Modernism in Kyiv: Jubilant Experimentation 9781442640986, 1442640987

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MODERNISM IN KYIV: JUBILANT EXPERIMENTATION

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Modernism in Kyiv KIEV/KɂȲȼ/KɂEȼ/KIJÓW/ʥʥʲʩ ʷ Jubilant Experimentation

Edited by Irena R. Makaryk and Virlana Tkacz

U NI V ERSIT Y OF TORONTO P RE SS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2010 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in Canada ISBN 978-1-4426-4098-6 (cloth)

Printed on acid-free paper with vegetable-based inks

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Modernism in Kyiv: Kiev/Kyïv/Kiev/KijÓw/Kiev: jubilant experimentation/edited by Irena R. Makaryk and Virlana Tkacz. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4426-4098-6 1. Modernism (Art) – Ukraine – Kiev. 2. Arts, Ukrainian – Ukraine – Kiev – 20th century. 3. Kurbas, Les’, 1887–1937 – Criticism and interpretation. 4. Theater – Ukraine – Kiev – History – 20th century. 5. Kiev (Ukraine) – Intellectual life – 20th century. 6. Kiev (Ukraine) – History – 20th century. I. Makaryk, Irena R. (Irena Rima), 1951– II. Tkacz, Virlana, 1952– NX456.5.M64M64 2010

700.9477’70904

C2009-905088-9

The University of Toronto Press gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Canadian Foundation for Ukrainian Studies for the preparation of the index. The authors and the University of Toronto Press are grateful for the support of the Mykhailo and Oksana Sosnowsky Memorial Fund and the Ukrainian Canadian Foundation of Taras Shevchenko. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

Contents

Acknowledgments ix Permissions xi List of Illustrations xiii A Note on Transliteration xxiii Introduction: Reconnecting Modernisms i r ena r. mak ary k PART ONE

3

KYIV: ‘SPECIAL AND BEWILDERING’ 13

Les Kurbas Foreword to Victor Auburtin, Art Is Dying (excerpt) 1 Modernism in Kyiv: Jubilant Experimentation i r e na r. mak aryk

16

Serhy Yefremov ‘How beautiful Kyiv is’ (diary excerpt) 2 ‘A Theatrical Mecca’: The Stages of Kyiv in 1907 m ay hil l c. f owler Pavlo Tychyna ‘Dawn’

25

26

51

3 ‘Special and Bewildering’: A Portrait of Late-Imperial and Early Soviet Kyiv 52 m ichae l f. hamm Legend Sweet Michael and the Golden Gates 4 Three Novels, Three Cities ta r as k oz narsky

98

97

15

vi

Contents

Tsar Nicholas II and Lev Trotsky On Film

138

5 Film in Kyiv, 1910–1916 139 o le h s y dor-hybelynda PART 2

KYIV THE EPICENTRE 167

Les Kurbas On Rhythm (diary excerpt)

169

6 In the Epicentre of Abstraction: Kyiv during the Time of Kurbas d my t ro hor b achov Volodymyr Koriak ‘To the Isles Electric!’ (excerpt) 7 The Yiddish Kultur-Lige g ennady e s t ra i kh

197

Pavlo Tychyna ‘You Tell Me’

218

8 Politics and the Ukrainian Avant-garde m y ros l av s hk and ri j Les Kurbas On Art (diary excerpt)

196

219

242

9 Kyiv’s Multicultural Theatrical Life, 1917–1926 h a nna v e s e l ovska PART 3

170

243

‘FIRE AND MOTION’ 275

Pavlo Tychyna ‘In the Orchestra of the Cosmos’ (excerpt)

277

10 Towards a New Vision of Theatre: Les Kurbas’s Work at the Young Theatre in Kyiv 278 v i rl ana t kac z Serge Lifar On Movement (excerpt)

310

11 The Choreographic Avant-garde in Kyiv, 1916–1921: Bronislava Nijinska and Her École de Mouvement 311 m a ria r atanova Pavlo Tychyna ‘The Highest Power’

321

12 Kyiv, the 1920s, and Modernism in Music dag m ar a t urchyn- du vi ra k

322

Contents

Pavlo Tychyna ‘Lull’ (excerpt) 342 13 Music in the Theatre of Les Kurbas ya na l e one nko PART 4

343

THE INVISIBLE MADE VISIBLE 359

Bronislava Nijinska On the Theatre (notebook excerpt) 361 14 Les Kurbas’s Early Work at the Berezil: From Bodies in Motion to Performing the Invisible 362 v i rl ana t k acz Vladimir Lenin ‘Why worship the new?’

386

15 Abstraction and Ukrainian Futurist Literature o l e h s . il ny t zkyj

387

Klyment Redko In sight of the sun (autobiography excerpt)

407

16 The Graphic Arts: From Page Design to Theatre 408 m yros l ava m. mu d ra k Pavlo Tychyna ‘Rhythm’

442

17 Dissecting Time/Space: The Scottish Play and the New Technology of Film 443 i r ena r . m ak aryk Natalka Bilotserkivets ‘We’ll not die in Paris’ (excerpt)

478

18 On the World Stage: The Berezil in Paris and New York i r ena r . m ak aryk PART 5

479

ELEGIES: REFLECTIONS ON THE FUTURE PAST 515

Serhiy Zhadan ‘The End of Ukrainian Syllabotonic Verse’

517

19 Vsevolod Meyerhold and Les Kurbas 519 b é at r ice p icon - va lli n wi th vero ni ka gop ko-p e re ve rz e va Pericles ‘Funeral Oration over the Athenian Dead’ (excerpt)

537

20 Les Kurbas and the Spiritual Foundations of the Ukrainian Avant-garde 538 ne l l i k ornie nko Les Kurbas ‘Premonition’ (excerpt) 567

vii

viii Contents

Appendices 1 Production List 569 2 Kyiv, Historical Timeline 583 Contributors 589 Index 593

Acknowledgments

This book has had a long, but loving, gestation period during which it profited both from conversations with many people and from work in many archives. Numerous exchanges among the contributors, as well as with the editors of this volume, both at conferences and by way of the Internet, were fruitful, enriching, and catalytic, igniting ideas and discovering new connections about as yet little charted territory. A window into this world was first opened for us by two actors of the Berezil Theatre, Yosyp Hirniak and Roman Cherkashyn, who generously shared their stories, insights, and archives. We would like to thank Volodymyr Hrycyn and Bohdan Boychuk in New York as well as Les Taniuk and Nelli Kornienko in Kyiv for first introducing us to the wealth of material available. We would like to thank Roman Weretelnyk for his constant support and enthusiasm for this project and, especially, the Mykhailo and Oksana Sosnowsky Memorial Fund of which he is the executor, and which has generously funded the publication of this book. We are also grateful to The Ukrainian Canadian Foundation of Taras Shevchenko (UCFTS), which contributed additional funds, enabling the inclusion of supplementary images. The Social Sciences and Humanities Federation of Canada provided seed money, augmented in subsequent years by the University of Ottawa’s Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies, which enabled the hiring of (then) graduate student Elena Ilina, who acted as editorial assistant throughout most of this project. Tobi Kozakewich assisted at an early stage, while Lukash Monczak provided efficient scanning skills at various stages. A grant from the Canadian Foundation for Ukrainian Studies enabled the editors to hire an indexer. We would like to thank Barbara Czarnecki and Ruth Pincoe for completing work begun by Elena Ilina. We would like to thank the artists of Yara Arts Group, especially Watoku Ueno, for providing innumerable insights into the art of making theatre, Wanda Phipps and Dzvinia Orlowsky for their elegant translations of the poetry. The editors wish to thank Mr Gibbs Raetz, Pacific Palisades, for unfettered access to the Bronislava Nijinska Archives (Pacific Palisades, now in the Library of Congress); Edward Kasinec, Head, the New York Public Library, Slavic Baltic, East European and Eurasian Collections; the San Francisco Performing Arts Library

x Acknowledgments

and Museum (PALM); The Museum of Modern Art Archives (MOMA, New York); the Lincoln Centre Archives; Chrystyna Pevny, Maria Shust, and Hanya Krill at the Ukrainian Museum in New York; the National Gallery of Canada Library (Ottawa); the Ukrainian State Museum of Music, Theatre, and Film Arts (Kyiv); the Shevchenko Theatre Museum (Kharkiv); and the Les Kurbas Centre (Kyiv). For various assistance, advice, and stimulating exchanges along the way, we wish to thank Ruslan Leonenko, Natalia Ermakova, Halya Stefanova, Iryna Volytska, Volodymyr Pasichnyk, Olena Sedunova, Serhiy Gordiev, Nina Medvedieva, Nadia Sokolenko, Kostya Strilets (Ukraine), Elena Zheltova, Georgii Kovalenko (Russia), Sebastian Kreth (Austria), Tamara Vajagic, Tamara Trojanowska, Brian Foss, Robert Klymasz (Canada), Nina Vetrova, Mel Gordon, Svitlana Matviyenko, Oksana Radysh, Michael Naydan (USA), and Maren Ballerstedt and his staff at the Stadtarchiv Magdeburg (Germany). Finally, the editors would like to thank the staff at the University of Toronto Press, particularly acquisitions editor Richard Ratzlaff, designer Val Cooke, and managing editor Barbara Porter. The Editors

Permissions

The Editors wish to thank Serhiy Zhadan for permission to cite his poem ‘The End of Ukrainian Syllabotonic Verse,’ which first appeared in Ukrainian in Ballads of War and Reconstruction (Kalvaria, 2001) and in English in the translation of Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipps in In a Different Light: A Bilingual Anthology of Ukrainian Literatures (Lviv: Sribne Slovo, 2008). Blaise Cendrars’s poem ‘La tête’ has been reprinted with permission from Éditions Denoël; the English translation, ‘The Head,’ has been reprinted from The Cubist Poets in Paris: An Anthology, edited by L.C. Breunig, by permission of the University of Nebraska Press. © 1995 by the University of Nebraska Press. Thanks to Natalka Bilotserkivets for her permission to publish her poem ‘We’ll not die in Paris,’ translated from Ukrainian by Dzvinia Orlowsky. A special note of thanks to Dmytro Horbachov for graciously permitting us to reprint many illustrations that first appeared in his Ukrainian Avant-garde Art 1910s–1930s / Ukrains’kyi avanthard 1910–1930 rokiv (Kyiv: Mystetstvo, 1996). Every effort has been made to locate the copyright holders of images reproduced in this volume. The Editors welcome any new information that may have escaped their extensive searches.

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Illustrations

1.1 Vadym Meller, Mask. Sketch for Bronislava Nijinska’s dance to the music of Chopin at the École de Mouvement, 1919 22 2.1 Kyiv. View of the Dnipro River and Lavra (Monastery of the Caves) from the bell tower 27 2.2 Les Kurbas, 1908 28 2.3 Solovtsov Theatre, 1913 30 2.4 Solovtsov troupe, 1906–7 31 2.5 Konstantin Mardzhanov 32 2.6 Vera Yureneva 32 2.7 Ivan Marianenko, 1912 35 2.8 Mykola Sadovsky in Nikolai Gogol’s (Mykola Hohol’s) Inspector General, Sadovsky Theatre, 1908 35 2.9 Troitsky Dom 36 2.10 Sadovsky troupe 37 2.11 Ivan Karpenko-Kary 38 2.12 Scene from Marko Kropyvnytsky’s Po revizii (After the Inspection) 40 2.13 Scene from Volodymyr Vynnychenko’s Moloda krov (Young Blood), directed by Ivan Marianenko. Sadovsky Theatre, 1913 41 2.14 Vera Komisarzhevskaia 43 2.15 Vsevolod Meyerhold, 1925 44 2.16 Aleksandr Tairov 44 2.17 Kijow (Kyiv). Coffeehouse ‘Udziałowa’ 46 3.1 View of Dnipro River port and Podil 53 3.2 Kontrakty. Kyiv’s contract market in the Podil area 54 3.3 Kyiv. Synagogue 55 3.4 Indoor market (Bessarabka) 56 3.5 Map of Kiev/Kyiv, 1900 57 3.6 Fundukleivska Street 58 3.7 Electrical power plant 59 3.8 Street scene: Khreshchatyk 60 3.9 Tsarist Minister Stolypin’s statue being taken down, 16 March 1917, Duma Square 62 3.10 Mykhailo Hrushevsky 63

xiv

Illustrations

3.11 3.12 3.13 3.14 3.15 3.16 3.17 3.18 3.19 3.20 3.21 3.22 3.23

Kyiv. Revolutionary troops celebrate, 1 May 1917 64 Demonstration in support of the Central Rada 65 Destruction of Kyiv. Oko (Berlin) 66 Germans in Kyiv. Changing of the guard, 1918 67 Pavlo Skoropadsky, Kyiv, 1918 68 The Directory. Volodymyr Vynnychenko and Symon Petliura 69 Red Army on Khreshchatyk Street, 5 Feburary 1919 70 Denikin’s troops marching on to St Sophia Square, 31 August 1919 71 Women at the proclamation of the Ukrainian National Republic, 1918 75 Cover of the journal Soltse truda, no. 1, 1919 78 Andriivsky Sobor (St Andrew’s) in Kyiv 78 Les Kurbas 81 Pavlo Kovzhun, The City (from Sviatoslav Hordynsky, Pavlo Kovzhun, 1896–1939, 1943) 85 Pilgrims at Pecherska Lavra (Monastery of the Caves) 99 Golden Gates of Kyiv 100 St Volodymyr Cathedral 101 Aleksandr Kuprin 103 An encounter 105 Pecherska Lavra Dormition Cathedral (11th century) 106 Mykhailivsky sobor (St Michael’s Cathedral complex) 107 ‘The eyes of a Kyiv girl are looking at you’ 110 Mikhail Bulgakov 112 Monument to St Vladimir (Volodymyr) 117 Velyka Volodymyrska Street 118 Corner of Velyka Volodymyrska and Prorizna Streets, Kyiv 119 Valerian Pidmohylny 121 Kyiv panorama 124 Kyiv. Bergonier Theatre 140 Poster for Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925) 141 Poster for Louis Feuillade’s Fantômas (1913–14) 143 Schantzer Theatre in Kyiv, upper foyer 144 Poster for Le Bargy’s L’Assassinat du duc de Guise (1908) 146 Max Linder 148 Asta Nielsen 148 Scene from Giovanni Pastrone’s Cabiria (1914) 153 Babylonian scene from D.W. Griffth’s Intolerance (1916) 154 Aleksandr Khanzhonkov 155 Scene from Władysław Starewicz’s Cameraman’s Revenge (1912) 155 Scene from Yevgeny Bauer’s Song of Triumphant Love (1915) 156 Yevgeny Bauer 157 Scene from Yakov Protozanov’s The Queen of Spades (1916) 163 Alexandra Exter, ca. 1912 171 Alexandra Exter. Bridge. Sèvre, 1912 173 Oleksander Bohomasov, Fire in Kyiv, 1916 177 St Sophia Cathedral 180

4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 4.8 4.9 4.10 4.11 4.12 4.13 4.14 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 5.7 5.8 5.9 5.10 5.11 5.12 5.13 5.14 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4

Illustrations

7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 8.5 8.6 8.7 8.8 8.9 8.10 8.11 9.1 9.2 9.3 9.4 9.5 9.6 9.7 9.8 9.9 9.10 9.11 9.12 9.13 9.14 9.15 9.16 9.17 9.18 9.19 9.20 9.21 10.1

xv

Yiddish Writers’ Group, Kyiv, 1912 200 Semen Semdor, signed photo 202 A group of Kyiv Lige activists with two American delegates, 1920 203 Cover of the journal Baginem (Dawn) 205 Portrait of Mykhail Semenko by Anatol Petrytsky, 1929 221 Yosyp Hirniak as a rich peasant with puppet houses that ran away from him, in Les Kurbas’s production of Dictatorship, 1930 223 Founders, Ukrainian State Academy of Art, Kyiv, 1917 225 VAPLITE, 1926 227 Scene from Myna Mazailo, directed by Les Kurbas and designed by Vadym Meller, 1929 229 Les Kurbas’s production of Prologue at the Berezil, 1926 231 Ceramic plates. Dybyntsi, Kyiv province, 1905 232 Abstract pysanky designs 233 Mykola Krychevsky, textile designs 235 Scene from production of Mérimée’s La Jacquerie at the Berezil 236 Pysanky designs 238 Ivan Marianenko as Khlestiakov in the production of Gogol’s Inspector General at the Sadovsky Theatre, 1908 244 Panas Saksahansky, People’s Artist of the Republic. Cover: Nove mystetstvo 13 (1926) 244 Liubov Hakkebush in Lisova pisnia (Forest Song), 1918–19 246 Julius Osterwa 249 Cover by Aleksandr Schervachidze of Vasily Kamensky’s The Book on Evreinov, 1917 250 Konstantin Mardzhanov 252 Isaak Rabinovich, set design for Oscar Wilde’s Salome, 1919 253 Isaak Rabinovich, costume sketch for Salome production, directed by Konstantin Mardzhanov. Lenin Theatre, Kyiv, 1919 254 Isaak Rabinovich, set design for Salome, 1919 255 Isaak Rabinovich, costume sketches for Soldiers, Salome, 1919 256 Vera Yureneva 257 Anatol Petrytsky, self-portrait, 1926 259 Alexander Dovzhenko, portrait of Pavlo Tychyna in Hart, vol. 1, 1924 260 Marko Tereshchenko at the Young Theatre 261 Scene from Carnival, directed by Marko Tereshchenko, design by Vadym Meller. Hnat Mykhailychenko Theatre, Kyiv, 1923 262 Scene from Universal Necropolis, directed by Marko Tereshchenko, design by Vadym Meller 263 Scene from Universal Necropolis, directed by Marko Tereshchenko, design by Vadym Meller 264 Favst Lopatynsky, 1919 265 Scene from They Made Fools of Themselves, 1924 266 Yosyp Hirniak as Kuksa in They Made Fools of Themselves, 1924 267 Semen Semdor 268 Les Kurbas, 1919 279

xvi

Illustrations

10.2 Scene from Young Theatre’s production of Volodymyr Vynnychenko’s The Black Panther and the White Bear 281 10.3 Les Kurbas and Olimpiia Dobrovolska in Max Halbe’s Youth 282 10.4 Olimpia Dobrovolska in Autumn, from Evening of Études by Oleksander Oles 282 10.5 Anatol Petrytsky 283 10.6 Young Theatre rehearses the movements of the chorus for Oedipus Rex 286 10.7 Les Kurbas as Oedipus, Vira Shchepanska as Jocasta, and Volodymyr Leontovych as Creon 288 10.8 Chorus in Oedipus Rex 289 10.9 Hnat Yura and Yona Shevchenko as the shepherds, Les Kurbas as Oedipus 290 10.10 Chorus reacts to the news the servant brings 291 10.11 Les Kurbas, Vasyl Vasylko in Franz Grillparzer’s Woe to the Liar 292 10.12 Traditional Nativity puppet house 293 10.13 Traditional puppet representing King Herod 294 10.14 Traditional puppet representing Death 294 10.15 Ryta Neshchadymenko 297 10.16 Les Kurbas and his bride, Valentyna Chystiakova, a student of Bronislava Nijinska 299 10.17 Bronislava Nijinska, letter to Nadia Shuvarska 299 10.18 The Chorus as ‘Ten Words of the Poet’ in Kurbas’s restaging of a Shevchenko poem 300 11.1 Mikhail Mordkin in Aziade. Newspaper cutting in scrapbook 312 11.2 Bronislava Nijinska in Papillon costume, Le Carnival 312 11.3 Bronislava Nijinska’s draft sketch for a poster announcing her École de Mouvement 315 11.4 Bronislava Nijinska’s draft sketch of her announcement of the École de Mouvement, for ‘artists of opera and drama.’ Torn fragment from inside her 1919 notebook 316 11.5 Bronislava Nijinska choreographic sketch, ca. 1920 317 11.6 Bronislava Nijinska, six choreographic diagrams 317 11.7 Bronislava Nijinska, excerpt from diary, Kyiv, 1919 318 11.8 Birthday greetings to Bronislava Nijinska from her students at the École de Mouvement 319 12.1 Mykola Leontovych, in the 1910s 323 12.2 Book cover by Vasyl Krychevsky of Dmytro Revutsky’s collection of Ukrainian Dumas and Historical Songs 326 12.3 Pylyp Kozytsky. Portrait by Anatol Petrytsky 328 12.4 Mykhailo Verykivsky 330 12.5 A page from Levko Revutsky’s Symphony no. 2, first movement 332 12.6 Levko Revutsky 333 12.7 Mykhailo Verykivsky. Portrait by Anatol Petrytsky 334 12.8 Victor Kosenko 335 12.9 Borys Liatoshynsky 335 12.10 A page from Borys Liatoshynsky’s Otrazheniia 337

