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Maryna Chystyakova, a physician who performs autopsies on children Courtesy A physician who performs autopsies on children looks back, wants to revive her family’s faded legacy

Had she followed in her talented family’s footsteps, Maryna Chystyakova might have been dancing in Swan Lake at Kyiv Opera and Ballet Theater. But life takes cruel and unexpected turns, as the 60-year-old Kyiv woman knows -- perhaps better than most people.

Instead of dancing ballet – like her noted grandmother, Oleksandra Havrylova, or her mother, Iryna Tomasevych-Chystyakova – she is performing autopsies on children.

Instead of basking in the adulation of audiences, like her orchestra conductor father, Borys Chystyakov, she is engaged in a grim but important pursuit that pays $215 a month.

Instead of teaching children ballet in the school that her grandfather, Illya Chystyakov, founded during Russian czarist days, she is daily toting up the terrible toll that society’s indifference and neglect takes on the most vulnerable segment of society: Children who die prematurely.

What has Chystyakova learned from 40 years of work as an autopsist who has conducted 7,000 autopsies on children? Part of Ukrainian society is sick.

Some of the children’s deaths are the consequences, she said, of Ukrainian women who “abuse alcohol or drugs” during pregnancy. The nation’s bad ecological situation is also a factor, she said. In a nation in which the child-infant mortality rate is still high -- 9.5 per 1,000 newborns, or nearly 30 percent higher than in the United States -- many babies die of congenital defects and fetal asphyxia.

Examining the bodies of children who die prematurely has taken its toll on Chystyakova, but also made her more philosophical and appreciative of life. Her advice: Never get tripped up by the small problems in life.

“If your boyfriend left you, if you lost your wallet, if your flat was burgled, you should still be happy. I know for sure there are no greater troubles in life except of disease and death,” Chystyakova said.

Her work – and society’s indifference to it, at least in terms of monetary rewards – has not killed her dreams. She still has the music inside and her spirit for living is undimmed, maybe even enhanced by tragedies.

“I like to surround myself with something alive when I have free time,” Chystyakova said. “My job gave me a strong understanding of the true beauty of life and possibilities given to anybody, any day.”

She writes poetry and translates other poems into different languages. She is also writing a book about her artistic family, still spoken of warmly by modern musicians. “Borys Chystyakov was among the greatest maestros in Ukrainian orchestra conducting. He was my teacher and I owe him much for the things I perform now,” said Allyn Vlasenko, a conductor at the Kyiv Opera and Ballet Theater.

The book about her famous parents is a way for Chystyakova to reconnect with the creative atmosphere of her childhood and her apartment house full of music on 13 Reitarska Street. The street was home to other famous musicians including Peter Tchaikovsky, who wrote Swan Lake, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Sergei Rachmaninoff and the founder of Ukrainian classical music, Mykola Lysenko.

The musical street was noted by the Nobel Prize-winning writer Boris Pasternak, who wrote a euphoric poem about it in 1931, called “Chopin again seeks no gains…”

Kyiv historian Mykhaylo Kalnytskiy wrote that “it was the famous musical house on 13 Reitarska” where Pasternak heard Chopin. “The Chystyakov family belonged to the cultural elite of the 19th and 20th centuries. Their family history and their house were among the stories Kyiv guides enjoyed telling. Of course, young guides may not know it, and the house is not a ballet school any more. That is how we are losing the history of Kyiv,” Kalnystkiy wrote on a Kyiv city historical portal, http://www.kyiv.at/content/view/409/18/.

Chystyakova still dreams of ballet, the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow and the Russian ballet seasons in Paris, where her grandmother, Oleksandra Havrylova, performed. “Since childhood ballet was the only one thing I was dreaming of,” Chystyakova said.

Her book will recount the happy times. But there were plenty of unhappy moments.

In fact, her dreams – and the family’s achievements – were lost over time, one by one.

Her mother told her she wasn’t good enough for the ballet. She entered medical school by accident, but stayed with it. “It was my mercenary marriage and I decided to devote my life to anatomical theatre, as I call it. Working in a place where death triumphs, I feel I and my decisions are helping many children to survive,” Chystyakova said.

Her grandfather’s ballet school on Reitarska Street is no more.

“So-called ‘new Russians’ started buying flat by flat at our house,” she said. “And when there was only my flat left, they started abusing us because we were not ‘rich.’ They even cut down one of these famous maple trees that my family planted, which is mentioned in Pasternak’s poem. I could not bear it any more and sold the flat.”

She is determined, however, not to let the memory of her family’s achievements die.

“I have collected all the photos of my family and the music my father wrote. I will give them all to Kyiv’s museum [of theatre, music and cinema]. My grandmother’s ballet shoes and my father’s conductor baton are already there.” The museum is on 21 Mazepy (formerly Sichnevoho Povstannya) Street.

With death all around her by day, her nights are devoted to recreating the joys of a bygone life. “I will make sure my family’s achievements and name do not die in Ukrainian culture.”