian pronunciation of the name.)