Illustrations

13.1 13.2 13.3 13.4 13.5 13.6 13.7 14.1 14.2 14.3 14.4 14.5 14.6 14.7 14.8 14.9 14.10 14.11 14.12 14.13 15.1 15.2 15.3 15.4 15.5 15.6 15.7 15.8 15.9 15.10 15.11 15.12 16.1 16.2 16.3 16.4 16.5 16.6 16.7 16.8 16.10

xvii

Les Kurbas, 1920 344 Yuly Meitus in his later years 344 Aleksandr Scriabin 348 Kyrylo Stetsenko 349 Dmitry Shostakovich and Yuly Meitus 350 From the score for Haidamaky 352 Mykhailo Verykivsky 356 Movement class at the Berezil 363 Berezil Artistic Association 364 Scene from Ruhr 367 Vadym Meller, sketch for a female costume in Gas 369 Vadym Meller, sketch for the officer’s costume, Gas 369 The entrance of the workers, Gas 370 Vadym Meller’s set for Gas 371 Scene from Gas 372 The ‘European-American Concert’ scene in Jimmie Higgins 374 Pavlo Dolyna as America, ‘European-American Concert’ scene, Jimmie Higgins 375 Jimmie Higgins as his thoughts huddle 378 Jimmie Higgins as his thoughts scatter under torture 379 Jimmie Higgins surrounded by his thoughts in his final moments 380 Mykhail Semenko, 1924 388 Kablepoema Karta No. 3 390 Mykhail Semenko, ‘Suprepoeziia’ (3 October 1922, Kyiv), from the cycle of visual poems Moia mozaika 391 Mykhail Semenko, ‘Svit’ (9 July 1922), from ‘My Mosaic’ 396 Zhovtnevyi zbirnyk panfuturystiv (The Panfuturists’ October Collection, 1923) 397 Geo Shkurupy, Dvyhunamy … (By Means of Engines, …). Poster in Geo Shkurupii, Psykhetozy (1922) 398 Page from Favst Lopatynsky’s ‘Dynamo,’ a ‘visual’ film script 399 Mykhail Semenko, Blok-notes (Kyiv, 1919). Design by Anatol Petrytsky 400 Semafor u maibutnie (Semaphore to the Future) (Kyiv, 1922) 401 Honh Komunkulta (Kyiv, 1924) 402 Semafor (page 2) 403 Futurist advertisement from Avangard: Almanakh proletarskykh myttsiv Novoi generatsii, Kyiv, 1930 404 Pavlo Kovzhun, cover design for the journal Nova generatsiia, 1929 410 Page from a Bible printed in Lviv, 1636 412 Taras Shevchenko, The Judges’ Meeting, 1844 413 Mykhailo Zhuk, drawing 414 Mykhailo Zhuk, cover design for the journal Muzahet, 1919 414 Vasyl Krychevsky, book cover for the novel Maister Korablia, 1928 417 Heorhy Narbut, cover design for the journal Mystetsvto, 1919 417 Zaborovsky heraldic poem 418 / 16.9 Heraldic poem 419 The Life of St Nicholas, second half of the 16th century. Wood tempera, village of Liskovate 420

xviii Illustrations

16.11 Mykhail Semenko, poetry-painting ‘Longing for the Beast,’ 1922 421 16.12 Anatol Petrytsky, costume design for ‘Adam’ for the production of Gogol’s Vii, directed by Hnat Yura (Kharkiv, 1924) 422 16.13 Cover of Marko Tereshchenko’s book Mystetsvo diistva, 1921, designed by Vadym Meller 423 16.14 Volodymyr Tatlin, design for Zustrich na perekhresti, 1927 423 16.15 Agit-train 424 16.16 Vasyl Yermilov, poster design ‘Construction of National Home’ 425 16.17 El Lissitzky, design at the Pressa-Köln exhibition, 1928 426 16.18 Vasyl Yermilov, Kanatka (Cable), a portable wall newspaper shown in Cologne, 1928 427 16.19 Vasyl Yermilov, wall newspaper ‘Generator,’ 1928 427 16.20 Vasyl Yermilov, murals for Central Red Army Club, 1920 428 16.21 Vasyl Yermilov, cover design for the miscellany Sem’ plius try, 1918 430 16.22 Mykhailo Boichuk and his students, 1910 431 16.23 School of Mykhailo Boichuk, cover design for Ivan Franko’s Velykyi shum-povist’ 432 16.24 Unidentified Boichukist artist, Literacy, early 1920s 433 17.1 Vasyl Krychevsky, design for the VUFKU logo 444 17.2 Lenin’s decree about the nationalization of cinemas 445 17.3 Liubov Hakkebush as Lady Macbeth and Ivan Marianenko as Macbeth in Les Kurbas’s 1924 production 446 17.4 ‘Castle Gates’ printed in giant letters on the screen behind the murder of Banquo 447 17.5 Amvrosy Buchma as the Fool in Les Kurbas’s 1924 production of Macbeth 447 17.6 Sergei Eisenstein 449 17.7 Ivan Kavalaridze 449 17.8 Anatol Petrytsky, portrait of Vasyl Vasylko, 1931 452 17.9 Yosyp Hirniak 452 17.10 Scene from the film Ostap Bandura 453 17.11 Boris Zavelev 454 17.12 Piotr Chardynin 454 17.13 Aleksei Granovsky 455 17.14 Scene from the film Ukraziia 456 17.15 Heorhy Stabovy 457 17.16 Yosyp Hirniak in Kurbas’s film Vendetta 458 17.17 Hirniak as the Priest in Vendetta 459 17.18 Trauberg, Yutkevitch, and Kozintsev 460 17.19 Directors’ lab, Odesa, 1925 461 17.20 The journal Siluety announces the Berezil in Odesa 462 17.21 Scene from Les Kurbas’s film MacDonald 463 17.22 Les Kurbas and designer Vadym Meller in Odesa 466 17.23 Alexander Dovzhenko 466 17.24 Scene from Les Kurbas’s production of October Revue 467 17.25 Amvrosy Buchma in the 1928 film of Jimmie Higgins 468

Illustrations

17.26 17.27 18.1 18.2 18.3 18.4 18.5 18.6 18.7 18.8 18.9 18.10 18.11 18.12 18.13 18.14 18.15

18.16 18.17 18.18 18.19 18.20 18.21 19.1 19.2 19.3 19.4 19.5 19.6 19.7 20.1 20.2 20.3 20.4 20.5 20.6 20.7

xix

Georgy Tasin 468 VUFKU logo 468 Poster for Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels 480 Map of the Exposition 481 North view of Exposition. Lalique fountain and Esplanade des Invalides 482 Soviet pavilion designed by Konstantin Melnikov 483 Paris, view of Right Bank pavilions 484 A guidebook to the Exposition. Russian entry with Melnikov’s pavilion 485 Soviet exhibit at the Palais de Justice 487 Cover of Soviet catalogue of the Exposition (Paris edition) 488 Vadym Meller, set for Secretary of the Labour Union 489 Vadym Meller surrounded by his designs for the Berezil 491 Vadym Meller and Berezil actresses in his costumes for Hello on Radio 477, 1929 492 Title page of The Little Review, Winter 1926 493 Page from The Little Review 495 From The Little Review: photo portraits of Borys Tiahno and Vadym Meller 496 From The Little Review: mentioning Meller’s set model and listing Meller under ‘Russian’ theatre designers and artists; images and models by Isaak Rabinovich 498 From The Little Review: two sets by Vadym Meller 499 Vadym Meller, set for Machine Wreckers 500 From The Little Review: the set for Gas by Vadym Meller, director Favst Lopatynsky, and Pavlo Dolyna as America in Jimmie Higgins 501 From The Little Review: pictures of Meyerhold and Tairov 502 From The Little Review, with set by Boris Aronson 503 Les Kurbas on the cover of Sovremennyi teatr, nos. 32–3 (1928) 505 Les Kurbas, 1929 520 Death certificate that states Les Kurbas was shot, 1937 521 N. Ulianov’s portrait of Vsevolod Meyerhold as Pierrot, in Aleksandr Blok’s Balaganchik. Mise-en-scène, Meyerhold 523 D.E. (1924). Mise-en-scène, Vsevolod Meyerhold 527 Sergei Tretiakov, The Earth in Turmoil, 1923. Mise-en-scène, Vsevolod Meyerhold 531 D.E. (1924). Mise-en- scène, Vsevolod Meyerhold 533 Les Kurbas, prison photo (Lubianka prison) 533 Les Kurbas at Young Theatre 539 Rudolf Steiner 540 Hryhory Skovoroda lithograph by Mykhailo Zhuk, 1925 540 Actors of Les Kurbas’s Berezil Theatre 542 Volodymyr Leontovych as Creon and Les Kurbas as Oedipus 544 Directors’ lab at the Berezil, 1925 546 Jimmie Higgins and the King 547

xx

Illustrations

20.8 Les Kurbas working with Olympia Dobrovolsky 549 20.9 Mykola Kulish reading his play to the artists of the Berezil, 1927 550 20.10 Yosyp Hirniak, Marian Krushelnytsky, and Valentyna Chystiakova in the People’s Malakhy 551 20.11 Scene from act 1 of The People’s Malakhy 552 20.12 Scene in psychiatric ward in The People’s Malakhy 553 20.13 Photo of Berezil artists who were rehearsing Maklena Grasa in Mezhyhiria, summer 1933 554 20.14 Dmytro Miliutenko as Zarembsky and Yosyp Hirniak as ZbroĪek in Maklena Grasa 556 20.15 Yosyp Hirniak as the dapper ZbroĪek in Maklena Grasa, 1933 558 20.16 Yosyp Hirniak as ZbroĪek, who lost all, in Maklena Grasa 559 20.17 Yosyp Hirniak as ZbroĪek, with watch, in Maklena Grasa 560 20.18 Natalia Uzhvy as Maklena and Marian Krushelnytsky as Padur in the doghouse scene, Maklena Grasa 561 20.19 Les Kurbas in prison 563 Colour Illustrations (following p. 24) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

Bell tower of St Sofia Cathedral, Kyiv Oleksander Bohomazov, Electrician, 1915 Oleksander Bohomazov, Lvivska Street (Tram) (Kyiv), 1914 Alexandra Exter, Fundukleivska Street at Night (Kyiv), 1914 Sukher (Issachar) Ber Ryback, The City, 1917 Klyment Redko, Factory, 1922 Alexander Archipenko, Boxers, 1914 Kazimir Malevich, Suprematist composition from the 1920s Alexandra Exter, design for Famira Kifared (Thamira Khytharedes) Vadym Meller, Fear, painting of Bronislava Nijinska, 1919 Vadym Meller, Bronislava Nijinska dancing in Mephisto Valse, 1919 Vadym Meller, stage design for Marko Tereshchenko’s Carnival, 1923 Anatol Petrytsky, design for Lesia Ukrainka’s Kaminnyi hospodar (1921) Vasyl Yermilov, design for the agit-train Red Ukraine, 1921 Isaak Rabinovich, design for Fuenta Ovejuna, 1919 Oleksander Khvostenko-Khvostov, stage design for Upton Sinclair’s MOB, 1924 David Burliuk, Vladimir Burliuk, and Vasily Kamenskii, Tango with Cows, 1914 David and Vladimir Burliuk, The Bung, 1913 Vasyl Yermilov, cover design for Stikhy Ekateriny Neimaier (Poems by Ekaterina Neimaer), 1920 El Lissitzky, cover of Ukrainishe folk mayses (Ukrainian Folk Tales), translated into Yiddish by Leyb Kvitko, 1922 Alexandra Exter, cover for the Kyiv journal Hermes, 1919

Illustrations

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The following abbreviations are used in the captions for archival sources: BM BNA BPV CSALA CSAMLAU

Bakrushin Museum, Moscow Bronislava Nijinska’s Archive Beatrice Picon-Vallin archive Central State Archives of Literature and Arts, Moscow Central State Archives – Museum of Literature and Arts of Ukraine, Kyiv CSPA Central State Photo Archive (Kyiv) DMTMKU Ukrainian State Museum of Theatre, Music, and Film Arts (Kyiv) NAMU National Museum of Art (Ukraine) NKLKC Nelli Komienko, Les Kurbas Centre, Kyiv PALM San Francisco Performing Arts Library and Museum PHAM Parkhomivsky History and Art Museum RGAKFD Russian Federal Archives RM SPb Russian Museum, St Petersburg SMUFA State Museum of Ukrainian Fine Arts SODRAC Society for Reproduction Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers TsDAMLMU Archive-Museum of Literature and Art (Ukraine) UNDIASD Ukrainian Research Institute for Archival and Records Studies VT Virlana Tkacz personal archive YHOD Yosyp Hirniak and Olimpia Dobrovoska Archive at the Ukrainian Museum, New York YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York

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A Note on Transliteration

For readability and ease of pronunciation, the editors have chosen to simplify the spelling of Slavic personal names in the body of this study (so, for example, ‘Sofia’ rather than ‘Sofiia’). A modified version of the Library of Congress System, as indicated in the tables below, has been followed. The editors have used the commonly accepted English forms of the names of well-known personalities (e.g., Meyerhold, rather than Meierkhol’d), while the names of authors who have published in English (e.g., Tkacz, Shkandrij) are written as published rather than as transliterated. We have retained the distinction in spelling between Russian and Ukrainian names (e.g., Aleksandr: Russian; Oleksander: Ukrainian), except when they are very well known (e.g., Alexander Archipenko). The notes, however, follow the standard Library of Congress System (including hard and soft marks). The names of cities are cited following currently accepted official usage (e.g., Moscow, Odesa). Transliteration tables Ukrainian (Modified Library of Congress) a –a

ʀ –i

ɮ –f

6 –b

ɣ –y

ɯ – kh

ɜ – v

ɤ –k

ɰ – ts

ɝ – h

ɥ –1

ɱ – ch

ʉ – g

ɦ –m

ɲ – sh

ɞ – d

ɧ –n

ɳ – shch

e –e

ɨ –ɨ

ɸ – iu

ɽ – ie

ɩ –p

ɹ – ia

ɠ – zh

ɪ –r

ɶ – ’ (soft sign) not used in text

ɡ –z

ɫ –s

-ɿɣɢɣ – y endings of names in text

ɢ –\

ɬ –t

ɘ – Yu initial letter in names in text

ɿ – i

\ –u

ə – Ya initial letter in names in text ȯ – Ye initial letter in names in text

xxiv A Note on Transliteration Russian (Modified Library of Congress) a –a

ɥ –1

ɱ – ch

6 –b

ɦ –m

ɲ – sh

ɜ –v

ɧ –n

ɳ – shch

ɝ –g

ɨ –ɨ

ɴ – ‘ (hard sign) not used in text

ɞ –d

ɩ –p

ɵ –y

e –e

ɪ –r

ɶ – ’ (soft sign) not used in text

ë – io

ɫ –s

ɷ –e

ɠ – zh

ɬ –t

ɸ – iu

ɡ –z

ɍ –u

ɢ –i

ɮ –f

ɹ – ia ɢɣ – y endings of names in text

ɣ –i

ɯ – kh

ɘ – Yu initial letter in names in text

ɤ –k

ɰ – ts

ə – Ya initial letter in names in text

MODERNISM IN KYIV: JUBILANT EXPERIMENTATION

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Introduction: Reconnecting Modernisms irena r. makaryk

In the spring of 1914, the young Canadian artist Edwin Holgate left Paris and set off for Kyiv, then part of the Russian empire, to join up with artist friends he had met while studying in France. Holgate felt a ‘great affinity’ for and ‘kinship’ with the ‘Russians.’1 What struck him most was their ‘vigour’ and ‘warmth,’ the power of their drawings, and their strong use of colour.2 Disappointed by his studies at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, he claimed to have learned more from those working beside him than from those who taught him. Outside Kyiv, he painted his first rural landscapes of distant views and clouds. Not yet distinguished work, the small oil paintings ‘On the Dniepr [Dnipro], Ukraine’ and ‘Windmill, Ukraine’ gave little indication that Holgate would become known for sensual nudes set in the Canadian wilderness or that he would become a central figure in the development of Canadian modern art.3 When the First World War broke out, Holgate hurriedly, and with great difficulty, made his way back home to Montreal by way of the Trans-Siberian railway. His friends were left to experience years of upheaval: world war, revolution, civil war, a brief period of Ukrainian independence, and, finally, the creation of Soviet Ukraine in 1922. Although by the time he was interviewed about these early years Holgate’s memory was rickety, he must have encountered Alexandra Exter, who frequented the Académie de la Grande Chaumière at that time, and is known to have returned to Kyiv in 1914. A seminal bridging figure, Exter (discussed in a number of the essays in this volume; see also colour plates 4, 9, 21) linked the Parisian Cubists, the Italian Futurists, and the ‘Russians’ – among them, Ukrainians Alexander Archipenko (see plate 7), Sonia Delaunay, Vadym Meller (see plates 10, 11, 12), and Anatol Petrytsky (see plate 13). Close to such well-known avant-gardists as Apollinaire, Picasso, Braque, and Chagall, Exter opened a studio-workshop in Kyiv that became a hub of artistic and intellectual life. From there, she also travelled back and forth to Moscow.4 At the same time as Holgate travelled East, other artists such as Vladimir Tatlin, Vadym Meller, and David Shterenberg travelled to the West: to Vienna, Berlin, Munich, or Paris. This brief glance at artists’ peregrinations may be viewed as a synecdoche of some of the prominent themes of Modernism in Kiev/Kyiv/Kɢʀɜ/Kɢɟɜ/Kijów/ʥʥʲʩ ʷ: Jubilant Experimentation: the cross-pollination between East and West, North and South, the creation and dissemination of international modernism, as well as the

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serendipity, evanescence, and incalculability of chance – the unexpected human encounters which spurred creativity. Great works of art and the stimulus for their creation could be – and were – found as easily in the ‘periphery’ as in the ‘centre’: not just in Paris, New York, Berlin, but also in Kyiv and Montreal. As the concluding essay in this volume will show, ironically, Kyiv – the ‘provincial periphery’ – would become the carrier to the West of some of the most radical of modernist art forms, in a continuing cycle or confluence of new ideas, forms, and methods. Modernism in Kiev/Kyiv/Kɢʀɜ/Kɢɟɜ/Kijów/ʥʥʲʩ ʷ is the first book-length study of this topic. As such, it has three clear goals. First, this book adds Kyiv to the list of such major centres of modernist dialogue as Paris, Vienna, London, and New York. The city’s multiple identities are suggested by the various spellings of its name: Kyiv (Ukrainian), Kiev (Russian), Kijów (Polish), and ʥʥʲʩ ʷ (Yiddish). Until now a silent presence in Western accounts of the cultural topography of modernism, multicultural Kyiv is here restored in its historical, intellectual, and artistic complexity, with its interplay between East and West, past and present. Here we see the active ties that fused abstraction, German Expressionism, American cinema and jazz, Constructivism, Ukrainian Baroque poetry, folk puppet theatre, and Byzantine iconography. Second, the book argues that Kyiv’s modernist impulse is most prominently displayed in the experimental work of Les Kurbas, one of the masters of the early Soviet stage, who employed ‘estrangement’ or ‘Brechtian’ techniques nearly a decade before Brecht, and was one of the first in the world to incorporate film with live actors on stage as an organic part of the theatrical narrative. Theatre itself is still one of the most understudied of modernist genres, though it was, arguably, the most influential genre of the early twentieth century because of both its political and its synthetic nature which embraced the other arts, thus making it a special kind of ‘laboratory’ where the general state of culture was presented and new possibilities were explored. Director, actor, playwright, translator, and film-maker, Kurbas was, as his contemporaries called him, ‘the man who was theatre.’ He created exciting theatre pieces, and trained a generation of young actors, designers, composers, and directors in the art of making experimental theatre and film. Turning away from both realistic art (art as surface facsimile) and from narrowly conceived ideas of national art, he created conceptual theatre productions that he hoped would astonish the world. Hailed by Meyerhold as the greatest living Soviet theatre director, Kurbas became one of the ‘blank pages’ of Soviet history. Executed in the far north in 1937, his papers, set design models, photos, and company destroyed, Kurbas became a prohibited and dangerous name until the late 1950s, when the laboriously slow process of ‘rehabilitation’ began. His theoretical works were not permitted publication in Ukraine until the late 1980s, and even under glasnost were still severely censored. Only after Ukraine achieved independence in 1991 was it possible openly to discuss his career and investigate biographical details, including the year and place of his death. Third, this book examines the wide variety of cultural activities of Ukrainians, Russians, Jews, Poles, and others that found their way into the experimental milieu in which Kurbas created his productions, and so brings together insights from

Introduction: Reconnecting Modernisms 5

a variety of disciplines and from hitherto unmined archives into contemporary debates about the nature and definition of modernism. For instance, the productions of the Berezil Artistic Association, Kurbas’s third and most famous company, were the result of connections with the vast creative energies of groups and individuals who lived and worked in Kyiv: Isadora Duncan danced there. Michael (Mikhail) Mordkin taught choreography to Kurbas’s actors, as did Bronislava Nijinska. The first subjectless ballets were created in Nijinska’s École de Mouvement, founded in 1919 in Kyiv. At the same time, Nijinska shared studio space, danceractors, and theoretical discussions with Kurbas and his troupe. Sergei Eisenstein, not yet a film-maker, tested out some of his preliminary ideas about montage in a theatrical endeavour. Grigory Kozintsev, Isaak Rabinovich, Nisson Shifrin, Serge Lifar, Anatol Petrytsky, and Vadym Meller gathered together in Exter’s studio. Petrysky and Meller created wonderful costumes and fantastic ‘constructions’ – set designs. Klyment Redko painted huge posters and decorated ‘agit-trains.’ Victor Shklovsky lectured there. Vsevolod Meyerhold brought his productions to Kyiv, where he ‘faced off’ with the shows of Kurbas, igniting a polemical debate in the press. The Kultur-Lige (Yiddish Culture League) exhibited, among others, the works of El Lissitzky and Boris Aronson. Anatoly Butsky shocked his own musicians with his atonal music. Pavlo Tychyna and Mykhail Semenko turned literary notions upside down with their poetry. Some of the flavour of the excitement and creative exuberance of this period is suggested by excerpts taken from the works of artists, writers, leaders, and critics, as well as by numerous illustrations. This exuberant experimentation is the defining feature of Ukrainian modernism and separates it from its Western variants, argues Irena R. Makaryk in ‘Modernism in Kyiv: Jubilant Experimentation,’ an essay that opens Part One of the volume, ‘Kyiv: “special and bewildering.’’’ Makaryk’s essay contextualizes the Kyiv experience by addressing both some of the broad historical issues and the recurrent terminological themes of the book, including modernism, modernity, identity, and the avant-garde. Mayhill Fowler’s ‘‘‘A Theatrical Mecca’’: The Stages of Kyiv in 1907’ establishes many of the historical and theoretical parameters of the whole volume. Exploring the theatrical landscape of Kyiv in the early part of the twentieth century by teasing out the various and interlocking theatrical worlds (the Russian-language theatre, the Ukrainian-language theatre, and the world of touring companies from Russia and Europe), Fowler attempts to explain why, perhaps improbably, this (then) provincial city of the Russian empire was perceived as a theatrical Mecca. Alluding to the limitations of studies that focus only on one ‘national’ theatre within the complex and fluid cultural situations and boundaries of multi-ethnic and multi-lingual empires, Fowler instead proposes historian Aleksei Miller’s ‘situational approach’ to the topic, which better responds to such imperial circumstances by being attentive to the variety and interaction of various groups. Following Fowler’s lead, Modernism in Kyiv/Kiev is premised upon such a ‘situational’ approach. The contributions of collaborators from around the world extend this view to the broader sphere of the interaction among various arts and technologies. Through the lens of the theatrical world and, more specifically, through the charismatic self-proclaimed modernist, stage and film director Les

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Kurbas, who slips in and out of our focus in the following pages, we may discern the tapestry of modernisms formed by these complex interactions. This efflorescence of cultural activity was to prove short-lived, yet it left its indelible mark on subsequent generations and hundreds of artists, critics, and scholars, some of whom, in moving to the West, enriched modernisms in their newly adopted countries. Michael F. Hamm’s essay, ‘“Special and Bewildering”: A Portrait of LateImperial and Early Soviet Kyiv,’ follows up by taking in a wide spectrum of topics to uncover a diverse, multi-ethnic Kyiv: from historical and political events, including the First World War, revolution, civil war, subsequent periods of anarchy and extreme violence, to the onset of Soviet rule, urban governance, demographics, literacy and education, sports, workers’ clubs, and the artistic explosion of the early Soviet period. Like Fowler, Hamm terms Kyiv a Mecca, but not just for theatre, rather for all spheres of artistic endeavour in which Ukrainians, Russians, and Jews were well represented. Taras Koznarsky’s ‘Three Novels, Three Cities’ invokes the question of ownership: ‘Whose city is this?’ – a question also implicit in the title of this book. Koznarsky studies Kyiv as a ‘text’: the various narratives and spatial and historic landmarks that defined the city in the perceptions and imaginations of its inhabitants, travellers to the city, and those authors who drew upon Kyiv’s legacy in their literary and intellectual works. Following Michael Hamm’s view of a multi-ethnic city, Koznarsky shows how Kyiv served as an anchoring point for articulating various cultural, religious, and national identities which interacted and often clashed. Three novels played particularly important roles in such a discourse. The Pit (Yama) by Aleksandr Kuprin targets the moral decay epitomized in prostitution in the urban milieu at the turn of the century; The White Guard by Mikhail Bulgakov captures the tragic world of revolutionary Kyiv in 1918; while The City by Valerian Pidmohylny traces the progress of a young Ukrainian who comes from the village to conquer the city in the mid-1920s. At the same time as representing three different groups and their different perceptions of Kyiv, these novels also represent different ages – the late imperial period, the civil war, and the early Soviet era. Part One is rounded out by Oleh Sydor-Hybelynda’s ‘Film in Kyiv, 1910–1916.’ In this fascinating glimpse of the international variety of films available to spectators of all linguistic and ethnic backgrounds, Sydor-Hybelynda suggests the way in which the ‘world’ came to Kyiv and how Kyivans, for their part, were connected to the world. Still an almost unknown field of study, the topic of film in Ukraine suggests the wide net being cast by this volume in examining a range of influences and interactions – artistic and technological, national and international, high and low art, elitist and popular. In addition to the Herculean task of exhuming a vast number of the titles of long-forgotten films, Sydor-Hybelynda also claims that this broad, popular form of entertainment was one of the many sources of artistic inspiration and influence on the work of various artists, including Les Kurbas, who himself would turn to creating films in 1924. Part Two, ‘Kyiv the Epicentre,’ begins with Dmytro Horbachov’s essay ‘In the Epicentre of Abstraction: Kyiv during the Time of Kurbas.’ Having lived most of

Introduction: Reconnecting Modernisms 7

his life under the Soviet regime, which reviled modernist art and permitted only descriptive, rather than analytic, art history, Horbachov brings a liberal and suggestive reading of the visual arts of the 1920s to the reader. His vast range of allusions – from folk art, Byzantine, through Baroque art, to Cubism – and his emphasis on the vernacular and even idiosyncratic attempts to convey a sense of the energy, enthusiasm, and new-found liberty of the artists of the time who sought to arrive at a fresh, new understanding of their medium. Horbachov places Alexandra Exter at the centre of this activity: her exploration of non-objective art, her study of rhythm, and her pedagogical achievements in the use of colour, space, and (especially theatre) design. Exter’s studio was also the centre for artists wishing to develop Jewish art as part of Yiddishist nation-building projects, a topic taken up by Gennady Estraikh in his essay ‘The Yiddish Kultur-Lige.’ Kyiv was home to the largest Jewish community in the tsarist empire. Thus, when the Central Rada (Council) declared Ukraine’s autonomy in 1917, it issued its proclamation (the ‘Second Universal’) in four languages: Ukrainian, Yiddish, Russian, and Polish. Seeking complete independence in 1918, the Ukrainian National Republic also introduced national autonomy for the minorities of Ukraine, including the Jews. As Estraikh shows, the Kultur-Lige was conceived as a non-partisan organization whose aim was to construct and promote a new Jewish culture based on Yiddish and secular democratic values. The Kultur-Lige formed a neutral venue where political opponents could cooperate in projects such as education, theatre, and publishing. The Jewish modernist experience partly coincided with the Ukrainian. Poets Osher Shvartsman, hailed as the founder of Soviet Yiddish poetry, and his cousin David Hofshtein began to write in Ukrainian and later switched to Yiddish. The critic Bal-Makhshoves, the linguist Nohum Shtif, and the writer David Bergelson even contended that Ukraine was the main place for Yiddish literary talent. Although the Kultur-Lige model was later emulated in other cities, it never met with the kind of success that it had in Kyiv. Myroslav Shkandrij’s ‘Politics and the Ukrainian Avant-garde’ examines the Ukrainian avant-garde and its major contributions to international modernism as it was shaped by the political struggles of its time. Shkandrij regards the genesis and evolution of the avant-garde not just within the context of Western cultural developments, but also as a response to two revolutionary movements – socialism and national liberation – as well to Soviet attitudes towards Ukrainian culture. Such a combination of ‘revolutions’ strengthened the idea that authority needed toppling, and that artists and writers could borrow freely from a wide spectrum of liberationist currents in exploring their visions of the new. More than others, argues Shkandrij, Ukrainian avant-gardists linked the liberation from prejudices (including from imperialistic attitudes and chauvinism towards minorities) to a spiritually reformed humanity. Echoing the work of other contributors to this volume (including Dmytro Horbachov, Dagmara Turchyn-Duvirak, and Myroslava Mudrak), Shkandrij argues that Ukrainian avant-gardists were also unique in their relationships to indigenous art forms. Symbolic, simplified, abstract forms were already familiar to such artists from icon and folk art. Rather than confronting the ‘Other,’ artists

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recovered the ‘Self’ in tradition. For this reason, claims Shkandrij, the leap to conceptual art was quickly achieved by many artists in the immediate pre- and postrevolutionary years. Using Kazimir Malevich as a case study, Shkandrij analyses the influence of his Ukrainian heritage on his artistic endeavours. Hanna Veselovska’s ‘Kyiv’s Multicultural Theatrical Life, 1917–1926’ completes this part by peering into the worlds of Russian, Polish, Yiddish, and German theatres, as well as into the fascinating and understudied world of clubs, cabarets, mass spectacles, and experimentation in Ukrainian theatre outside of Kurbas’s Berezil. She emphasizes the general trend towards rejuvenating theatre through the use of conventions and techniques taken from the circus, as well as through the combination of ‘high’ with the ‘low,’ the grotesque with the beautiful. Part Three, ‘Fire and Motion,’ opens with Virlana Tkacz’s essay ‘Towards a New Vision of Theatre: Les Kurbas’s Work at the Young Theatre in Kyiv.’ Tkacz examines Kurbas’s formation of the Young Theatre (1917–19), the first step in the process of reorienting and recreating Ukrainian theatre and, more broadly, Kyiv’s cultural life. Kurbas’s work with the Young Theatre culminated in a series of productions that explored the possibility of a theatre inherently related to the groundbreaking work of Bronislava Nijinska in dance, as well as that of Alexandra Exter and Kazimir Malevich in the visual arts. The essay studies in detail those productions that helped Kurbas crystallize a new vision of theatre. Maria Ratanova, in ‘The Choreographic Avant-garde in Kyiv: 1916–1921, Bronislava Nijinska and Her École de Mouvement,’ assesses the work of another important ‘bridging’ figure, Bronislava Nijinska, the great twentieth-century choreographer and soloist dancer. Nijinska founded an innovative school, the École de Mouvement (School of Movement) in Kyiv, where she created the first subjectless ballets. Ratanova brings to the fore the new insight and claim that Nijinska was influenced by the work of visual artists, specifically by Alexandra Exter, whose studio operated in Kyiv from 1919 to 1922 and who was Nijinska’s close friend. Exter’s designs for scenery and costumes, with their ‘kinetic energy’ and ‘masterly development of a particular rhythm’ – suggests Ratanova – spurred Nijinska to create a radical equivalent in her own art form, dance. These abstract or subjectless ballets were recorded in the paintings of Vadym Meller (Kurbas’s favourite designer), their expressive movements and swirling rhythms suggesting the nature of the dance that Nijinska had created.5 Kurbas, for whom movement and rhythm were central to the theatrical experience, also shared studio space, actors/dancers, and discussions with Nijinska, whom he invited to take over the choreographic lessons with his actors. The ideas Nijinska explored and brought to her new works created in Kyiv, argues Ratanova, provided the springboard for world fame, a fame achieved with her masterpiece, the ballet Les Noces, produced shortly after her escape to the West in Paris, and emanating from her Kyivan experience. Virlana Tkacz (in the previous essay) suggests the ballet is related to Les Kurbas’s stylized productions. Turning from dance to music, Dagmara Turchyn-Duvirak’s essay ‘Kyiv, the 1920s, and Modernism in Music’ reveals how the musical ‘explosion’ of the 1920s was almost exclusively created by a new, young generation that turned to musical movements of the West – Impressionism, Constructivism, Urbanism, Expressionism, Neoclassicism, Jazz – as well as to Neo-folklorism. Like Shkandrij, Turchyn suggests

Introduction: Reconnecting Modernisms 9

that Ukrainians looked for a bridge to, rather than a rupture with, the past, while simultaneously being inflected by contemporary ideas and movements. Turchyn also shows how, in the brief period of Ukrainian independence (1917–19), ambitious musical projects were undertaken and conceived. The establishment of the Ukrainian National Republic provided a tremendous stimulus for the creation of musical societies, orchestras, and choirs, some of which toured the world. Among the most fascinating projects, unprecedented and unmatched elsewhere, was a great cycle of 177 concerts of about 2000 musical works that provided a grand overview of all of musical history; in effect, a whole musical library. Also created then were Ukrainian institutions of musical learning – conservatories, colleges, and institutes – that, for the first time, permitted those aspiring to become composers to be able to study on home ground, rather than in Moscow, Prague, or Vienna, as had hitherto been the case. Les Kurbas participated in this world too, teaching a seminar on the interconnections of the arts, and directing operas. Ukrainian musicologists and composers were also in the forefront, creating new theories of ‘modal rhythms.’ Some of them are only now gaining attention. For instance, several years ago the Miller Theatre in New York, known for its innovative programming, presented the work of Nikolai (Mykola) Roslavets.6 This part of the volume comes to a close with Yana Leonenko’s ‘Music in the Theatre of Les Kurbas’ – a closer look at Kurbas’s relationship with music: his musical training, sensitivity, and way of thinking, which shaped the way in which he conceived of his stage productions. Kurbas was the fi first rst in Ukraine to draw attention to the idea of the rhythmic development of the theatrical production. Music was a way to organize stage space and time, thus making it a meaningful element of the conception of the production. Together with the composer, the stage director aimed at developing a unified conception of the production (Gesamtkunstwerk) that was to be mutually enriching. These ideas achieved their most successful realization in Kurbas’s production of Georg Kaiser’s Gas and in his dramatization of Upton Sinclair’s Jimmie Higgins. Leonenko also examines the rich musical curriculum that Kurbas introduced into the Berezil academic program, which included voice training, sight reading, playing musical instruments, and music history, as well as extensive dramatic improvisational work carried out to his accompaniment on the piano. Part Four, ‘The Invisible Made Visible,’ moves us more surely into the terrain of conceptual art, opening with Virlana Tkacz’s essay ‘Les Kurbas’s Early Work at the Berezil: From Bodies in Motion to Performing the Invisible,’ which reveals Kurbas’s rapid development. Constantly experimenting, Kurbas created one of the boldest experimental theatres in all of the Soviet Union. His productions developed from mass movement to music, to explorations that embodied the inner workings of the mind on stage, thus appearing to render the invisible visible. Kurbas used film as an integral part of his dramatization of Jimmie Higgins. Staging this piece, he employed the devices that film language was developing to reveal new ways of looking at the stage space. In the process, he became a conceptual director and joined the ranks of the major creative directors of his time. Oleh S. Ilnytzkyj, in his article ‘Abstraction and Ukrainian Futurist Literature,’ underscores the fact that undeniably abstractionist concerns, practices, and ideas

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played a crucial role in the Ukrainian Futurist movement. Preferring to label their work as ‘left,’ ‘new,’ or ‘experimental,’ Ukrainian Futurists and especially their master, Mykhail Semenko, rejected realistic conventions and genres, refusing to use language as a transparent referential tool. Denying ‘Literature’ (that is, ‘institutionalized’ forms and conventions) and happily marrying different genres and art forms, Semenko experimented widely and wildly with a variety of distorting techniques: exaggeration, grotesque, violation or elimination of syntax, pure sound poetry, and ‘poetry-painting’ (poezo-maliarstvo). Inspired by analogous tendencies in painting, Semenko, like his colleague Les Kurbas, admired and was inspired by the work of Paul Cézanne as the originator of the revolution in art. Looking forward to some of the observations made in the next essay by Myroslava Mudrak, Ilnyzkyj also briefly examines the preoccupation with the abstract evident in the covers of Futurists’ publications, which distorted typefaces, mixed Cyrillic with Roman letters, and made dynamic use of different angles and contours. These devices encouraged readers to rethink and re-view not just the literature inside the cover pages but also the outside. Ilnytzkyj concludes by noting that while political powers criticized the ‘formalism’ of such approaches and the inaccessibility of their messages, we may instead view the Futurists as indulging in an overwhelming joy of experimentation – a phrase that sums up precisely the exuberance of Ukrainian modernism. In ‘The Graphic Arts: From Page Design to Theatre,’ Myroslava Mudrak looks more closely at the efflorescence of graphic art which occurred after 1917 and once the Ems ukaz (decree), its ban on publications, and on the use of the name ‘Ukraina’ (Ukraine) was made void. Her subject, the public sphere of art, focuses on art in the service of national revitalization and reorientation. In this essay, we find discussion of a wide spectrum of art, including posters, newspaper mastheads, book and journal covers, murals, banners – all of which engaged artists directly with their public. A sense of theatricality is omnipresent, as new fonts, mixtures of Latin and Cyrillic letters, a blending of word and image, and playful formats invited the reader to examine and interpret from various angles and directions. Most notable in this regard is the work of Futurist poet-artist enfant terrible Mykhail Semenko. Sounding one of the recurrent themes of this book, Mudrak observes that graphic artists created new art forms which were not negations of the past but, rather, imaginative translations of it. The international, modern, and the local (often folk) melded together in a fruitful union that pushed art towards abstract form: modern Ukrainian graphics married a heroic cultural past with the spirit of a new, industrially minded society. The hybrid that was created was a classicized Constructivism conjoined with an ‘untamed’ Baroque. Mudrak takes us through a variety of artists and their achievements, 130 of whom displayed their work at the First Exhibition of Drawing and Graphics held at the Kyiv Picture Gallery in November 1926. Ukrainian art was also recognized abroad in exhibitions in Leipzig and Cologne. Les Kurbas’s designer Vadym Meller was among those who participated in such shows, though all of Kurbas’s designers were, to one degree or another, actively involved in the graphic arts. Kurbas himself was, in Mudrak’s words, endowed with the ‘keen eye of a draughtsman,’ and his mise-en-scènes were often described in terms usually ascribed to the

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graphic medium. He also frequently employed graphic design in his productions, most notably in Jimmie Higgins (1923) and Macbeth (1924). Perhaps in no other period, claims Mudrak, was the collaboration and integration of graphic artists into the theatre as active as it was in early modernism. Indeed, the stage became the ‘ultimate arena for the marriage of the optical and aural.’ Irena R. Makaryk’s ‘Dissecting Time/Space: The Scottish Play and the New Technology of Film’ examines Kurbas’s most radical experiment in the theatre: his 1924 Macbeth and his brief foray into film. Employing a variety of estrangement techniques nearly a decade before Brecht, Kurbas rethought the idea not only of the classic but of the theatre event itself. This scandalous production resulted in an extensive polemic that reverberated for years to come. From this production, Kurbas turned to the new technology of film. After having used film clips along with live actors in his stage productions, he then made three films: Vendetta, Macdonald, and Arsenaltsi, the last of which used a split screen (the first time in the Soviet Union) to create dynamic movement and tension. In each of these endeavours, he was fascinated by the possibilities of dissecting the notion of space/time. In 1925 Kurbas and the Berezil were at their height. Kurbas was awarded the state’s highest honour: he was named People’s Artist. Irena R. Makaryk’s essay ‘On the World Stage: The Berezil in Paris and New York’ brings us to this apex. The Berezil was represented at the Paris Exposition des arts industriels et décoratifs, where Vadym Meller received a gold medal for the production of The Secretary of the Labour Union, directed by Borys Tiahno under the tutelage of Kurbas. Over fifteen million visitors viewed the exhibitions of the Soviet pavilion, of which, by common consent, the stage designs were the most extraordinary. Following this success, the exhibition travelled to New York for the International Theatre Exhibition, where ‘Russian’ stage design influenced a whole generation of American artists, designers, and playwrights. Just as Kurbas had been influenced by jazz rhythms, Taylorism, and American energy, so were Americans, in turn, influenced by the dynamism of the Berezil and other Soviet theatres. Makaryk’s essay brings to a close the theme of connections, collaborations, and interpenetrations. At the same time, the essay suggests that this triumph was met with silence. Ironically, at this originary moment of the massive dissemination of the grammar of modernism, the work of Kurbas and the Berezil was effaced by the continuing use of old imperial tags; the onomastic instability of the new political entity, the USSR; the refusal to grant Ukrainians travel visas to these international expositions; and the critics’ and public’s general difficulty in comprehending modernism. The volume concludes with two essays in Part Five, ‘Elegies: Reflections on the Future Past.’ Béatrice Picon-Vallin’s essay (with Veronika Gopko-Pereverzeva) ‘Vsevold Meyerhold and Les Kurbas’ muses about the parallel careers of two towering directors, the Russian and the Ukrainian, who have been often (not always accurately) compared both within their own lifetimes and thereafter, and who ultimately shared a similar, tragic fate. Nelli Kornienko, like her compatriot Dmytro Horbachov, courageously first began writing about Kurbas in a period in which it was dangerous to do so. She has published extensively about Kurbas in Ukrainian and founded the Les Kurbas Centre in Kyiv, which researches his theories of art and produces contemporary

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experimental theatre. Looking beyond Kurbas’s work in Kyiv, in her essay ‘Les Kurbas and the Spiritual Foundations of the Ukrainian Avant-garde,’ Kornienko takes us into his collaboration with the playwright Mykola Kulish in Kharkiv and to Kurbas’s last moments. A final word: As the essays which follow show, the tumultuous events of the late 1910s and early 1920s presented the extraordinary possibility of rethinking and reshaping the identity (including the culture) of those who lived in the former Russian empire. This process of recreation involved a heady, often contradictory – but productive – tension between recovery and renewal, tradition and contemporaneity, liberation and rupture. The sheer delight in the ability to express ideas out loud, in the public sphere, is palpable. In rapid succession and within a short period of time, astonishing achievements were made in all disciplines. Like theatrical roles, various styles, modes, functions, ideas, and technologies were tried on, embraced, adjusted, or discarded. We may thus identify yet another important thread of Kyivan modernism: the theatricalization or the ‘performative’ quality of all the arts: the self-conscious experimentation and quest for a new identity, a new art. Quite unlike Western European postwar culture, the Ukrainian scene – despite grave privations and extreme social duress – speaks a language of joy. In yoking together antithetical modes in creative exuberance, range, and achievement, this period has, not surprisingly, come to be regarded as a Ukrainian renaissance.

NOTES 1 Rosalind Pepall, ‘An Art of Vigour and Restraint,’ in Edwin Holgate (1897–1977), ed. Rosalind Pepall and Brian Foss (Montreal: Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 2005) 16. 2 Interview with Edwin Holgate conducted by Charles Hill on 20 September 1973, Canadian Painting in the Thirties Exhibition, Exhibitions in Gallery, National Gallery of Canada Fonds, National Gallery of Canada Archives. Throughout the interview, Holgate had difficulty remembering events and people, and, in some cases, even his own work (e.g., a mural he created for the World’s Fair in New York). He recalled the Ballet Russes, the names of Yakovlev (Alexandre Iakovleff; Aleksandr Iakolev) and Shugaev (Vasiliy Shukhaev), but was unable to summon more details. He noted that, at his age, he was ‘a bit woolly’ about his trips to Paris (1912–14, 1921) and to Ukraine. 3 Pepall, ‘An Art of Vigour and Restraint’ 15. The exhibition, which toured Canada, was the first major retrospective of Holgate’s work. Both of these small oil paintings were on display. 4 L’Avant-garde russe; chefs-d’oeuvre des musées de Russie 1905–1925 (Nantes: Musée des Beaux-arts de Nantes, 30 January–18 April 1993), exhibition catalogue 96. 5 I am deeply grateful to Nina Vetrova Robinson, the grand-daughter of Vadym Meller, for this information about Meller’s paintings as representing not costumes but actual choreographic movements. Telephone conversation, 5 May 2007. My thanks to Tamara Vajagic for making possible this connection with Mrs Vetrova. 6 Richard Taruskin, ‘Restoring Comrade Roslavets,’ New York Times, Sunday, 20 Feb. 2005: Arts 25.

PART ONE Kyiv: ‘Special and bewildering’

KIEV/KYIV/KɂÏB/KɂEB/KIJÓW/ʥʥʲʩ ʷ

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For us who hear the new calls from the East and the West, who have experienced the tragic crisis in artistic consciousness and human perception, who have become accustomed to the broken lines of Delaunay,1 listened to the strange genius of Cˇiurlionis,2 given ourselves over to the whirlwind of Scriabin,3 felt the tragic hammer blows of Mayakovsky,4 it is clear that a wake for art is definitely premature. On the contrary, the new aesthetics open up before us a completely new world and limitless, unmined possibilities. Joy is to find ourselves in art; [but] art had become alien and repugnant since it was born in times long past that are now foreign to us. I dare think we stand on the eve of the birth of a great and living art unequalled in strength which differs as much from the old art as the naive gavottes of Bach from the earth-shattering sonatas of Scriabin. Les Kurbas, Foreword to Victor Auburtin’s Art Is Dying5

Translated from the Ukrainian by Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipps 1 Robert Delaunay (1885–1941), French painter. 2 Mikalojus Cˇ iurlionis (1875–1911), Lithuanian composer and painter who attempted to combine music and painting. 3 Aleksandr Scriabin (Skriabin, 1872–1915), Russian composer whose late sonatas Kurbas admired. 4 Vladimir Mayakovsky (Maiakovskii, 1893–1930), Russian poet and playwright. 5 Victor Auburtin (1870–1928), Berlin theatre critic. Kurbas’s translation was published in 1918.

1 Modernism in Kyiv: Jubilant Experimentation irena r. makaryk

The ‘terrible beauty’1 of events that occurred in the city of Kyiv were forever etched in the mind of Grigory Kozintsev, a young sixteen-year-old born in Kyiv, and decades away from becoming an internationally renowned film-maker. Later he would recall that throughout this period, despite the revolutions, First World War, civil war, and anarchy, every kind of art began to flourish … Innumerable committees, section and subsections discussed projects for producing all the great classic plays of the world, for organizing popular festivals, and for decorating the squares in honour of the first of May. Theatre studios and art studios proliferated. Everyone took to art with passion, and with passion people taught it. What was not taught? There were lectures on the troubadours and minstrels, on the Baroque art of the Ukraine, and on the Japanese theatre … In the evenings I went to the school of painting, to the classes given to a little group of young people by Alexandra Exter.2

As Kozintsev emphasized, a sense of exuberance prevailed in the city, in spite of the surrounding horrors and privations; it was especially palpable and widespread in artistic circles, and gave rise to a unique modernism. Sharply differing from its Western European variants, the nature of Ukrainian modernism may be summed up in a phrase: jubilant experimentation. The fall of the USSR has permitted access to hitherto closed archives and to many documents which had been clandestinely, and at great peril, preserved for decades by artists, their families, and loyal colleagues and admirers in the hopes that such a time would arrive – as it now has – for a revaluation of modernist works of art which had been attacked and condemned under the repressive conditions of Soviet ideological-aesthetic positions. Among the many discoveries is the fact that Kyiv was one of the great centres of artistic expression and experimentation in the early twentieth century. Moscow and St Petersburg have long been recognized as such centres; Kyiv has yet to be awarded its rightful place.3 This brief chapter will sketch out some of the terminological groundwork for the following essays that prismatically examine Kyiv’s artistic life from approximately 1905 to the late 1920s, when more and more state controls were imposed on artistic activity, curtailing, impeding, and, finally bringing all experimentation to a halt.

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For many scholars, the Great War was the uncontested cataclysmic event that shaped the nature of modernisms. It was not so for Kyiv or for Ukraine. Since the conditions for the creation of avant-garde art were different in Eastern Europe, a different type of art was produced. Modernism was well under way in Ukraine before the October Revolution (1917) took place in Russia, often regarded as the cataclysmic moment for Eastern Europe. Imported into Ukraine from Russia (rather than naturally arising there), the Bolshevik Revolution did not match in significance other events which occurred in Kyiv, particularly massive rallies and the creation of the Central Rada, as well as the creation of major cultural institutions (discussed later in this volume); these had an enormous impact on the explosion of artistic creativity. Ukraine’s ‘watershed’ occurred much earlier and as a result of the relaxation of censorship following the 1905 Revolution that first presented the opportunity for a major political and cultural ‘thaw,’ releasing the theatre and many other institutions from the numerous stultifying bonds of censorship and various prohibitions hitherto in place because of the tsarist fear of fanning the fires of Ukrainian separatism and nationalism. The most radical tsarist decrees had included, among many others, a ban on staging all but the most trivial of genres and on all translated works into Ukrainian, including the Bible. After the 1905 Revolution and for the first time in the history of the Russian empire, Ukrainians were finally permitted to create a theatre with a permanent home – an event comparable in its wide-ranging cultural, political, and psychological impact to the founding of the Abbey Theatre in Ireland. What is more, Ukrainian was finally declared an independent Slavic language by the recently created Duma. (It should be noted, however, that Interior Minister Piotr Stolipin restored the restrictions in 1910. They were, in fact, never lifted, but simply became void during the February Revolution of 1917–18.) This brief spell of liberalization bred an optimism which only grew with the eventual overthrow of the tsarist regime and rapidly accelerated with the proclamation of the creation of an independent (albeit short-lived) Ukrainian state. Social, political, national, and aesthetic revolutions sparked together, creating an electric surge of creativity in all areas of cultural endeavour. Once again, Kozintsev provides a sense of the excitement of this period: What we were doing then we were doing in the cold and the famine of a devastated country. The conditions of life were very hard … Yet the dominant sentiment was the affirmation of life. The young artists felt life in all its richness and colour, and artistic forms seemed naturally to take on the artistic forms of a great popular carnival. In the middle of every kind of privation a sort of fair was going on. The young artists bore the common fate gaily, so fine did the time in which they lived appear to them. If this atmosphere is forgotten or neglected, then the art of those times remains incomprehensible.4

The rapid assimilation of abstraction and modernism as a whole by Ukrainians, then, may thus in large part be explained by their vested interest in the complete and total transformation of society. Modernism both harmonized with modernity (in its guise as political evolution, modernization, urbanization, and so forth) and promised to transcend or overturn the provincialism of imported imperial academic models and

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stultifying conventions. As a result, it is not surprising that the stage and film director Les Kurbas referred to himself interchangeably as ‘modernist’ and ‘avant-garde,’ a kind of slippage which suggests the interpenetration of the aesthetic with the political (a political edge is usually ascribed to the avant-garde). Andreas Huyssen considers modernism as an ‘adversary culture,’ and distinguishes between modernism – which generally insists upon the inherent hostility between high and low – and the historical avant-garde, which aimed at ‘developing an alternative relationship between high art and mass culture’5 – terms which hold little meaning for an understanding of Ukrainian modernism. As Tamara Hundorova has argued, scholars have homogenized and flattened out national differences in the modernism debate by extrapolating theories based on the example of the nation-state; in their view, then, modernism represents decadence and decline.6 While Ukrainian modernism must be examined in relation to Europe, it is, nonetheless, a ‘differentiated, dynamic.’7 A quest for liberation and a break from authority and conformity have often been identified as the most important impulses behind experimentation.8 In the case of Ukrainian modernism, the quest for liberation came not from a desire to escape entrenched Western-oriented aesthetic theories, but from the desire to pull away from the centrifugal political-cultural dominance of imperial Russia. At the same time, there was no simple desire merely to emulate other (for instance, Western) models. Instead, Ukrainian modernism may be characterized by an unusual openness to myriad influences and traditions – Western, as well as Far Eastern – with a concomitant desire to digest and reformulate them, in the process creating a distinctive Ukrainian voice. As important in its outward gaze was Ukrainian modernism’s inward study: it was a self-proclaimed renaissance in its turn back to long-suppressed native academic and authentic folk Ukrainian traditions, not to restore them but, rather, to re-conceive them through the prism of modernity. To put it in another way, the desire to escape provincialism and colonialism (both political and aesthetic) was paralleled by the overwhelming impulse to innovate. Ukrainian modernism thus departs from most definitions of modernism. If Western European modernism is generally described as elitist in impulse,9 and its art said to reflect devolution,10 discontinuity,11 a sense of dislocation, fragmentation, ruin, alienation, and loneliness,12 on the one hand, and a simultaneous desire for social coherence and meaning on the other,13 Ukrainian modernism is the opposite: an attempt to restore continuity and cultural identity, at the same time as it rejects imposed imperial conventions and traditions. In many circles, Ukrainian modernism was, in fact, considered a new renaissance, with all the connotations usually attributed to that word, including the idea of a new creation, synthesizing often opposing and even contradictory traditions. The spirit of Ukrainian modernism was particularly nurtured by previous cultures of Ukraine, some of which had also been identified as ‘renaissances.’ The ancient massive and mysterious stone idols – the stone ‘babas’ of the steppes – provided a primitivist inspiration for sculptors and visual artists. The period of Byzantine-inspired Kyivan Rus offered a variety of approaches eminently compatible with modernism: richly painted icons with their sense of cosmic space and

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simultaneity of time (also an essential feature of Cubism). The skomorokhy – medieval jugglers-acrobats-performers-bards – drew attention to the formal aspects of theatre. The Ukrainian Baroque14 (mid-seventeenth to the early eighteenth century) period served as another source of non-psychological, non-mimetic art: the sensuousness of dynamic form (most evident in architecture); the grotesque, stylized physical action of the vertep or puppet theatre with its diptych of sacral events alternating with the secular, comic, and social; the interludes, whose broad contemporary comedy similarly jarred with its serious sacred or historical ‘frame’ plays; the self-conscious artificiality of theatre (theatricality); and, generally, a literature rich in allegory, paradox, exaggeration, and the grotesque, and resistant to linearity of structure or narrative. The cultural past of the Ukrainians functioned for them in the same way as ‘exotic tribal and Eastern cultures’ did for Western European artists. While Western Europe’s dialogue with primitivism was fraught with the paradoxes of a dialogue with the ‘Other’ (notably, condescension on the one hand, admiration on the other), the Ukrainian dialogue in art, as in politics, was (while not unproblematic) a dialogue with the ‘Self.’15 Thus, where Western modernists looked to cultures outside their own to revivify art (African masks, for example), Ukrainians looked ‘inside’ their culture, resulting, as Myroslava Mudrak suggests, in what might be called a ‘hyper-sensitized self-awareness.’16 To look to their past was also to look past the rupture imposed by external forces, to forge a continuum of culture by restoring dignity to past traditions, while simultaneously mediating these forms and approaches through the prism of contemporary circumstances and ideologies – political, social, and aesthetic. Ancient folk arts were still alive, still part of daily life; artists believed they reached back to the roots of ritual, to the undefined and mysterious ‘dark abysm of time’ (to paraphrase Shakespeare’s Prospero). Here, again, the Irish example (and, in particular, Yeats’s turn to Celtic mythology) springs to mind as a useful parallel. As a self-proclaimed renaissance, Ukrainian modernism drew attention to the accelerating transition of an agrarian society into modernity with exuberance and joy. Speed, dynamism, jazz, social and political upheaval were all celebrated together, but without the uncritical devotion to technology and the machine characteristic of the Italian Futurists. Ukrainian modernism’s dialogue with modernity was thus neither the Expressionists’ melancholy, dispirited sense of the soullessness of the universe, nor the Futurists’ adulation of the machine. Rather, there was a euphoric sense of development, or, more properly stated, movement. For a society whose artists had hitherto experienced a real, imposed stasis, the early years of the twentieth century (post-1905 revolution) finally seemed to bring the promise of creativity, modernization, liberation: a flinging open of all the old imperial doors and windows. It is because of this belief and the subsequent rapid explosion in the arts, particularly in Kyiv and later in Kharkiv, that even in the midst of war, anarchy, and revolution, creative projects continued to flourish rather than be abandoned. Thus, for example, in the worst year of anarchy, 1919, Les Kurbas continued to prepare and to stage plays, debate aesthetic theories, write theoretical and polemical articles, and dream about a great theatre of world-class standing. In the West, the Great War had confirmed the modernists’ sense of detachment, their

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preoccupation with nihilism, and discontinuity. In Ukraine, the euphoria did not vanish even after the conflagration of two revolutions, world war, and civil war, and the establishment of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (an event which closed off the possibility of independence and which brought about further instability and a return to censorship). Perhaps, one might speculate on the basis of the Ukrainian variant of modernism, colonized nations which experience and embrace modernism may develop modernism of a different order than that which emanates from an imperial, dominant, or otherwise metropolitan culture. Certainly it is important to stress the fact that Ukrainian modernism differed significantly from its Russian variant in the ‘consistent application of culture-transforming principles to the goal of national liberation.’17 Where Ukrainians differed among themselves was in how to achieve that transformation, and in what proportions or in what balance the sometimes exclusionary aims of socialism/communism and nationalism were required. The heteroglossia of aesthetic debates which took place among Ukrainians and other groups which inhabited the territory of Ukraine may be set against the monologic discourses of the Communists. For example, the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Ukraine (CP(b)U), dominated by Russians in the early years from 1919 to 1923, put forward a simplistic theory of the struggle of ‘two cultures’: the Russian as the ‘culture of the city’ and the Ukrainian as the ‘culture of the village.’ In this, still colonialist, view, Ukraine was regarded as representative of the backward peasant element resisting the supremacy of the metropolitan culture, which would shortly be victorious. Other Russian aesthetic debates fit more conveniently into the terminological templates frequently offered by many Western scholars. So, for example, as has already been suggested, one view of the relationship between modernism and the avant-garde is that modern art is hostile to ‘low’ art, while the avant-garde embraces and explores the relationship between high and low.18 With its military roots, the phrase ‘avant-garde’ suggests its natural antagonism to tradition.19 Indeed, as Renato Poggioli points out, the Russian avant-garde’s revolt was directed against the totality of bourgeois culture and its mechanisms of domination and control; thus, ‘avant-garde communism is the fruit of an eschatological state of mind, simultaneously messianic and apocalyptic, a thing compatible, psychologically if not ideologically, with the anarchistic spirit.’20 This utopian-apocalyptic-messianic thread – like the hankering anxiety to ‘discover the eternal laws of ideal or perfect form’21 – is generally more muted in Ukrainian modernism. More useful to an understanding of the synonymity of the avant-garde and modernism in the Ukrainian case is the idea of the centrality of experimentation and opposition to received ‘authoritative’ positions. As Endre Bojnar suggests, the East European avant-garde rejected narrow definitions of national character and the moral didacticism of earlier literature. Again, the Irish example springs to mind in Lady Gregory and Yeats’s studied efforts to combat stereotypes. In embracing modernism, Ukrainians wished to escape the national stereotypes of the infantile dancing and drinking peasant. Too, since aesthetic norms had been both imposed and others prohibited, there was a fascination with exploring and exploding distinctions between art forms and genres, high and low culture.22 The

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interest in classical theatre thus coincided, for example, with an equal fascination with the circus, the cabaret, the fairground, sporting events, dance, and film. This multitude of media and genres suddenly made available for artistic exploration contributed to the sense of euphoria of the early decades of the twentieth century in Ukraine, and led to the conviction that such explorations and experimentations could lead to truly new art. As John E. Bowlt observes, the avant-garde, while usually identified as Russian, was, in substance, a movement or group of ideas drawing upon many national ingredients – Armenian, Georgian, Jewish, Polish, Russian, and especially Ukrainian. Suffice it to recall that most of the stellar players in the so called Russian avant-garde (the Burliuk brothers and sisters, Exter, Mikhail Larionov, Aristarkh Lentulov, Kazimir Malevich, Vladimir Tatlin) were Ukrainian by birthright or adoption to understand the extent to which the Russian avantgarde was as much Ukrainian as anything else ... The same can be said of the Russian performing arts, cinema, and literature of the same period. Without the contributions by the Ukrainians Anna Akhmatova (real name: Gorenko), Oleksandr Dovzhenko, Nikolai Foregger, Benedikt Livshits, Vaslav Nijinsky, Oleksandr Tairov, Pavel Tchelitschew, and many other luminaries, Russian dance, dramatic theatre, cinema, and poetry would lack much of their vitality and excitement. Just how important Ukraine was to the development of the avant-garde is indicated by the fact that Isadora Duncan chose Kyiv as one of her first venues during her second Russian tour of 1907–08.23

This essay has been focusing on the particularly Ukrainian aspects of modernism in Kyiv, since this current of modernism has not yet received widespread recognition; however, like all multicultural urban centres, Kyiv belonged to many groups. We have seen that, for example, Grigory Kozintsev presents some of the most memorable accounts of the artistic excitement of this period. Consistently classified as a Russian film-maker, Kyiv-born and educated Kozintsev reflects some of the problems of identifying the ethnicity of members of the avant-garde. Many of the artists listed above were not primarily focused on ethnic identification, nor in creating ‘national’ art – just great art – although drawing inspiration from Ukrainian cultural roots. Kurbas had similar aims: his long-standing desire was to create great theatre that would astonish the world. Within this ‘universalist’ framework of thinking, it is important to consider the continuing aesthetic-cultural traffic between East and West from the early years of the twentieth century to 1928.24 Among the many Ukrainians and Ukrainian-born travellers and longerterm residents of Paris were the visual artists Vladimir (Volodymyr) Tatlin, Alexandra Exter, Sonia Delaunay, Klyment Redko, Mykhailo Boychuk, Vadym Meller, Natan Altman, David Shterenberg, and the sculptor Alexander Archipenko. Exter, while meeting with her compatriots in France, also encountered Picasso, Bracque, Léger, and Apollinaire. Dividing her time among Kyiv, Moscow, and Paris, she finally emigrated to France in the 1920s, a choice made by a number of artists who felt equally at home in all three capital cities. Others studied and worked in Munich, Vienna, and Berlin.

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1.1 Vadym Meller, Mask. Sketch for Bronislava Nijinska’s dance to the music of Chopin at the École de Mouvement, 1919. (DMTMKU)

The fertile cross-pollination which such travel entailed suggests that modernism, as a purely Western phenomenon, needs some reconfiguration. This book offers one such attempt. Hitherto subsumed under the general rubric ‘Soviet,’ the Ukrainian radical and far-reaching influence on modernist art is just beginning to be explored in art exhibitions around the world. Availing themselves of models from East and West, from the popular and the elite, Ukrainian artists confirmed the historical role of Ukraine not only as a crossroads between various cultures, and a borderland, but also a rich source of creative power.

NOTES 1 W.B. Yeats’s phrase, ‘a terrible beauty is born,’ appears in his poem ‘Easter, 1916,’ about the Easter Uprising in Ireland. 2 Grigori [sic] Mikhailovitch Kozintsev, ‘A Child of the Revolution,’ in Luda and Jean Schnitzer and Marcel Martin, eds, Cinema in Revolution: The Heroic Era of the Soviet Film, trans. and with additional material by David Robinson (London: Secker and Warburg; New York: Da Capo Press, 1973) 90. 3 Gregory Guroff, ‘Crossroads: Modernism in Ukraine. Introduction,’ in Ukrains’kyi modernism. Ukrainian Modernism 1910–1930 (Kyiv: Natsional’nyi Khudozhnyi Muzei Ukrainy, [2006]) 72.

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4 Kozintsev 100. 5 Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986) vii–viii. 6 Tamara Hundorova, Proiavlennia slova: Dyskursiia rann’oho ukrains’koho modernizmu. Postmoderna interpretatsiia (Lviv: Litopys, 1997) 9–10. Translation mine. 7 Hundorova 278. 8 Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (Toronto: Lester and Orpen Dennys Ltd, 1989) 48. 9 Michael Bristol, ‘Introduction,’ in Michael Bristol and Kathleen McLuskie, with Christopher Holmes, eds, Shakespeare and Modern Theatre: The Performance of Modernity. Accents on Shakespeare (London and New York: Routledge, 2001) 8. 10 Clement Greenberg, ‘Beginnings of Modernism,’ in Monique Chefdor, Ricardo Quinones, and Albert Wachtel, eds, Modernism: Challenges and Perspectives (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1986) 22. 11 William R. Everdell, The First Moderns: Profiles in the Origins of Twentieth-Century Thought (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1997) 10. Also note Astradur Eysteinsson’s identification of the principal feature of modernism as a ‘dialectical opposition.’ See his The Concept of Modernism (Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1990) 8. Also, see Carl. E. Schorske, Thinking with History: Explorations in the Passage to Modernism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1998) 4, who defines modernism as a ‘rejection of history or indifference to it.’ 12 Richard Sheppard’s Modernism – Dada – Postmodernism (Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 2000) raises the definitional issue of what is modernism, and persuasively argues that it is essential to ‘reconstruct the dynamic, not to say cataclysmic, context’ that generated modernism (5). The essays in this book are precisely an attempt to identify the nature of the Kyivan modernist ‘combinatoire’ (to use Sheppard’s term [5]). 13 Richard Halpern, Shakespeare among the Moderns (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1997) 34. 14 The Ukrainian or ‘Kozak’ Baroque was one of the first periods in which there was a coherent attempt to create an independent, democratic form of government on the ‘borderlands’ of the steppes, and in a territory independent of both tsarist Russia and Poland. 15 See Myroslav Shkandrij, ‘Politics and the Avant-Garde,’ in this volume. 16 Myroslava Mudrak, ‘Rupture or Continuum? Ukraine’s “Avant-garde” in Search of a System,’ in Myroslav Shkandrij, ed., The Phenomenon of the Ukrainian Avant-Garde / Phénomène de l’avant-garde ukrainienne / Fenomen ukrains’koho avanhardu 1910–1935 (Winnipeg: Winnipeg Art Gallery, 2001) 29. 17 See Shkandrij in this volume. Also, on a related note, see Gerald Janeþek, ‘Dada in Central and Eastern Europe,’ in Stephen C. Foster, ed., The Eastern Dada Orbit: Russia, Georgia, Ukraine, Central Europe, and Japan, Crisis and the Arts, vol. 4 (New York: G.K. Hall and Co.; Prentice Hall International, 1996) 1, who carefully distinguishes Eastern European avant-garde agendas from those in the West, especially in terms of concepts of national identity following the collapse of the Ottoman, Russian, and AustroHungarian empires. 18 Huyssens viii. 19 Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Gerald Fitzgerald (Cambridge, MA: Belknap P of Harvard UP, 1968) 28–30.

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20 Ibid. 100. 21 Ibid. 181. One should qualify this claim, however, by observing that there was a strong interest in discovering appropriate and effective forms that would move audiences. See, for example, Irena R. Makaryk, ‘The Perfect Production: Les Kurbas’s Analysis of the Early Soviet Audience,’ Gramma: Journal of Theory and Criticism 15 (2007) 89–109. 22 Endre Bojtar, East European Avant-Garde Literature, trans. Pál Várnai (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1992) 37–8. 23 John E. Bowlt, ‘National in Form, International in Content: Modernism in Ukraine,’ in Ukrains’kyi modernism. Ukrainian Modernism 1910–1930, catalogue, Anatoly Melnyk, project director (Kyiv: Natsional’nyi Khudozhnyi Muzei Ukrainy, [2006]) 76. 24 See Shkandrij’s essay in this volume.

1 Bell tower of St Sofia Cathedral, Kyiv (photo: Margaret Morton © 2005)

2 Oleksander Bohomazov, Electrician, 1915, private collection (Kyiv), with the permission of Dmytro Horbachov

3 Oleksander Bohomazov, Lvivska Street (Tram) (Kyiv), 1914, private collection (Moscow), with the permission of Dmytro Horbachov

4 Alexandra Exter, Fundukleivska Street at Night (Kyiv), 1914 , RM SPb, with the permission of Dmytro Horbachov

5 Sukher (Issachar) Ber Ryback, The City, 1917, NAMU

6 Klyment Redko, Factory, 1922, CSALA, with the permission of Dmytro Horbachov

7 Alexander Archipenko, Untitled (The Boxers), 1914, Collection of the Winnipeg Art Gallery. Acquired with funds from the Alpha Omega Women’s Alumnae, the Ukrainian Community of Winnipeg, and The Winnipeg Foundation. Photo: Ernest Mayer, Winnipeg Art Gallery, © Estate of Alexander Archipenko (SODRAC, 2009)

8 Kazimir Malevich, Suprematist composition from the 1920s, PHAM, with the permission of Dmytro Horbachov

9 Alexandra Exter, design for Famira Kifared (Thamira Khytharedes)

10 Vadym Meller, Fear, painting of Bronislava Nijinska, 1919 (BNA; with the permission of Gibbs Raetz, Pacific Palisades)

11 Vadym Meller, Bronislava Nijinska dancing in Mephisto Valse, 1919 (with the permission of the Bakrushin Museum, Moscow)

12 Vadym Meller, stage design for Marko Tereshchenko’s Carnival, 1923, private collection (Kyiv), with the permission of Dmytro Horbachov

13 Anatol Petrytsky, design for Lesia Ukrainka’s Kaminnyi hospodar (Stone Master, 1921) (DMTMK)

14 Vasyl Yermilov, design for the agit-train Red Ukraine, 1921, CSAMLAU, with the permission of Dmytro Horbachov

15 Isaak Rabinovich, design for Fuenta Ovejuna, 1919

16 Oleksander Khvostenko-Khvostov, stage design for Upton Sinclair’s MOB, 1924, private collection (Kyiv), with the permission of Dmytro Horbachov

17 David Burliuk, Vladimir Burliuk, and Vasily Kamenskii, Tango with Cows, 1914

18 David and Vladimir Burliuk, The Bung, 1913

19 Vasyl Yermilov, cover design for Stikhy Ekateriny Neimaier (Poems by Ekaterina Neimaer), 1920

20 El Lissitzky, cover of Ukrainishe folk mayses (Ukrainian Folk Tales), translated into Yiddish by Leyb Kvitko, 1922

21 Alexandra Exter, cover for the Kyiv journal Hermes, 1919, with the permission of Dmytro Horbachov

How beautiful Kyiv is and how little we know it even after living here for decades! Especially from the hills – with the wide view on the Dnipro and its limitless prospect on the tilled lands and pine forests beyond the Dnipro. I sit for hours looking at the ravines, the wide panorama, and recall the far-far distant past and its people. Serhy Yefremov, Diary, 12 September 19231

Translated from the Ukrainian by Irena R. Makaryk 1 Serhii Iefremov (1876–1939), literary scholar, politician, and holder of many highranking positions, among them, vice-president of the Ukrainian Central Rada (1917–18). Excerpt from his Shchodennyky [Diaries], 1923–1929 (Kyiv: Rada, 1997) 42.

2 ‘A Theatrical Mecca’: The Stages of Kyiv in 19071 mayhill c. fowler

In 1916 Oleksander (‘Les’) Kurbas moved to Kyiv to act in Mykola Sadovsky’s theatre. Several of Sadovsky’s best actors had left his company, the first stationary Ukrainian-language theatre in the Russian empire, because Sadovsky was unable to guarantee repertoire or salary owing to the sharp decline in audiences during the First World War. Sadovsky invited Kurbas, a member of the Ruska Besida,2 AustriaHungary’s best Ukrainian-language troupe, to come join his company and take on Ivan Marianenko’s Young Lover roles. By 1916 the Ruska Besida had actually dissolved, since most of its male actors had been mobilized into the army, and Kurbas had started his own company in Ternopil, the Ternopil Theatrical Evenings. Unfortunately, the Russian army’s occupation of Eastern Galicia and Ternopil’s proximity to the shifting Eastern Front had a deleterious effect on the new venture. Kurbas accepted Sadovsky’s invitation and moved to the Russian empire.3 Theatre journalist Aleksandr Deich spent his youth in pre-Revolutionary Kyiv, ‘an ancient town on the Dniepr, called the mother of all Russian cities.’ He writes of meeting Kurbas in 1916, when they spent the afternoon with several acquaintances in a café talking about theatre in a mix of Ukrainian, Russian, and Polish. Kurbas, a former student of the University of Vienna, had travelled more than his companions, and recounted theatre life in the European capitals of Vienna and Berlin, Munich and Prague. Deich recalls Kurbas asserting, however, that, ‘the theatrical Mecca … is destined to be Kyiv.’4 Why did Kurbas consider Kyiv ‘the theatrical Mecca’? In order to understand both the later effect that Kurbas had on theatre in Ukraine, and why he was drawn to Kyiv in the first place, we have to uncover the theatrical landscape that existed in Kyiv before 1916, when Kurbas joined Sadovsky’s troupe and the First World War was shattering the ancien régimes of Europe. Of course, the Russian and AustroHungarian armies moving back and forth across Galicia would have provided ample enough reason for Kurbas to move to Kyiv, and we have only Deich’s account of this magical conversation in a café on the eve of the Revolution. But let us take Deich at his word. Why might Kurbas have called Kyiv, ‘a theatrical Mecca,’ a place where ‘nastoiashchee iskusstvo’ (genuine art) could take place?5 In the first years of the twentieth century Kyiv boasted a variety of theatre, both professional and amateur: Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, and Yiddish. A veritable

‘A Theatrical Mecca’: The Stages of Kyiv in 1907 27

2.1 Kyiv. View of the Dnipro River and Lavra (Monastery of the Caves) from the bell tower (photo: Irena R. Makaryk, 2000)

crucible of theatrical cultures, Kyiv became a gathering place for young people who would later become major names in Soviet and East European theatre. A major stop on tours from St Petersburg, Moscow, and other European cities, Kyiv was plugged into the theatrical circuits of both the Russian Empire and Europe. The year 1907 marked a turning point for theatre in Kyiv. Following the revolutionary uprisings of 1905, the tsarist government abolished the infamous 1876 Ems ukaz, or decree, which had severely restricted Ukrainian-language printing, education, and culture. Now Ukrainian-language troupes were no longer limited in their repertory and could maintain a permanent theatrical home. Seizing this opportunity, Mykola Sadovsky created a theatrical troupe in residence at the Troitsky Narodny Dom (Trinity People’s House) in Kyiv and translated a host of classic and contemporary plays into Ukrainian for the repertory.6 Although Ukrainian-language theatre had now attained structural parity with Russian-language theatre, the emergence of Sadovsky’s enterprise provoked a new set of challenges, as intelligentsia, officials, and artists all attempted to define the form and function of theatre in the Ukrainian language. Was it just theatre … in Ukrainian? Was theatre part of a national political project? Was it imperial? Was there anything specifically Ukrainian about theatre in Ukrainian? This opening of possibilities for Ukrainian-language theatre in 1907 transpired in the larger context of a European-wide theatrical revolution: from Stanislavsky’s naturalism to

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2.2 Les Kurbas, 1908

Meyerhold’s physical experimentalism, from realism to symbolism, from the real to the theatrical. This essay seeks to illustrate the theatrical landscape of theatre in 1907 Kyiv by illuminating three interconnected theatrical worlds: the Russian-language theatre, the Ukrainian-language theatre, and the world of the tours from Russia and Europe. Each milieu reflected the shifts in the theatrical landscape both of 1907 Kyiv and of early-twentieth-century Europe. In 1907 Les Kurbas, studying at the University of Vienna, had no idea that in less than a decade he would be creating a theatrical revolution in Kyiv – but Kyiv in 1907 was already a city in artistic transition. Capturing this artistic moment demands an approach that comprehends the variety of Kyiv’s stages, Russian and Ukrainian, professional and amateur. Historian Aleksei Miller argues against the prevalent regional approach to studying multi-ethnic and multi-linguistic empires, such as Russia: cultures do not adhere to prescribed geographic boundaries. ‘When we speak of analyzing the empire as a poly-ethnic structure, it makes sense to think in situational, not regional, categories,’ he argues. Could not theatre offer just such a situation, in which the imperial culture reveals itself in one provincial city in the Russian empire? Miller’s concept of situation not only reveals the empire in the theatre, but also reveals the theatre itself to be imperial. Could it have been this very imperial quality, this tapestry of cultural influences, that made Kyiv appear like a theatrical Mecca?7

‘A Theatrical Mecca’: The Stages of Kyiv in 1907 29

Kyiv, Solovtsov Theatre: Mardzhanov Makes a Revolution Young student Aleksandr Deich watches a lecture-performance on 9 September 1907 entitled ‘Theatre and Life’ in the Russian-language Solovtsov Theatre. Professor de la Barthes reads his lecture, which is illustrated with performances by Solovtsov actors of scenes from classic plays, such as Cyrano de Bergerac, Hamlet, and Ostrovsky’s Les (The Forest). This lecture series, designed to educate students in Kyiv about the history of the Russian theatre, is just one of the innovations of Konstantin Mardzhanov, the new artistic director of the Solovtsov and ‘hero’ of the 1907–8 season, ‘an entirely unusual season for Kyiv.’8 Isaak Duvan-Tortsov, a sometime character actor and now the impresario of the troupe at the Solovtsov, had hired Konstantin Mardzhanov earlier in 1907 while Mardzhanov was working at a provincial theatre in Kharkiv (Russian: Kharkov). The move to the Solovtsov was a plum appointment for Mardzhanov and reflected the upward momentum of his career. Born Kote Mardzhanishvili in tsarist Georgia, he began his career acting in local Georgian-language and Russian-language troupes, but a stroke of luck brought him to Riga, where he directed a Russianlanguage production of Maxim Gorky’s Dachniki (Summer Folk) at Konstantin Nezlobin’s Russian-language theatre. Working at Nezlobin’s theatrical enterprise at the time was Gorky, as well as actress Maria Andreeva, Gorky’s common-law wife, who had just left the Moscow Art Theatre. Everyone became much attached to the young Georgian director, and Summer Folk was such a success that in early 1905 Nezlobin brought the entire production from Riga to Moscow, where it secured Mardzhanov’s reputation as one of the latest up-and-coming directors. Mardzhanov next procured a season of directing in Kharkiv, where he managed to save a theatrical enterprise left in the lurch by its impresario. From this coup he received the appointment to the Solovtsov, the premiere Russian-language theatre in Kyiv and one of the best on the entire provincial circuit.9 Theatres in the capital cities of Moscow and St Petersburg stood at the centre of an expansive network of provincial theatres covering the Russian Empire. The five ‘Imperial’ theatres located in the capitals enjoyed government subsidies and housed permanent ensembles. Few other permanent companies existed in tsarist Russia, however. Instead, theatre impresarios such as Duvan-Tortsov hired actors, directors, and musicians for a season, and rented theatre buildings from entrepreneurs for stays of a few weeks or a few months in cities and towns across the Empire. Many artists spent their careers travelling back and forth across Russia, from Tbilisi to Riga to Irkutsk and back again. With no government funding, theatres in Russia were private enterprises and, as such, serious business. Duvan-Tortsov hired Mardzhanov because of the young director’s success in Riga and Moscow. Press, periodicals, and rumour informed Kyiv about fashions in the larger theatre world, so Mardzhanov’s reputation could lead to profit for impresario Duvan-Tortsov and the Solovtsov theatre-owner himself, Jewish entrepreneur and sugar-factory magnate Lev Brodsky, who had bought the theatre after Solovtsov’s death in 1902.10

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2.3 Solovtsov Theatre. Postcard, 1913 (published in Kyiv by ‘Khromosvet’)

Nikolai Solovtsov, one of the most famous theatre impresarios in late Imperial Russia, had the reputation of striving for artistic as well as commercial success. In 1891 he settled in Kyiv and ran a troupe out of the Dom Bergonier, a former circus owned by Frenchman Auguste Bergonier. Throughout the nineteenth century the Bergonier served as a restaurant and theatre space rented to touring Italian opera, Russian-language, and even Ukrainian-language theatre companies. It was here that the first professional Ukrainian-language troupe in Russia performed Kotliarevsky’s popular operetta Natalka-Poltavka in 1882 – starring a young Mykola Sadovsky. In 1898 the municipal government built Solovtsov his own theatre. Both the Dom Bergonier and the new Solovtsov theatre were located not far off the Khreshchatyk, Kyiv’s central thoroughfare, which boasted the first electric trams in the entire Russian Empire.11 The new Solovtsov building impressed artists and audiences alike. Vera Yureneva, a recently hired graduate of the prestigious acting course at the Imperial Aleksandrinsky Theatre in St Petersburg, found the interior design helpful to actors. Instead of one central aisle dividing the audience in two sections, architect Viktor Shreter had built two aisles, which divided the audience in three sections. This made it easier for the actors to perform to everyone in the audience. Deich remembers that the theatre was ‘all in blue: blue velvet on the banisters of the loges at all levels,’ and he notes that the ‘thick blue velvet curtain’ parted to the side, instead of being pulled upwards – a novelty at the time.12 Backstage, the infamous tramvaichik, a narrow corridor lined with folding benches extending from the dressing rooms to the stage, constituted the heart of the

‘A Theatrical Mecca’: The Stages of Kyiv in 1907

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2.4 Solovtsov troupe 1906–7 (DMTMKU, photo 3788)

Solovtsov and a central locus of the Kyivan theatre world. Here actors would ‘smoke, fight, judge other actors, recount anecdotes and … gossip.’ Every time Yureneva walked through the tramvaichik she felt the ‘storm’ of gossip behind her. Theatre critics relaxed on the benches in the tramvaichik and chatted with the actors waiting for their entrances. Newspaper editors maintained special relationships with theatre owners in Kyiv. The editor of the Kievskii teatralnyi kurer, for example, ordered his theatre critics never to write bad reviews; he rented signposts in town to theatre owners for advertising and turned a nice profit. In fact, when one theatre critic, freshly arrived from St Petersburg, dared to write a scathing review of a Solovtsov production, the actors were so incensed that they refused to set foot on stage the following night until the critic had left the building. Both parties eventually reconciled, but the critic soon returned to St Petersburg.13 Actors and directors depended on the leniency of theatre critics because they had to put up a new play every week. Audiences in Kyiv expected a premiere at the Solovtsov every Friday night. Each production received only ten or fifteen performances, which meant learning a new role quickly and ‘putting faith in the prompter’s box.’ Yureneva hated the clichés in acting that resulted from such thrown-together performances: prostitutes always wore red stockings; the Young Lover always used a white make-up pencil to make his nose appear straighter; the ingénue always had gentle curls in her hair and knew ‘no other colours than blue and pink’; and the leading lady always wore a black scarf in the third act when tragedy inevitably struck.14 A few theatres had the luxury of focusing exclusively on the creation of art while supported by wealthy patrons. One of these was Konstantin Stanislavsky’s and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko’s revolutionary new Moscow Art Theatre. Yureneva describes the shock at seeing this new company perform Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vania: ‘All the actors are equally interesting; it’s an ensemble, like beads on an expensive necklace.’ The play seemed ‘so like life … the people – they’re completely alive, and I am sitting so close that I want to reach out my hand

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2.5 Konstantin Mardzhanov (DMTMKU)

2.6 Vera Yureneva (turn-of-the-century postcard)

and touch them.’ The two ideas of ensemble (‘beads on a expensive necklace’) and realism (‘so like life’) constituted the innovations of the Moscow Art Theatre, especially prevalent in its productions of Chekhov. This view clashed with the realities of the provincial theatre world, which Yureneva illustrates in her account of a rehearsal with another Solovtsov actress, who commands, ‘I do my monologue – you don’t react. I pause here – you react. I cross – you stay still. Then I laugh – you look at me.’ Such a rehearsal style would never produce the ‘so like life’ effect of Stanislavsky’s realism.15 Anatoly Lunacharsky, who worked briefly as a journalist and theatre critic in Kyiv in 1904, describes a ceremony honouring Chekhov after his death: actors from the Solovtsov performed a mediocre (in Lunacharsky’s view) production of Vishniovyi sad (The Cherry Orchard), gave various perorations, and finally lay wreaths on a bust of Chekhov standing in the theatre lobby. Although, according to Lunacharsky, ‘in Kyiv the admirers of Stanislavsky completely dominate,’ provincial actors had difficulty accepting the Moscow Art Theatre style of making theatre. Yureneva claims, in fact, that provincial troupes ‘generally hated and fiercely rejected’ Stanislavsky. The idea of ‘ninety rehearsals for one play, careful discussion of every step taken on stage, the absence of a prompter, reading [the script] around a table and discussing the period of the play’ was simply incompatible with the demands of the provincial theatre world. Nevertheless, Stanislavsky’s ideas of ensemble and of realism constituted the challenge of the early-twentiethcentury theatre in Russia; whether artists loved or hated Stanislavsky, they could not ignore his innovations.16

‘A Theatrical Mecca’: The Stages of Kyiv in 1907 33

Konstantin Mardzhanov arrived in Kyiv in the summer of 1907, inspired by Stanislavsky’s theatrical revolution and prepared to shake up the theatre world of Kyiv. ‘Used to the clichés of the respectable bourgeois theatre,’ Kyiv may not have been quite ready for him or his proposed revolution. He opened his season in September 1907 with Tri sestry (Three Sisters) and added a technical innovation: the stage turned. Although Kyivans still remembered the rotating stage years later, it did not provoke the appropriate response at the time. As the sisters lamented, ‘To Moscow! To Moscow!’ the stage creaked into motion, turning as if, indeed, carrying them off to Moscow. Audiences howled with laughter. During Tolstoy’s Vlast tmy (Power of Darkness) Mardzhanov added a live duck to the set design in order to create the proper mood and atmosphere. One evening the duck jumped off the stage and into the audience. When Duvan-Tortsov suggested to Mardzhanov that perhaps he should modify his directorial vision, Mardzhanov picked up an axe and began hacking at the scenery, at which point Duvan-Tortsov begged him to ‘have mercy’ on the theatre’s property.17 Nor were actors accustomed to submitting to a directorial concept. Elizaveta Charusskaia, who played Irina in Three Sisters, had a habit of faking a faint during especially dramatic scenes. After wringing her hands and rolling her eyes, she would fall in a faint on the stage, as if overwhelmed by her own performance. The show would come to a halt, she would be taken off stage, and the stage manager would summon a doctor. After a short while, she would ‘recover’ and return to the stage, while the audience shouted and clapped with glee. Mardzhanov, however, did not want his sophisticated productions ruined by such a diva stunt. For a production of Svadba Zobaidy (Zobaida’s Wedding) he prepared an understudy and had stagehands dressed in costume waiting in the wings. When Charusskaia ‘fainted,’ the understudy stepped on the stage and resumed the performance without missing a beat, while the stagehands dragged a shocked Charusskaia offstage. The actress ‘immediately recovered’ and insisted that Mardzhanov allow her to return to her performance, but he demurred, claiming he was unwilling to harm her health by allowing her to continue to perform in such dramatic roles. The fainting fits stopped then and there.18 Despite his desire to shake up the Solovtsov, Konstantin Mardzhanov was unable to ‘radically change’ the provincial stage in 1907 Kyiv. The Russian-language provincial theatre was a well-loved part of Kyivan life, but was not yet ready for an artistic revolution. In his season at the Solovtsov, however, Mardzhanov drew a cluster of talented young actors around him. He even allowed these young artists to arrange a benefit performance for themselves. This was contrary to custom; usually, benefits served as salary supplements to more established artists. The connection forged with these young actors at the Solovtsov would spread throughout the theatre circuit of the Russian empire, and later the Soviet Union.19 Mikhail Bagrov, who played Vershinin in the Solovtsov Three Sisters, invited Mardzhanov to work with him during the 1908–9 season in Odesa, where Bagrov ran his own theatrical enterprise. It was at Bagrov’s theatre that Stepan Kuznetsov, who as a young man played the aged servant Ferapont in Three Sisters, triumphed as Khlestakov in Mardzhanov’s production of Gogol’s Revizor (The Inspector General). Kuznetsov’s success in this provincial Inspector General landed him the

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role at the Moscow Art Theatre. Although Kuznetsov returned to Kyiv after two years because he missed the variety of roles and artistic independence of the provincial stage, Deich notes that his Khlestakov had improved after two years at the Moscow Art. It was at Bagrov’s theatre that Mardzhanov first worked with Vera Yureneva, who had missed Mardzhanov’s season at the Solovtsov. Yureneva and Mardzhanov would link up at several points in their careers. In 1911 Mardzhanov directed a production of Aleksandr Voznesensky’s play Sliozy (Tears), starring Vera Yureneva, at Nezlobin’s new enterprise in Moscow. Mardzhanov and Yureneva took this production on tour to Kyiv and performed it at the Solovtsov theatre. Finally, in 1919 Mardzhanov, now Bolshevik Theatre Commissar for Soviet Ukraine, directed a celebrated production of Lope de Vega’s Fuente Ovejuna at the Second Lenin Theatre of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic – formerly the Solovtsov – with Vera Yureneva starring in the main role.20 As for Mardzhanov himself, his dream finally came true when NemirovichDanchenko and Stanislavsky tapped him for an assistant directing position at the Moscow Art Theatre in 1910. Mardzhanov, convinced that the Art Theatre was the ‘first’ theatre in Russia, wrote to his family that he was simply in ‘seventh heaven.’ He invited Ivan Bersenev, who had followed him from the Solovtsov to Bagrov’s in Odesa, to join him in Moscow. Bersenev accepted the offer, and played Fortinbras in the famous Edward Gordon Craig production of Hamlet, for which Mardzhanov was an assistant director.21 Mardzhanov quickly grew disillusioned with Stanislavsky’s enterprise. Like Vsevolod Meyerhold and others, he ultimately rejected Stanislavsky’s fierce commitment to realism, and advocated Edward Gordon Craig’s style of poetic theatricality. In his memoirs Mardzhanov explains that he began to feel that realism for realism’s sake was less effective than artistic imagination. In 1913 Mardzhanov left his mentor and the Moscow Art Theatre and founded his own theatre, the Svobodny teatr (Free Theatre), where another group of artists would gather and create a nexus of personal and professional connections on the imperial theatre circuit. Directors such as Mardzhanov spent their careers moving between the capital cites and the regions, linking theatre in Kyiv with theatre in Moscow, with theatre in Riga and St Petersburg. In this way Mardzhanov reflects Miller’s notion of the imperial situation. Through the world of theatre Mardzhanov traversed the Russian empire; his career, which resists regional categorization of Georgian or Russian, suggests the dynamism and multiplicity of influences possible in the multi-ethnic, multi-linguistic Russian Empire. Through artists such as Mardzhanov – and Yureneva – theatre in Kyiv, one provincial city in Russia, became truly imperial, connected to people and places throughout the Empire.22 Kyiv, Troitsky Narodny Dom: Sadovsky Makes a Revolution Mykola Sadovsky, actor and impresario of the leading Ukrainian-language troupe, opens his season on 15 November 1907 with Revizor (The Inspector General). With this play by Nikolai Gogol, known in Ukrainian as Mykola Hohol, Sadovsky inaugurates not only the season, but also the first-ever permanent and stationary Ukrainian-language theatre.

‘A Theatrical Mecca’: The Stages of Kyiv in 1907 35

2.7 Ivan Marianenko, 1912

2.8 Mykola Sadovsky in Nikolai Gogol’s (Mykola Hohol’s) Inspector General, Sadovsky Theatre, 1908

Everyone, from the coat-check ladies to the actors on stage, speaks Ukrainian. Sadovsky has translated the play himself and transposed the action from Russia to Ukraine; he worried that his audience would not understand if a character from St Petersburg started speaking Ukrainian. Word of this performance has reached the capital in St Petersburg, where in Teatr i iskusstvo theatre critic Aleksandr Kugel warns derisively, ‘Khlestakov, conversing in the Ukrainian language – what a hoot!’ Deich reports that the evening feels like a ‘test’ for the Ukrainian-language theatre. Ivan Marianenko, playing the central role of Khlestakov, and Sadovsky, playing the Mayor, suffer backstage from nerves before the curtain rises.23 The performance, pace Kugel, was a success. Russian actor Aleksei Smirnov, who played the Mayor at the Solovtsov, complimented Sadovsky with tears in his eyes. Stepan Kuznetsov later mentioned to Deich how much he would like to play Khlestakov to Sadovsky’s Mayor, but of course he, Kuznetsov, could not speak Ukrainian. In fact, whenever The Inspector General played, actors from the Solovtsov rushed to the Troitsky Dom after their own performance to see the Ukrainian Inspector General’s last act. Sadovsky’s fiery rendition of the line ‘Who are you laughing at? It’s yourselves you are laughing at!’ was unforgettable.24

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2.9 Troitsky Dom (turn-of-the-century postcard; photo: D. Markov)

Along with his translation of Gogol’s Revizor, Sadovsky’s inaugural 1907 season offered a wealth of new Ukrainian translations of plays then popular in the greater European repertoire: Russian plays were represented by Aleksandr Ostrovsky’s Dokhodnoe mesto (A Profitable Position) and Evgeny Chirikov’s Evrei (The Jews); Polish plays by Gabriela Zapolska’s Moralnist pani Dulskoi (The Morality of Mrs Dulska) and Juliusz Słowacki’s Mazepa; Dutch plays by Herman Heijermans’s The Good Hope; and even Yiddish plays were represented by a Ukrainian translation of Sholem Asche’s Boh pomsty (God of Vengeance). No longer was the Ukrainianlanguage stage limited in its repertory; Sadovsky was determined to bring the world of European literature to his theatre, the first-ever permanent Ukrainianlanguage ensemble.25 In fact, Sadovsky had been in Austria-Hungary directing the Ruska Besida, which enjoyed limited regulation and even received a subsidy from the Galician Sejm, when he got news of the 1906 revocation of the regulations restricting Ukrainianlanguage culture. He returned to Russia and assembled a troupe in Poltava in 1906, but somehow managed to miss the first round of bids on the theatre at the Literacy Society’s new building, the Troitsky Narodny Dom, just outside the centre of Kyiv in a lower-class section of town not well served by public transportation. The Kyivan liberal intelligentsia had founded the Obshchestvo gramotnosti, the Literacy Society, in 1882 and built the Troitsky Narodny Dom in 1902 as a people’s club with auditoriums, reading rooms, tearooms, and a theatre. Isaak Duvan-Tortsov of the Solovtsov won the auction and set up his own theatre company, the aptly titled Teatr obshchestva gramotnosti (Theatre of the Literacy Society), where in early 1907 one could see Molière’s Scapin, Gorky’s Deti solntsa (Children of the Sun), Chirikov’s The Jews, Griboedov’s Gore ot uma (Woe from

‘A Theatrical Mecca’: The Stages of Kyiv in 1907 37

2.10 Sadovsky troupe

Wit), and the French duo Erckmann-Chatrian’s Le Juif Polonais (The Polish Jew). Duvan-Tortsov managed the enterprise and hired Alexandr Kosherov as artistic director. A colleague of Meyerhold’s at the Moscow Art Theatre, Kosherov had toured the provinces with Meyerhold for several seasons until their paths diverged artistically. Kosherov’s directing at the Teatr obshchestva gramotnosti consisted of copying the Moscow Art Theatre productions with minimal sets and costumes – he did not have the same budget as Stanislavsky. The result was not always poor, however. Lunacharsky writes that Kosherov’s production of Aleksandr Ostrovsky’s Snegurochka (The Snow-Maiden), deprived of Stanislavsky’s special effects, revealed the power of the text. Despite Lunacharsky’s good reviews, Duvan-Tortsov’s venture failed; he lost 20,000 rubles in the 1906–7 season. Happily for all, Sadovsky stepped in and offered 6000 rubles a year to rent the theatre for the winter season, from September to Lent.26 Even rented from Duvan-Tortsov, Sadovsky’s new theatrical enterprise constituted a major watershed in Ukrainian-language theatre. The Ukrainian-language stage was not unique in the Russian empire in its subjection to censorship; unlike the Russian-language stage, however, it was subjected to both Ukrainian-language and theatrical censorship. Although the tsarist government did not support theatres financially, it regulated each and every troupe through a system of censorship, designed by the Glavnoe upravlenie po delam pechati (Main Administration

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2.11 Ivan Karpenko-Kary

for Affairs of the Press) in the Ministry of Internal Affairs in St Petersburg and applied by the local offices of the governor-general or police administration. Provincial theatres, or theatrical enterprises on tour in the provinces, had to confirm their proposed repertory with the local administration. While general censorship of the press was rescinded following the revolution of 1905, theatrical censorship continued throughout Russia until 1917.27 The Ukrainian-language stage also faced the late-nineteenth-century restrictions on the Ukrainian language. The 1876 Ems ukaz had (among much else) prohibited ‘all stage performances, lyrics to music, and public readings (as they presently have the character of Ukrainophile manifestations).’ Amendments to the decree in 1881 permitted Ukrainian-language plays, but only when performed with Russianlanguage plays. Circulars from the Main Administration for the Affairs of the Press continued to alter the ukaz; for example, a circular of 1883 specified that the Russian and Ukrainian portions of the performance had to be of equal length. The Ems ukaz, however, was never published, so it was up to the local governor-general or police administration to decide how to interpret the various circulars on repertory restriction of Ukrainian-language theatre.28 Herein lay the central difficulty for the Ukrainian-language stage: quite simply, the government forbade translation into Ukrainian, which limited repertory. Aside from the old classics, such as Kotliarevsky’s 1819 Natalka-Poltavka, a story of love triumphing in Poltava province amid hopak dances and folk songs, Taras Shevchenko’s verse dramas, and Kvitka-Osnovianenko’s comedies, playwrights had to create an entire repertory from scratch. While melodrama and musical operettas were popular throughout the Russian empire, the Ukrainian-language troupes were restricted to these genres – no Shakespeare, no Ostrovsky, no Schiller, all staples of Russianlanguage provincial troupes. Nor could the Ukrainian-language troupes change with the times; melodrama was popular in the 1880s when the professional Ukrainian-language stage began, but by the 1900s the theatre needed new genres. Panas Saksahansky and Ivan Karpenko-Kary, Sadovsky’s two brothers, described the difficulties imposed by the restrictions on the Ukrainian language in a

‘A Theatrical Mecca’: The Stages of Kyiv in 1907 39

speech to the All-Russian Congress of Actors in St Petersburg in 1897, at which many of the 1384 delegates complained about the strictures of tsarist theatrical regulation. The stipulation that for every performance of a Ukrainian-language play companies had to perform a Russian-language play of equal length meant that actors often had to perform – and audiences sit through – ten acts in a row, which ‘tests the endurance of both actors and audience.’ Saksahansky admitted that officials could be lenient, permitting a single Russian vaudeville to replace the stipulated five-act Russian play, for example, but officials had the power to fine a company that did not follow the law, or order them to leave the city and cut short their tour (and their profits). Furthermore, Saksahansky and Karpenko-Kary declared that the staples of their repertoire were ‘totally uninteresting for the people and too overladen with song and dance.’ The Ukrainian-language theatre, they argued, needed serious plays because ‘continually feeding’ an audience bad plays ‘destroys their taste.’29 Despite the regulation, however, Ukrainian-language theatre flourished in late Imperial Russia, and its leading actors were known as the Teatr Koryfeiv, the Theatre of the Stars. The Tobilevych brothers, known by their stage names of Mykola Sadovsky, Ivan Karpenko-Kary, and Panas Saksahansky, as well as their childhood friend Marko Kropyvnytsky, and the celebrated diva and Sadovsky’s sometime girlfriend Maria Adasovska, known as Maria Zankovetska, continually formed and re-formed companies depending on the state of familial quarrelling. Like other theatrical enterprises in the Russian Empire, the koryfei troupes toured on the imperial theatrical circuit, to Moscow, St Petersburg, Vilnius, and even Baku. In 1886 they charmed St Petersburg – and Tsar Alexander III – with their performances. Nor did the popularity of the Ukrainian-language theatre diminish; however much Saksahansky may have complained about his repertoire, he continued performing plays such as Natalka-Poltavka with his itinerant troupe long after the 1906 abolition of the Ems ukaz. In 1907, undeterred by his brother’s acquisition of a permanent theatrical home, Saksahansky rented an outdoor theatre in Kyiv for the summer season, offering plays in the familiar koryfei repertoire.30 Although Sadovsky’s theatre was a critical success, it polarized the question of the nature of Ukrainian-language theatre. While the theatre successfully performed Gogol, the works of more modern Ukrainian playwrights, such as Lesia Ukrainka or Volodymyr Vynnychenko, left Sadovsky’s audience and critics cold. Actors were unable to handle new texts, such as Ukrainka’s Kaminnyi hospodar (The Stone Guest), which was a failure in 1914. Many koryfei artists, moreover, wanted to keep working in the style and repertory they already knew. Was this repertory of village melodrama still appropriate for the times, however? Yury Smolych grew up on the koryfei plays, which were ‘so like life in their songs, dances, and clothes.’ But he grew to dislike the ‘non-intellectual’ quality of the repertory; after all, he lived in the city, not the village. Within the structures of the Russian empire, koryfei artists and their audiences had created a theatre identified as ‘Ukrainian,’ but by 1907 younger generations had newer visions of ‘Ukrainian’ theatre, and began to contest the repertoire and style of the older koryfei troupes.31 Members of the intelligentsia in Kyiv saw no difference between their cultural and political activities and linked the Ukrainian-language theatre to the Ukrainian

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2.12 Scene from Marko Kropyvnytsky’s Po revizii (After the Inspection), starring (left to right) Mykola Sadovsky, Hanna Zatyrkevych-Karpynska, Panas Saksahansky, Marko Kropyvnytsky, and Maria Zankovetska

political project. The year 1907 saw the publication of Liudmyla StarytskaCherniakhivska’s essay ‘25 Years of Ukrainian Theatre,’ in which she recalls the evening, twenty-five years earlier, when the Teatr Koryfeiv first performed in Kyiv. She describes the smell in the Dom Bergonier: ‘warmth … the smell of powder, perfume, and gaslight.’ The audience’s ‘eyes sparkled’ as the Ukrainian language ‘rang out’ in the theatre. Starytska-Cherniakhivska, who identifies her generation as the ‘first Ukrainian children,’ was the middle daughter of Mykhailo Starytsky, a Ukrainian-language writer involved in the early years of the koryfei who wrote much of its repertory. His eldest daughter, Maria, taught acting at the Lysenko conservatory, named after composer Mykola Lysenko, Starytsky’s close friend and brother-in-law. The memoirs of Starytsky’s youngest daughter, Oksana, recount evenings of family and friends gathered together. The Starytskys were close friends with the Kosachs, whose daughter, Larysa, wrote under the pen name Lesia Ukrainka. The brother of Ukrainka’s mother, herself a writer under the pen name Olena Pchilka, was Mykhailo Drahomanov, Ukrainian political activist and political émigré following the Ems ukaz. Symon Petliura, then a mere theatre critic,

2.13 Scene from Volodymyr Vynnychenko’s Moloda krov (Young Blood), directed by Ivan Marianenko. Mykola Sadovsky Theatre, 1913 (photo from the journal Saivo, 1913)

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considered himself a close family friend of the Starytskys and Kosachs. Oksana, her husband Ivan Steshenko, Lesia Ukrainka, the playwright Volodymyr Vynnychenko, and other members of the young artistic intelligentsia formed the Ukrainian Social Democratic Party in 1905. These figures carry various political and literary significance, but they all belong to a common network of the Ukrainian intelligentsia for whom culture and politics were inextricably intertwined. By 1907 Ukrainian-language theatre was for them not just art, or entertainment, but a part of the national political project.32 Intelligentsia members Mykola Vorony and Dmytro Antonovych wrote the first histories of the Ukrainian-language theatre. For Antonovych ‘theatre had to be a community school, had to teach, had to lead’ the ‘unconscious Ukrainian mass,’ which did not yet have ‘national feeling.’ Moreover, Antonovych and Vorony both critiqued the aesthetic style of the koryfei. Vorony advocated not the realism of Stanislavsky, but the theatrical expressionism of Max Reinhardt, who staged Greek plays in a 5000-seat circus. Reinhardt’s Oedipus Rex had toured Kyiv in 1912. Antonovych believed that theatre should revive the balagan, the theatre of the fairground booth, a theatre that in no way attempted representation of real life. For Antonovych, and for the many artists throughout Europe demanding a rejection of realism, the balagan offered a way to solve the perceived crisis in the theatre by offering pure theatricality, inspiration from commedia dell’arte and puppet theatre, and a connection with the popular audience. Sadovsky and his fellows, argued Antonovych, were still searching for a pobutovyi (quotidian; village manners) theatre and were unable to ‘turn around to the balagan.’33 With the creation of Sadovsky’s theatre, the Ukrainian-language stage faced a crisis of style and of purpose: pobutovyi or balagan, everyday or carnival? Endow Ukrainians with ‘national feeling’ or entertain multi-ethnic Kyiv? The opportunities for the Ukrainian stage were thrown wide open in 1907, as the younger generation strove for more theatricality, and less realism – both for the Ukrainian-language stage and for theatre throughout the Russian Empire and Europe. Russia and Europe: Imperial Culture in Action On 8 November 1907, leading actress and audience favourite Vera Komisarzhevskaia writes Vsevolod Meyerhold, who has directed her theatre for the past year, that she and he ‘cannot continue on together’ and that she cannot consider him her ‘co-worker’ anymore.34 Gossip about the entertainment world travels quickly. Word of Komisarzhevskaia’s letter and the Komisarzhevskaia-Meyerhold split soon reached Kyiv. Most of Kyiv sided with Komisarzhevskaia against Meyerhold. This prejudice against Meyerhold, suggests Deich, could have doomed his tour at the end of the 1907–8 theatre season to less-than-stellar success. Deich describes the two ticket windows at the Solovtsov theatre – the one upstairs for the expensive seats in the orchestra, and the one downstairs, with a perennial line out the door, for the cheap seats in the galleries. In 1908 Meyerhold played Balaganchik (The Fairground Booth) to an empty orchestra, but to a packed gallery in the Solovtsov theatre. The tour was a

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2.14 Vera Komisarzhevskaia (turn-of-the-century postcard; Imperial Theatres series)

rousing success with students and artists such as Deich, but the show ‘demanded too much’ of the general Kyivan public.35 Komisarzhevskaia hired Meyerhold, who had been touring the provinces after leaving Stanislavsky’s Moscow Art Theatre, to invigorate her theatre in St Petersburg. Meyerhold was anxious to further develop his ideas of commedia dell’ arte and physical acting, with which he had been experimenting during his time away in the provinces. His new production of Aleksandr Blok’s The Fairground Booth featured himself, Komisarzhevskaia, and Aleksandr Tairov, a young actor recently arrived from Kyiv. Writer Yury Annenkov saw the 1906–7 production of The Fairground Booth at Komisarzhevskaia’s theatre in St Petersburg. He describes his later realization that he had seen Meyerhold, Komisarzhevskaia, and Tairov onstage at the same time: ‘I suddenly felt the significance of this evening only twenty years later, and since then it has become the symbol of an entire era for me.’36 Tours played a major role in creating the theatrical landscape of pre-Revolutionary Kyiv. Kyiv was not cut off from the rest of Imperial Russia, nor from the rest of Europe. Through the press, readers could discover the scandals and happenings of the theatre world beyond Kyiv. Readers of Rada, the new intelligentsia-sponsored Ukrainianlanguage newspaper, learned in 1907 that Gerhart Hauptmann had just premiered a new play at the Lessingtheater in Berlin, while the opera Evgeny Onegin played in Polish in Warsaw. Readers could follow the itinerary of their favourite troupes and watch for advertisements of upcoming appearances in Kyiv. Vera Yureneva first saw the Moscow Art Theatre on tour in Kyiv; the Moscow Art, playing Kyiv in 1912, also impressed Vasyl Vasylko, a teenager involved in the Russian and Ukrainian-language theatres and school chum of Aleksandr Deich. Vasylko could not believe that the same actors performed both Knut Hamsun’s In the Grip of Life, directed by Konstantin Mardzhanov, and Gorky’s Na dne (The Lower Depths).37

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2.15 Vsevolod Meyerhold, 1925

2.16 Aleksandr Tairov

Aleksandr Tairov saw Komisarzhevskaia perform at the Solovtsov theatre in Kyiv in 1904, and the experience changed his life. A law student at Kyiv University, Tairov had performed professionally with local itinerant troupes, but he now decided he simply had to move to St Petersburg and work with Komisarzhevskaia. Somehow he garnered himself not only an audition but also a position in her company during their stay in Kyiv. The 1905 demonstrations delayed Tairov, however. Along with other Ukrainian actors, he demonstrated on the Khreshchatyk against the many restrictions on the use of Ukrainian language in the theatre and the press. He was arrested and did not arrive in St Petersburg until 1906.38 Like Komisarzhevskaia herself, Tairov did not enjoy Meyerhold’s experimentation. Although Tairov would himself later work with commedia forms and physical gestures at his own theatre, in 1907 he craved more artistic independence and accepted a position with Pavel Gaideburov’s Peredvizhny teatr (Itinerant Theatre). Gaideburov was married to Komisarzhevskaia’s sister, also an actress, and ran the theatre at Countess Sofia Panina’s charity project: the Ligovsky Narodny Dom (Ligovsky People’s House), built in 1903 in St Petersburg. Panina’s Theatre was one of several obshchedostupnyi (accessible to all) theatres, which kept prices low to educate a wider public through theatre, like the theatre at the Troitsky Dom in Kyiv. Gaideburov ran the theatre at Countess Panina’s and took the company on tour all over the Russian Empire to major cities such as Kyiv, where they performed at the Troitsky Dom, and minor cities such as the small town in Kherson province where theatre prompter Lev Bilotserkivsky spent his childhood.39

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After his work with Komisarzhevskaia and Gaideburov, Tairov agreed in 1913 to join Konstantin Mardzhanov’s new Svobodny teatr as a director – a huge opportunity for the unknown Tairov, whose directorial vision meshed with Mardzhanov’s impulses towards theatricality and away from realism. The theatre, unfortunately, lasted for only one season. The letters of Maria Andreeva, who had agreed to join Mardzhanov’s venture as an actress, suggest that Mardzhanov’s lack of business acumen caused a rift both with his patrons, the Sukhodolskys, and with young Tairov himself. To what extent Mardzhanov left his own theatre voluntarily remains unclear; in any case, the Svobodny ended, and Tairov, together with a group of artists who grew to admire him during the season, formed the Kamerny teatr. Through Mardzhanov and the Svobodny, Tairov met Alisa Koonen, a former rising star of the Moscow Art and favourite of Edward Gordon Craig. Koonen became Tairov’s partner and muse, and the Kamerny teatr one of the best known theatres in the Soviet Union.40 Meyerhold returned to Kyiv in March 1914 for a debate, staged in the Kyiv circus, about the future of theatre and the necessity of turning away from realism towards theatricality. Deich remembers the famous director urging them to ‘admit the unavoidable failure of everyday theatre and look for new paths.’ Deich, now a young theatre director himself, and his friends talked with Meyerhold after the debate late into the night. Deich and Nikolai Foregger were trying to produce an arts journal entitled Muse. When Meyerhold suggested that their journal needed more of a unified sense of artistic purpose, Deich countered that such a journal would never sell in Kyiv. Although aware of the commercial realities of the arts in a provincial city, the two young artists still felt themselves part of larger trends in the theatre world. Deich and his friends, including Foregger and artist Anatol Petrytsky, often sat around planning artistic ventures and lamenting that a ‘genuine feeling of theatricality was lost.’ For this circle of young artists struggling to rediscover theatricality and connect with the larger artistic world, Max Reinhardt’s 1912 tour to Kyiv constituted a momentous event. Reinhardt staged his Oedipus Rex, starring the celebrated actor Alexander Moissi, in the Kyiv circus and demanded 300 actors as extras. Students, including Deich, auditioned to obtain the privilege of both proximity to Reinhardt and Moissi and exemption from paying for a ticket.41 George Luckyj’s short volume The Anguish of Mykola Hohol, aka Nikolai Gogol illustrates the complex imperial identity in which pre-Revolutionary artists moved. Luckyj takes care to present Hohol-Gogol as a writer negotiating imperial culture, not as a ‘Little Russian’ writer oppressed by the empire, nor as a Ukrainophobic writer succumbing to Russian cultural hegemony. Luckyj suggests that Gogol moved along a Little Russia–Great Russia spectrum, unable to define himself solely as ‘Little Russian’ or as ‘Russian.’ Similarly, in an article showing the demise of the all-Russian cultural idea, Oleh Ilnytzkyj discusses Gogol’s cultural identity and concludes that ‘the origins and functions of creative work in such a complex society’ cannot derive from a single classification. He suggests embracing ‘the notion of the ‘imperial’ as a special type of cultural community and space therein.’ Kyiv in 1907 formed part of just such an ‘imperial’ cultural community, and reveals itself in 1907 as a cultural community ready for change. The imperial situation, in Miller’s terms, in the theatre was one of flux, of crisis, of a younger generation anxious to take over and create new theatre, in Russian or in Ukrainian.42

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2.17 Kijow (Kyiv). Coffeehouse ‘Udziałowa’ (turn-of-the-century postcard)

Now, if we can return to Kurbas, in a café in Kyiv conversing with Deich about theatre, perhaps we can better understand his use of the term ‘theatrical Mecca’ to describe the theatrical landscape of Kyiv. Kyiv presented a kaleidoscope: Ukrainianlanguage theatre ripe for transformation in an imperial theatrical circuit buzzing with an atmosphere of artistic revolution. As an artist in Kyiv, Kurbas was now part of this imperial cultural community, rich with interaction and possibility. It is this richness and this very sense of possibility that made Kyiv in 1916 so artistically exciting – truly, a ‘theatrical Mecca.’ How this imperial cultural community would be transformed over the next ten years is another story, but one involving the players of 1907 and 1916: Kurbas, Deich, Mardzhanov, Vasylko, Sadovsky, Smolych, and Marianenko, as well as Meyerhold and Tairov would all operate in the Soviet cultural community creating Ukrainian, Russian, and indeed, ‘Soviet’ theatre.

NOTES 1 All translations are my own, unless otherwise indicated. Some of the artists discussed here are covered in Hanna Veselovska, Teatral’ni perekhrestia Kyieva 1900–kh rr (Kyiv: Derzhavnyi tsentr teatral’noho mystetstva imeni Lesia Kurbasa, 2006), which was published after this essay was completed. 2 Roughly translated, Rus’ka Besida is Ruthenian Conversation; the group eventually renamed itself Ukrains’ka (Ukrainian) Besida.

‘A Theatrical Mecca’: The Stages of Kyiv in 1907 47 3 Nataliia Kuziakina, ‘Les’ Kurbas,’ in Kuziakina, Ivan Drach, and Les’ Taniuk, eds, Les’ Kurbas: Stat’i i vospominaniia o L. Kurbase (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1987) 10–11; Ivan Mar’ianenko, Stsena, aktory, roli (Kyiv: Mystetstvo, 1964) 169; Olena Bon’kovs’ka, L’vivs’kyi teatr tovarystva ‘Ukrains’ka Besida’ 1915–1924 (L’viv: Litopis, 2003) 35–9, 62–3; Vasyl’ Vasyl’ko, Teatru viddane zhytiia (Kyiv: Mystetstvo, 1984), 59, 68–70; see, for Galicia and the First World War, Paul Magocsi, History of Ukraine (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1996) 464–5; how did Sadovs’kyi know of Kurbas? – Sadovs’kyi worked with the Rus’ka Besida 1905–6; to ask Kurbas to replace Mar’ianenko (an audience favourite) suggests that he knew Kurbas’s work. Director Prokhor Kovalenko claims that Galician actor-director Iosyp Stadnyk, who worked at Sadovs’kyi’s theatre in Kyiv after being freed from a Russian prisoner-of-war camp in early First World War, knew Kurbas and recommended him to Sadovs’kyi; see Kovalenko, Shliakhy na stsenu (Kyiv: Mystetstvo, 1964) 280. Sadovs’kyi also probably knew Kurbas’s father, Stepan, also an actor, who had been to Eastern Ukraine (then Russia) in 1891 to observe Marko Kropyvnyts’kyi’s theatre troupe and study his method of production. 4 Deich, Golos pamiati (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1966) 6; Deich, ‘Chelovek, kotoryi byl teatrom,’ in Les’ Kurbas: Stat’i i vospominaniia o L. Kurbase 173–5. 5 Deich, ‘Chelovek’ 175. 6 See, for an overview of theatre in Imperial Kyiv, Michael Hamm, Kiev: A Portrait 1800–1917 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1993); see, for a fairly reliable, if overly Soviet view of Ukrainian-language theatre, Maksym Ryl’s’kyi, ed., Ukrains’kyi dramatychnyi teatr, 2 vols. (Kyiv: Naukova dumka, 1967); information on early twentieth-century Polish and Yiddish theatre in Kyiv is (so far) slim, see A.V. Smirnova-Iskander, ‘O Stanislave Vysotskoi,’ in O tekh, kogo pomniu (Leningrad: Iskusstvo, 1989) 92–103; Piotr Horbatowski, W szponach polityki: Polskie Īycie teatralne v Kijowie; Henrikh Strons’kyi, ‘Pol’s’kyi teatr u Kyevi,’ Ukrains’kyi teatr 5 (1992): 28–9; see, on the Yiddish theatre, for background, Oleksandra Pidopryhorova, ‘Ievreis’ka kul’tura v Ukraini. Vzaiemopronyknennia ukrains’koi i ievreis’koi kul’tur,’ in Pidhotovchi materialy populiarnoi entsyklopedii, ‘Ukrains’ke ievreistvo’ 3 (Kyiv: Instytut Iudaiky, 1998) 219–35; for analysis, Jeffrey Veidlinger, The Moscow State Yiddish Theatre (Bloomington: U of Illinois P, 1999), although Veidlinger does not deal with other Yiddish theatres; see, on the post-1905 legislation, V. Sakhnovskii-Pankeev ‘Ukrainskii teatr v period revoliutsii 1905–1907 g,’ in Pervaia russkaia revoliutsiia i teatr (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1956) 280. 7 See, for Kurbas’s early years, Iryna Volyts’ka, Teatral’na iunist’ Lesia Kurbasa (L’viv: NAN, 1995); Aleksei Miller, ‘Between Local and Inter-Imperial: Russian Imperial History in Search of Scope and Paradigm,’ Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 5:1 (Winter 2004) 14–15; Irena R. Makaryk, Shakespeare in the Undiscovered Bourn: Les Kurbas, Ukrainian Modernism, and Early Soviet Cultural Politics (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2004), chap. 1. 8 Deich, Golos 11; ‘Programma serii spektaklei-lektsii osushchestvlionnykh K.A. Mardzhanishvili v Solovtsovskom teatre v sezone 1907–1908,’ in E.N. Gugushvili et al., eds, Konstantin Aleksandrovich Mardzhanishvili/Mardzhanov: Tvorcheskoe nasledie, pis’ma, vospominaniia i stat’i o K.A. Mardzhanishvili (Tbilisi: Literatura da khelovneba, 1966) 3 and n. 1, 592; see, on Mardzhanov, both Mardzhanishvili/Mardzhanov ibid., and K.A. Mardzhanishvili/Mardzhanov: Tvorcheskoe nasledie, vospominaniia, stat’i i doklady (Tbilisi: Zaria vostoka, 1958).

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9 Deich, Golos 11; Vera Iureneva, Zapiski aktrisy (Leningrad: Iskusstvo, 1946) 88; M.F. Andreeva, letter to Stanislavsky, 26 February 1904, in M.F. Andreeva: Perepiska, vospomonaniia, stat’i, dokumenty, vospominaniia o M. F. Andreevoi (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1961) 62–4; Mardzhanov’s wife mentions that when she met him, he was performing with a Georgian-language troupe, Nadezhda Zhivokini-Mardzhanishvili, ‘Iz vospominanii,’ in Mardzhanov (1966) 252. 10 Deich Golos 10–11; Iureneva 87–8; for the sake of clarity, I call those who own theatre buildings entrepreneurs, and those who run troupes impresarios. Contemporary sources call both entrepreneurs. Some were both, and some entrepreneurs/impresarios performed both administrative and artistic functions; see, for a stunning depiction of the pre-1861 provincial theatre world, Richard Stites, Serfdom, Society and the Arts in Imperial Russia: The Pleasure and the Power (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2006); I borrow the idea of the ‘theatrical circuit’ from Stites; see also Ira Petrovskaia, Teatr provintsial’noi Rossii (Leningrad: Iskusstvo, 1974); see, for the Imperial theatres, Murray Frame, The St. Petersburg Imperial Theatres: Stage and State in Revolutionary Russia, 1900–1920 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2000). 11 Mariia Velizarii, Put’ provintsial’noi aktrisy (Leningrad: Iskusstvo, 1938) 129, 149; Mykola Sadovs’kyi, Moi teatral’ni zhadky, ed. Maksym Ryl’s’kyi (Kyiv: Derzh. vyd. Obrazotvorchoho mystetstva i muzychnoi literatury, 1956) 16–17; Hamm 147, 32; the Dom Bergonier is now the Teatr russkoi dramy im. Lesi Ukrainky Russian-language theatre, while the theatre built for Solovtsov is now the Teatr im. Ivana Franka Ukrainian-language theatre. 12 Iureneva 88; Deich, Golos 10. 13 Iureneva 90; Deich, Golos 68, 25–7. 14 Deich, Golos 24; Iureneva 115; Velizarii, 149, notes how exceptional it was that Nikolai Solovtsov allowed ten rehearsals for every play. 15 See, for the Moscow Art Theatre, K. Stanislavsky, My Life in Art, trans. J.J. Robbins (New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1952), and V. Nemirovich-Danchenko, Iz proshlogo (Moscow: Academia, 1936); Iureneva 100–2, 113. 16 Deich, ‘Lunacharskii i teatr,’ in A.V. Lunacharskii: Izbrannye stat’i, 2 vols. (Moskva: Iskusstvo, 1958) 1: 11; Lunacharskii, ‘Vishnevyi sad A.P. Chekhova,’ Kievskie otkliki 5 (September 1904), rpt. in Lunacharskii 1: 56–8; Lunacharskii, ‘Snegurochka A. I. Ostrovskogo,’ Kievskie otkliki 3 (September 1904), rpt. in Lunacharskii 1: 53–5; Iureneva 102. 17 Deich, Golos 14–16. 18 Ibid. 16–17. 19 Ibid. 48; V. Khorol, ‘K.A. Mardzhanishvili na Ukraine,’ in Mardzhanov (1958) 416, 422; Ivan Bersenev, ‘Vospitatel’ i drug,’ in Mardzhanov (1966) 154. 20 Mardzhanishvili, ‘Vospominaniia,’ in Mardzhanov (1958) 35–42; Deich, Golos 31–2; Kuznetsov later became a company member of Moscow’s Malyi teatr; Iureneva 120, 127–8, 163–73; see, on Fuente Ovejuna, Deich, Golos 179–203. 21 K. Mardzhanov, letter to Nadezhda Mardzhanishvili, 16 May 1909, in Mardzhanov (1966) 58–9; Mardzhanov, ‘Vospominaniia’ 55; Mardzhanov, letter to Bersenev, 1910, in Mardzhanov (1966) 31; Bersenev 153; Bersenev ended up at the Moscow Art Theatre’s Second Studio, and later at the Lenkom; see, on the Edward Gordon Craig Hamlet, Laurence Senelick, Gordon Craig’s Moscow Hamlet: A Reconstruction (Westport, CT; Greenwood P, 1982).

‘A Theatrical Mecca’: The Stages of Kyiv in 1907 49 22 K. Mardzhanov, letter to his son, 9 August 1917, in Mardzhanov (1966) 67; Mardzhanov, ‘Vospominaniia,’ 55–8. 23 Deich, Golos 154–61; Mar’ianenko 159–60; Sadovskii [Sadovs’kyi], ‘Iz vospominanii,’ Sovetskii teatr 12 (1931) 30; Teatr i iskusstvo 32 (1907), qtd. in Sadovskii, ‘Iz vospominanii,’ 32; thanks to Virlana Tkacz for her suggestion of translating ‘eto nomer’ with ‘what a hoot’; the Troitskii Dom (Ukrainian: Troits’kyi Dim), located near metro Respublikans’kyi stadion, is now the Kyivs’kyi akademichnyi teatr operety. 24 Deich, Golos 161; catching the end of Sadovs’kyi’s show was possible because evening performances at the Solovtsov generally began at 7:30, while shows at Sadovs’kyi’s started at 8:00. 25 Mar’ianenko 147; Vasyl’ko 23. 26 See, for popular theatre and people’s houses, E. Anthony Swift, Popular Theatre and Society in Tsarist Russia (Berkeley: U of California P, 2002), Gary Thurston, The Popular Theatre Movement in Russia, 1862–1919 (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1998), and Murray Frame, School for Citizens: Theatre and Civil Society in Tsarist Russia (New Haven: Yale UP, 2006); Rada, 9 January 1907: 4; Sadovs’kyi 136–42, 154; Hamm 165; Nataliia Zvenigorodskaia, Provintsial’nye sezony Vsevoloda Meierkhol’da (Moscow: URSS, 2004) 93; Lunacharskii, ‘Snegurochka,’ Kievskie otkliki, 3 September 1907, rpt. in Lunacharskii 1: 53–5; Iu. Kostiuk, ‘Z istorii pershoho ukrains’koho statsionarnoho teatru,’ Teatral’na kul’tura (1968) 103–19. 27 See, for a concise summary in English, Swift, Popular Theatre and, for censorship of the arts in Europe, Robert Justin Goldstein, Political Censorship of the Arts and the Press in Nineteenth Century Europe (New York: St Martin’s P, 1989). 28 Alexei Miller, The Ukrainian Question: The Russian Empire and Nationalism in the Nineteenth Century (Budapest and New York: Central European UP, 2003) 267–9; note Ems ukaz, so called because Alexander II agreed to sign it while in the Prussian town of Ems, first published in Fedir Savchenko, Zaborona ukrainstva 1876 (Kharkiv and Kyiv: Derzhavne vydavnytstvo Ukrainy, 1930) 381–3; Miller, n. 80, 246. 29 ‘Doklad A.K. Saksaganskogo i I.K. Karpenko-Karogo Pervomu Vserossiiskomu S’ezdu Aktiorov,’ in P.K. Saksaganskii, Iz proshlogo ukrainskogo teatra (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1938) 155–62; S.S. Danilov and M.G. Portugalova, Russkii dramaticheskii teatr deviatnadtsatogo veka (Leningrad: Iskusstvo, 1957) 191. 30 See Makaryk, Shakespeare, for the story of the koryfei; Ivan Voloshin, ‘Tvorchist’ viddana narodu,’ in Aktors’ka maisternist’ koryfeiv (Kyiv: Mystetstvo, 1973), esp. chapter on Saksahans’kyi, 148–79; Sadovs’kyi 40–7, Saksaganskii 38–42; in the theatre of Ancient Greece coryphaei referred to the leader of the chorus, but here the term denotes the star actors of the professional Ukrainian-language theatre in Imperial Russia – their celebrity was such that they began to call themselves ‘the theatre of the stars.’ 31 Sofiia Tobilevych, Moi stezhky i zustrychi (Kyiv: Derzh. vyd. obrazotvorchoho mystetstva i muzychnoi literatury, 1957) 396; Sadovs’kyi 155; Iurii Smolych, Ia vybyraiu literaturu (Kyiv: Radians’kyi pys’mennyk, 1970) 249–50. 32 Liudmyla Staryts’ka-Cherniakhivs’ka, ‘25 rokiv ukrains’koho teatru,’ in Dmytro Antonovych, Trysta rokiv ukrains’koho teatru (Prague, 1925; Kyiv: VIP, 2003) 173–4, 269–70; Oksana Steshenko, Spohady, in Iurii Khorunzhyi, Shliakhetni ukrainky (Kyiv: vyd. im Oleny Telihy, 2003) 101–9; Khorunzhyi 94; About fifty members of the Ukrainian intelligentsia, including Lesia Ukrainka and Liudmila Staryts’ka-Cherniakhivs’ka, were

50

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34 35 36

37 38

39

40

41

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Mayhill C. Fowler arrested on 17 January 1907 and held overnight; for more on links between various figures of the intelligentsia, including those between Lesia Ukrainka, Evgenii Chirikov, Symon Petliura, and Aleksandr Deich, see Miron Petrovskii, Gorodu i miru: Kievskie ocherki, 2nd ed. (Kiev: Dukh i litera, 2008). Mykola Voronyi, ‘Ukrains’kyi teatr u Kyievi,’ in Voronyi, Poezii, pereklady, krytyka, publitsystyka, ed. G.D. Verves (Kyiv: Naukova dumka, 1996) 378–402; Deich, Golos 52; Antonovych 207; for the Ukrainian artists and intellectuals balagan referred also to vertep, the puppet (and later live-actor) theatre performed by students at the KyivMohyla Academy in the seventeenth century; see, for more on balagan, Catriona Kelly, Petrushka: The Russian Carnival Puppet Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990) and J. Douglas Clayton, Pierrot in Petrograd: The Commedia dell’arte / Balagan in TwentiethCentury Russian Theatre and Drama (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1994). V. Komisarzhevskaia, letter to Meyerhold, 8 November 1907, in Meierkhol’d: Perepiska (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1976) 108. Deich, Golos 57, 68. See, for Meyerhold and Komisarzhevskaia, Béatrice Picon-Vallin, Meyerhold (Paris: CNRS, 2004) 33–9; Iurii Annenkov, ‘Vsevolod Meierkhol’d,’ in Dnevnik moikh vstrech, 2 vols. (New York, 1966; rpt. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1991) 2: 30. Rada, 8 April 1907: 4; Vasyl’ko 46–8. Aleksandr Tairov, ‘Zapiski rezhissiora,’ in Tairov, O teatre, ed. Pavel Markov (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1970) 68–9; Tairov was born Aleksandr Kornblit in Romny; accounts rarely mention his Jewish origin, but see Gregor Aronson, ‘Tragedy of the Cosmopolite Tairov,’ Russian Review 11:3 (1952), which suggests that the campaign against Tairov (deprived of his theatre in 1949 and died 1950) had as much to do with his Jewish origins as with his aesthetics. Note that Aronson also claims Kornblit-Tairov was born in Berdychiv. Thurston 205; Lev Bilotserkivs’kyi, Zapysky suflera (Kyiv: Mystetstvo, 1962) 19; Gaideburov played Kyiv in March 1907, while Tairov was still in St Petersburg; Tairov 68; Rada, 30 March 1907: 2. M. Andreeva, letter to Ladyzhnikov, 4 December 1913, in M.F. Andreeva 226–7; N.F. and A.V. Monakhov, letter to Andreeva, 3 April 1914, in M.F. Andreeva 228–30; Alisa Kooonen, ‘Umenie verit’ v stoiashchego riadom,’ in Mardzhanov (1966) 302–7; O. Golubeva, ‘Ego mechtoi byl Svobodnyii teatr,’ in Mardzhanov (1966) 210–16. Deich, Golos 70–3, 52; Alexander Moissi / Alessandro Moissi / Aleksandër Moisiu, an actor of Albanian and Italian origin who grew up in Habsburg Trieste and Vienna, was one of the most famous actors of the German-language stage. George Luckyj, The Anguish of Mykola Hohol a.k.a. Nikolai Gogol (Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ P, 1998); ‘Little Russia’ was the term used to denote the right-bank lands (primarily) of today’s Ukraine, which were incorporated into the Russian empire from the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; aside from an imperial administrative term, the phrase ‘Little Russian’ had a range of connotations, including as a derogatory designation of ethnic Ukrainians, their language, and their culture. For a general history of the territory of today’s Ukraine, see Magocsi; Oleh Ilnytzkyj, ‘Modeling Culture in the Empire: Ukrainian Modernism and the Death of the All-Russian Idea,’ in Culture, Nation and Identity, ed. Andreas Kappeler and Mark von Hagen (Edmonton: Canadian University Scholars P, 2003) 367–8.

Dawn dedicated to Hryhory Savych Skovoroda Dawn now, but the mist still lingers … A crease appears in the sky. – How sorrow has taken hold of me! Radiant furrows plow into the clouds. I hear – fanfares! – How sorrow has taken hold of me … Those are not fanfares, they’re trumpets and guns. Sleep, do not awake, mother! … Damn them, a curse on them all who’ve turned into beasts! (Instead of sonnets or octaves). Pavlo Tychyna, Instead of Sonnets or Octaves (1920)

Translated from the Ukrainian by Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipps

3 ‘Special and Bewildering’: A Portrait of Late-Imperial and Early Soviet Kyiv1 michael f. hamm

‘Kiev is Kiev, special and bewildering.’ Ruth Kedzie Wood2

At its zenith in the eleventh century, Kyiv (Russian: Kiev), the ‘mother of towns of ancient Rus,’ was the ruling centre of the largest political entity in medieval Europe and one of the world’s largest and most splendid cities. Its estimated population of 50,000 in 1200 equalled that of Paris and exceeded that of London. In 1240 the Mongols destroyed the city. (Batu Khan had reportedly boasted, ‘I will tie Kyiv to the tail of my horse.’)3 Tatar raids would continue, and Kyiv would not fully recover for centuries. In the fifteenth century, one Venetian visitor called it ‘plain and poor.’4 In the late nineteenth century Kyiv began to grow rapidly, and modern Kyiv began to take shape. Podil, the commercial hub along the Dnipro (Russian: Dnepr) flood plain, High City, which contained the remnants of medieval Kyiv’s political and ecclesiastical splendour, and Pechersk, the upland fortress and site of the famous Cave Monastery, fused into a single urban area, and the Khreshchatyk, a wooded ravine favoured by hunters, trappers, and distillers, became one of Imperial Russia’s most famous Main Streets.5 The founding of St Vladimir University in 1834 and the rapid growth of the sugar beet industry in the surrounding region fuelled Kyiv’s early growth, from 20,000 in 1800 to 70,000 in 1870. With the completion of Kyiv’s first rail line that year, its population nearly doubled by 1874. By 1905 Kyiv had about 400,000 people; by 1914 about 520,000.6 In the Russian Empire, only St Petersburg, Moscow, Warsaw, and Odesa (Russian: Odessa) were larger. Growth and change could be confusing, as the following encounter from another Ukrainian city attests: Post policeman Cherevko (badge # 81), noting two freight-laden carts on the Prospekt, shouted to the drivers to turn back. But the peasants did not know that horses were forbidden and continued on their way. Indignant, the policeman seized his knout and dealt one a blow across the back and face. The peasant let out a shout and a huge crowd gathered, among them students P and Ch and the manager of the shop that bore the name of Prince Urusov. The crowd demanded that the policeman stop beating the

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3.1 View of Dnipro River port and Podil (turn-of-the-century postcard)

unfortunate peasants, who had entered the Prospekt by accident, not knowing city rules. Seeing the huge crowd and not understanding why it had assembled, a second policeman came and threatened everyone with arrest. But the crowd demanded the compiling of a full written report of the incident … and a complaint was filed with the chief of police.7

Multicultural Kyiv Poles were prominent in Kyiv’s high society in the early decades of the nineteenth century. During the Contract Fair, held in January, predominantly Polish landowners from the surrounding countryside came to Kyiv to mingle, strike deals, flaunt their wealth and fashion, and outdo one another with lavish balls and masquerades. During the Polish Insurrection of 1831, among Kyivans ‘there reigned a sense of excitement unseen anywhere else,’ according to one Pole.8 Stung by this insurrection, Tsar Nicholas I (1825–55) abolished Kyiv’s Magdeburg Rights, the independent burgher self-rule that had existed for more than 300 years, and began to fully integrate the city into the Russian Empire. The founding of St Vladimir University was the capstone of his effort to russify the region, and Polish cultural and economic influence diminished substantially, especially after a second insurrection in 1863.

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3.2 Kontrakty. Kyiv’s contract market in the Podil area (turn-of-the-century postcard)

Increasingly, Russian became the language of governance, education, and upward mobility in the city. Functional bilingualism was probably common, however, and many Kyivans spoke a Russian-Ukrainian amalgam called surzhyk (Russian: surzhik, meaning a mixture of wheat and rye). As one nineteenth-century scholar joked, ‘Kyivans speak neither Russian nor Little Russian. They speak a little in Russian.’9 It is difficult to assess the strength of Ukrainian sentiment in the city, as nationalist expression was forbidden. Russian nationalists did not accept the idea that ‘Little Russians’ were a separate nation, and tsarist edicts in 1863 and 1876 made publication in the Ukrainian language virtually impossible. A permanent Ukrainian theatre troupe was permitted in Kyiv only after the Revolution of 1905, and anecdotal evidence suggests that children were forbidden to wear Ukrainian peasant costumes in school plays.10 While a small Jewish community could be found in Kyiv as early as the eleventh century, Jews were denied permanent settlement for much of the city’s history. In 1827 Tsar Nicholas I expelled Kyiv’s 700 Jews, calling them exploiters and agents of Polish economic interests. In 1836 Kyiv was excluded from the Pale of Settlement, which meant that Jews could live in Kyiv Province but not in the city itself. In the late 1850s, however, Tsar Alexander II (1855–81) began to ease restrictions on Jewish settlement, and Kyiv’s Jewish community grew quickly to 14,000 in 1874, 32,000 in 1897, and 58,000 in 1910 (about 12 per cent of the total population). AntiSemitism became a powerful cultural and political force in the city. In 1910 the

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3.3 Kyiv. Synagogue (turn-of-the-century postcard; photo: D. Markov)

Russian Nationalist Club tried to prevent employees of commercial organizations that had Jews or foreigners on their boards of directors from voting in municipal elections. Jews were periodically rounded up and expelled from the city. Jewish scholar Simon Dubnow called Kyiv the ‘inferno of Russian Israel.’ ‘No place in the empire could vie as regards hostility to the Jews with the city of Kiev.’11 Tax rolls reveal that Jews owned about 17 per cent of Kyiv’s most lucrative real estate on the eve of the First World War and that Poles owned another 11 per cent.12 By comparison, Jews and other minorities controlled a greater share of the real estate wealth in other borderland cities such as Vilna, Kishenev, and Riga.13 Most Kyiv Jews were shopkeepers, peddlers, craftsmen, and students, and most were poor. About one-quarter had to apply for Passover alms. The Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem (Shalom Rabinovitz, or Rabinovich, 1859– 1916) lived in Kyiv for many years before leaving after the pogrom in October 1905, but Kyiv’s most prominent Jewish family descended from Mark Brodsky (Meir Schor), who came from Brody in Austrian Galicia (Ukrainian: Halychyna) early in the nineteenth century. One of his five sons, Izrail (1823–88), had a network of sugar-beet refineries that stretched as far as Odesa. His son, Lazar (1848– 1904), ‘the sugar king of the South,’ was a particularly important local philanthropist. His many projects included the Bessarabka covered market that still exists. Another prominent Kyiv Jew, Baron Vladimir Guenzburg, sponsored the ethnographic expeditions headed by Shloyme-Zanvl Rapoport (Semen Akimovich An-sky),

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3.4 Indoor market (Bessarabka) (turn-of-the-century postcard)

a Socialist Revolutionary activist turned folklorist, that gathered and photographed traditional artefacts from the shtetlach of the Pale. These expeditions, which began in 1908, continued during the First World War, when several ethnographic researchers were arrested in Zhytomyr and charged with spying. Their release came only after influential persons from St Petersburg intervened.14 Jews could not vote or stand for local election, but a committee of influential Jews attached itself to the City Duma (Council), serving as a conduit at least for the interests of the affluent.15 Affluence did not always protect Jews, however. In the pogrom of October 1905, as many as 100 were killed, 400 were injured, 1800 homes and shops were plundered, and 3000 Jews were left without a place to work. Two Brodsky homes were plundered, and a younger member of the family, Grigory, was severely beaten after killing two members of the mob. Local authorities stood by for three days before stopping the violence, and some police participated in the mob. Said one letter published in Kievskie otkliki (Kyiv Comments) on 27 October 1905, ‘Yesterday in your paper you asked us to turn all our plundered goods over to the police. We ask you to advise the police to turn over all the goods they plundered to us. They took more than we did.’16 Kyiv’s pogrom mobs consisted of drunken hooligans and thugs, street people from the ‘barefoot brigade,’ religious zealots, those who simply sought an excuse to riot and loot, and even some prominent citizens and local officials. These mobs, however, were small, and they could have been easily dispersed had local authorities chosen to do so.17 Late-imperial Kyiv was not a tolerant city with a fully integrated multiethnic community, but one should not exaggerate the level of ethno-religious conflict

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3.5 Map of Kiev/Kyiv, 1900 (with the permission of Princeton University Press)

either. Pogroms and ethnic riot were not the norm, and when they occurred they were not mass phenomena. Likewise, the ability of urban life to promote empathy and comfort with diversity should not be exaggerated either. One guidebook author, writing about Odesa in 1913, claimed that the ‘superlatively dressed’ residents of his city mingled in a ‘variegated street crowd, full of the consciousness that on the street, in the restaurants, on the promenades, everyone is equal.’ In reality, while promenades were a popular part of urban street culture, it is doubtful that factory owners typically joined arms with workers, or that Jews and Christians locked arms and strolled together, just as it is doubtful that the beau monde frequented the tavern haunts of workers or bargained for goods in the open-air markets and trade rows.18 Urban Governance In 1892 Tsar Alexander III (1881–94) enacted the Municipal Counter-Reform that curtailed the authority of city government and reduced the size of its already tiny electorate. Thus, only 3757 of Kyiv’s half million inhabitants could vote,19 and most of the voters and elected officials lived in the more prosperous central and hill-top

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3.6 Fundukleivska Street (turn-of-the-century postcard)

districts, which meant that poorer outlying working-class neighbourhoods such as Shuliavka had virtually no representation. Kyiv had some notably progressive urban leaders, such as mayor Ivan Diakov, but it acquired a reputation for poor, even scandalous, administration, which made it difficult for local officials to borrow money from foreign banks. Other cities, notably Moscow, Riga, and Kharkiv (Russian: Kharkov), were more aggressive in developing municipal enterprises and utilities, which enhanced the quality of urban life while providing new revenue sources for city coffers. Kyiv’s 1913 budget of 4.7 million rubles was only one-tenth that of Moscow or St Petersburg. Kharkiv and Saratov, each half the size of Kyiv, both had substantially larger municipal budgets.20 Water quality and quantity remained a constant problem. Kyiv built its first water lines in 1871, initially taking water from the Dnipro. Rapid population growth soon outstripped supply, and the privately owned water company failed to act accordingly. Small fish sometimes got through the filtration system, and a cholera epidemic swept through the city in 1907, causing 2.4 per cent of the entire population to fall ill.21 The company then turned to artesian wells – which numbered 28 by 1914 – but in outlying neighbourhoods such as Zverynets, residents continued to rely on water carriers, paying eight times more for water than those who lived in the more affluent central neighbourhoods. In 1914 Kievskaia mysl (Kyiv Thought) reported that some schools had to close for lack of water, and that nearly half of the properties in the outskirts had no water at all.22 Drilling for new wells ‘day and night’ remained a priority during the First World War. Developmental progress was more notable on other fronts. In 1909 the city took over the sewer system from private concessionaires and set up a plan to extend it to additional neighbourhoods. After the State Duma allocated a substantial sum

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3.7 Electrical power plant

for building schools and training teachers in 1908, the number of children (through age eleven) in Kyiv schools grew from 12,685 in 1909, about half the number eligible, to about 20,000 in 1914.23 Nevertheless, bureaucratic restrictions imposed by a state administration that was frightened by private initiative inhibited the development of both civil society and an effective local political culture. Elected city council representatives frequently missed meetings, coming only when private or party matters were at stake and making it difficult to ensure a quorum. Civic progress came grudgingly, and often because of the largesse of wealthy philanthropists rather than because of the efforts of public institutions. Ironically, the Jewish Brodsky family was the most notable of these philanthropists. The First World War The news of war with Germany and Austria-Hungary brought cries for unity and brotherhood, which created certain ironies in Kyiv, given the government’s ongoing persecution of Ukrainophiles, its permissive attitude towards pogroms, and its prosecution of Mendel Beilis, which had ended, finally, with his acquittal in 1913. The war provided an additional pretext for oppression – the liberal Ukrainian newspaper Rada (Council) echoed the call for patriotic unity, but it was quickly shut down.24 It also complicated matters for the city council. A German–owned power plant, which provided Kyiv’s only source of electricity, was taken over by the military in 1915 and turned over to the city to run. Technically, the Belgian Society owned the tram networks in twenty-two Imperial Russian cities, including Kyiv, but German capital had taken over this company and tram networks had to rely on German equipment and spare parts.25 For Russia, military disaster came quickly. By autumn 1915 its enemies had seized fourteen western provinces with a combined population of thirty-five million.

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German armies had entered nearby Volhynia Province, and plans were made to evacuate Kyiv. Though foreign troops did not enter Kyiv until 1918, eastern and central Ukraine and parts of Russia were flooded with refugees. On 12 January 1915, Kievskaia mysl reported that many refugee children had come into the city from Poland, and that a committee under the chairmanship of D.M. GrigorovichBarsky had been set up to investigate the possibility of building child shelters. In August 1916 a feeding station at the Kyiv railway station was providing 12,000 meals every day for refugees, but a recent study also suggests that local authorities generally kept refugees out of both city and province.26 Kyiv’s most notable wartime leader may have been M.I. Tereshchenko. His family had estates in eight provinces and owned a rich collection of paintings by Russian and Ukrainian artists. Tereshchenko chaired and generously endowed Kyiv’s War Industry Committee, established in June 1915, which came to operate ten enterprises, manufacturing optical equipment, pharmaceuticals, iodine and chloroform, and other items required for the war effort.27 Kyiv’s budget grew by nearly 50 per cent from 1914 to 1915,28 but on 29 January 1915 Kievskaia mysl complained that city government had done nothing to improve the lot of the poor. Later in the year, the city opened a bakery and a firewood warehouse, and it tried to regulate prices of critical commodities, but with little success. About one in five of the city’s wholesalers held a seat in the Duma, making it even more difficult to seriously address inflation. In some instances, fixed prices actually exceeded market prices.29 In mid-1915, Gorodskoe delo complained that there was still no coordinated general plan among cities for the purpose of attacking wartime needs.30 Working conditions remained grim for many. Laws on mandatory rest periods generally weren’t enforced. According to one 1914 survey, 60 per cent of Kyiv’s bakers were still averaging nineteen-hour work shifts (and some worked round the clock), often without a day off. Confectionery workers typically worked eleven- or twelve-hour days; half had no break, and more than one-third no day off.31 Nevertheless, Kyiv experienced surprisingly few strikes, even as the strike movement began to surge in other towns in 1913. The most significant of Kyiv’s 1913 strikes came in April when 2680 haulers (izvozchiki) struck over city council efforts to force drivers to instal rubber tires and covered tops. Kyiv was less industrialized than Moscow or St Petersburg, and small factories and workshops predominated in its economy. Kyiv did not have a citadel of labour militancy with a large, well-organized, politically militant cadre of workers like that employed at Kharkiv’s Locomotive Works. Once war was declared in 1914, no strikes were recorded in the city for the rest of the year.32 Only five strikes occurred in 1915, none involving large numbers of workers or industries that were critical to the war effort, and 1916 was almost as calm on the labour front. On 15 January 1916, 300 of Arsenal’s 2488 workers walked out over wage demands, and there were minor work stoppages in April and June. On 5 September workers in several small print shops asked for 50 per cent wage hikes and won increases of fifteen to 25 per cent, but only a handful of small strikes followed. By contrast, numerous strikes occurred in Kharkiv, some of which were political in nature, especially at the Locomotive Works and the Gelferikh-Sade plant. In contrast to Kharkiv, where the wartime calendar of strikes came to resemble 1905, Kyiv appeared to have no labour movement at all.33

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3.8 Street scene: Khreshchatyk (turn-of-the-century postcard)

War would bring further changes. By 1916 women constituted 30 per cent of Kyiv’s industrial labour force, young boys and older men another 12 per cent. Prisoners-of-war sometimes filled in: the city’s largest plant, Greter & Krivanek Mechanical, employed about 750.34 Inflation grew worse as the war continued. Between July 1916 and May 1917, official prices for rye, wheat, potatoes and other staples increased by 185 to 228 per cent, and real prices were usually considerably higher than official prices.35 But the worst was yet to come. Revolution and Civil War A reliable history of Kyiv during the turbulent period of revolution and civil war remains to be written. Istoriia Kieva (The History of Kyiv), edited by N.I. Suprunenko and published in the Soviet Union in 1985, provides interesting details about conditions in the city while documenting Bolshevik policies, but it offers only a sanitized analysis of those policies, while ignoring or demonizing competing movements. A short but valuable memoir published by Jewish attorney A.A. Goldenveizer in 1922 recalls that Kyivans began to suspect that something was amiss in St Petersburg only on 25–6 February (10–11 March New Style), when newspapers failed to carry stock quotations. A few days later, a telegram bearing the name of Communications Minister Bublikov ‘sent an electric spark throughout the city’ because no one knew who Bublikov was. When news of Nicholas II’s abdication finally came, it was greeted with joy and optimism. Aleksandr Kerensky’s emergence as leader of the Provisional Government surprised many, but his popularity grew quickly. When Kerensky visited Kyiv in the early summer of 1917, his idealism and rhetorical brilliance made a huge impression on the population.36

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3.9 Tsarist Minister Stolypin’s statue being taken down, 16 March 1917, Duma Square

Mayor F.S. Burchak, city council representatives, and officials from the wartime public organizations formed the Council of United Community Organizations, which became the arm of the Provisional Government in the city. It was dominated by Russians or russianized Ukrainians, but it included a few Jews and Ukrainian nationalists, as well as Bolsheviks and student representatives. Nikolai Stradomsky, a physician and progressive member of the pre-Revolutionary city council, D.N. Grigorovich-Barsky, leader of the city’s liberal Kadet (Constitutional Democratic) Party, and the fiery Menshevik (and anti-Bolshevik) Aleksei Dorotov, who represented the newly formed Soviet of Workers Deputies, emerged as its early leaders. Symbols of tsarism rapidly disappeared. The statue of former prime minister Piotr Stolypin, who had been assassinated in Kyiv in 1913, came down on 18 (31) March. Ukrainian organizations emerged just as quickly. Prosvita (Enlightenment

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3.10 Mykhailo Hrushevsky

Society), which had been closed down in 1914, reopened on 9 (22) March. The first Ukrainian gymnasium opened on 18 (31) March, and a day later an estimated 100,000 turned out beneath 300 blue and yellow flags for a Ukrainian celebration.37 Ukrainian clubs such as Rodyna (Family) attracted activists from far and wide. Myroslav Shkandrij describes Kyiv’s revived literary scene as ‘frenetic.’ Literaturnonaukovyi visnyk (The Literary-Scientific Herald), which resumed publication in July, and Knyhar (The Bookseller) were particularly prominent. Knyhar, said to be ‘the highest achievement of the Ukrainian elite during the revolution in the field of criticism,’ remained in print until 1920.38 In March, Ukrainian nationalists organized the Central Rada in Kyiv, electing as its president the influential historian Mykhailo Hrushevsky (1866–1934), who had spent the war years in Moscow under house arrest. The Central Rada’s executive organ, called the Little Rada, included eighteen non-Ukrainians among its fiftyfour members, among them Russian and Jewish socialists.39 In June the Rada published its First Universal, which called for a self-governing, free Ukraine in a democratic federation with Russia and a special tax to aid the national cause. In July the Second Universal recognized Rada administrative control over Kyiv and four other Ukrainian provinces. Thus, the Ukrainian movement coexisted uneasily with the Provisional Government, which hoped to postpone resolution of the broader question of Ukraine’s relationship to Russia until democratic elections could be held for a Constituent Assembly. According to Goldenveizer, ‘the threatening cloud of Ukrainian separatism’ quickly became the chief concern of the Kyiv’s Council of United Community Organizations. ‘We all saw it and felt it drawing near.’40 The Kyiv Workers Soviet, which formed on 3 (16) March and the Kyiv Soldiers Soviet (5, 18 March) also emerged as potential sources of authority.41 And in the City Duma a Russian socialist bloc consisting of Mensheviks, Socialist Revolutionaries,

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3.11 Kyiv. Revolutionary troops celebrate, 1 May 1917 (RGAKFD)

Bundists, and Poles won about 80 of the 120 seats in a mid-summer election. Resenting the ‘anti-Ukrainian campaign’ in the Russian socialist press, Ukrainian socialists had formed their own coalition, winning 20 per cent of the seats.42 Mensheviks V.A. Dreling, a respected journalist, and A.M. Ginzburg-Naumov led the new Duma, and Eser (‘S.R.’: a member of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party) Evgeny Riabtsev was elected mayor. Kyiv’s moderate socialist government focused on practical matters and governed well, in the view of Goldenveizer. In standing against both Bolshevism and Ukrainian nationalism, it probably reflected the views of most in the city.43 In August, the Kornilov Revolt challenged the Provisional Government, but it apparently evoked little interest in Kyiv. Few believed it would succeed. In the fall, however, as the military situation deteriorated, the mood in the city darkened. Goldenveizer describes it as one of ‘complete apathy and weariness.’44 Kyiv’s leading pre-Revolutionary newspapers, Kievskaia mysl and Kievlianin (The Kyivan), continued to dominate the news market, although Kievskaia mysl now favoured the Mensheviks and in 1917 published articles by foreign correspondents

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3.12 Demonstration in support of the Central Rada (RGAKFD)

Leon Trotsky (using the pen name Antid Oto) and future Soviet minister of education Anatoly Lunacharsky. Hostile to Ukrainian nationalism, it disappeared in December 1918 under Symon Petliura’s Directory. Kievlianin’s prestige had been enhanced by editor Vasily Shulgin’s opposition to the persecution of Mendel Beilis, his coverage of the war, and his role in the overthrow of the tsar, but the paper remained a bastion of Russian chauvinism and Judeophobia. With the arrival of the Germans on 1 (14) March 1918, it ceased publication until September 1919. Kyivans could also read the gossipy Poslednie novosti (Latest News), the Jewish-socialist Naye tsayt (New Time), the conservative Polish Dziennik Kijowski (Kyiv Daily), or the moderate Ukrainian Nova rada (The New Council). Five other Ukrainian dailies also surfaced: most were affiliated with the socialist parties.45 After the Bolsheviks seized power in Petrograd in November, the Rada refashioned itself into the Ukrainian National Republic (UNR), which promoted the nationalization of industry, seizure and distribution of land to the peasantry, and an eight-hour workday. The UNR also favoured federation with Russia, and for a short time managed to cooperate with the Bolsheviks and the municipal Workers’ Soviets (except in Kharkiv). Neither the UNR nor the Bolsheviks had enough authority to rule effectively alone. The Bolsheviks had a small following in Ukraine, and the UNR had no real army or state administration. Kyiv’s Bolshevik organization may have had 4000 members by August, including 1000 soldiers. In November the Kyiv Workers’ Soviet and the Kyiv Soldiers’ Soviet merged, electing a joint executive committee. The Bolsheviks took twenty-three of the fifty-eight seats. The Ukrainian S.R.s and S.D.s together won eighteen seats, the Russian S.R.s won ten, and the Mensheviks and the Bundists divided the remaining seventeen seats. However, the Bolsheviks could not control the Soviet, and a Ukrainian, S.R. Grigoriev, was made chair. In December the Bolsheviks helped lead a strike against the Rada, but they failed to shut down the city.46

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3.13 Destruction of Kyiv. Oko (Berlin) (with the permission of Bohdan Zholdak)

In December Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko’s Soviet Russian army, aided by loyalists in Kharkiv and eastern Ukraine, began to advance on Kyiv. On 15 (28) January they launched a ten-day artillery barrage against the city from outlying Darnytsia on the left bank, inflicting heavy property damage. Water shortages made it impossible to put out fires, and some wooden neighbourhoods were destroyed. One shell hit the home of Mykhailo Hrushevsky, setting it on fire. Shops and bazaars closed, and residents huddled in basements. The ‘Free Cossacks’ who defended the city committed sporadic acts of violence against Jews. On 26 January (8 February) the Bolsheviks took Kyiv. Mayor Riabtsev, a Russian S.R., and the city council’s Socialists interceded on behalf of numerous Kyivans, including Kievlianin editor Shulgin, but Soviet forces managed to execute an estimated 3000 residents, in many cases

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3.14 Germans in Kyiv. Changing of the guard, 1918 (UNDIASD)

because they spoke Ukrainian or were identified with Ukrainian national goals.47 The Germans then recaptured the city on 1 (14) March. Revealing, perhaps, their condescending attitude towards Kyiv and Ukraine, they promptly commanded 40 baby (old women) to wash out the railway station with soap and water.48 On 25 January 1918 (New Style), the Rada issued its Fourth Universal, proclaiming independence for Ukraine, and Hrushevsky’s parliament returned to German-occupied Kyiv. Dominated by Ukrainian S.R.s, it had little support in the city. After some attempts to work with the Rada, the Germans deposed it and the UNR at the end of April, and for eight months Kyiv was ruled by Hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky in close alliance with the Germans. Bolshevik activists, perhaps 650 in number, maintained six underground organizations in Kyiv and helped organize several strikes, the most significant of which were lengthy mid-summer strikes by printers and by railway employees. The railway strike spread throughout Ukraine. Many railwaymen had not been paid in months. In Kyiv, some 1800 railway workers and their allies were arrested.49 In the words of Paul Robert Magocsi, Skoropadsky’s Hetmanate ‘deserves credit for significant advances in creating an intellectual and educational infrastructure for a Ukrainian state.’50 Many Ukrainian schools were established and several million textbooks were published in Ukrainian. In the fall of 1918, a new university, a

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3.15 Pavlo Skoropadsky, Kyiv, 1918 (with the permission of Oleksander Kucheruk)

national archive and library, and the Ukrainian Academy of Science were founded in Kyiv. The Bolsheviks assailed the ‘Galician jargon’ imposed by the government, arguing that it was incomprehensible to the local population.51 Goldenveizer found the Hetmanate’s Cossack trappings and ceremonies ‘a bad masquerade,’ asserting that aside from the name changes, everything stayed much the same. But Kyiv enjoyed relative peace and prosperity in 1918, especially if judged against Bolshevik Moscow and St Petersburg. Émigrés poured into Kyiv from Russia (Kadet leaders M.M. Vinaver and Pavel Miliukov, his moustache shaved, among them), opening new businesses and dozens of new clubs and cabarets, and inflating rents. Unimpeded rail service to Berlin further helped the local economy.52 Writer Konstantin Paustovsky, then in his twenties, lived in Kyiv under the Hetmanate: Papers printed little about what was going on in Soviet Russia … People preferred not to talk about it. Everyone tried to pretend that life was cloudless and serene. The oxeyed beauties of Kyiv roller-skated on the city’s rinks with the hetman’s officers. Gambling dens and houses of assignation sprang up overnight. Cocaine was sold openly on the Bessarabka, where ten-year-old prostitutes offered themselves to passersby … Kyiv was like a banquet in the middle of a plague.53

The Germans sued for peace on 11 November 1918. In Ukraine, after Skoropadsky committed himself to uniting Ukraine with a non-Bolshevik Russian state, rebellion grew quickly, and by 21 November (4 December), Directory forces commanded by Volodymyr Vynnychenko and Symon Petliura encircled Kyiv. Amid the confusion in Kyiv, a massacre of students who had met in defiance of martial law apparently took place, and some of the German soldiers tried to form their own Soviet.54 German troops began to withdraw from Kyiv on 14 (27) December, and

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3.16 The Directory. Volodymyr Vynnychenko with his hat raised and Symon Petliura (centre)

the Directory took control of the city, announcing the re-establishment of the UNR. The presence of yet another government prompted a new wave of repression and violence in the city. Russian shop signs were made illegal: idalnia quickly replaced stolovaia; parikmakherskaia became holiarnia; Vishnevsky took on the Ukrainian spelling Vyshnevskyi. Kyivans, ‘who are as given to irony as all southern peoples, made the new government a target for a fantastic number of jokes,’ Paustovsky recalled. Everything seemed invented. ‘When you encountered the gaidamaks [haidamaks], you went nearly crazy, asking yourself if they were real or actors.’55 But as Bolshevik forces again drew near, poorly disciplined troops began to loot and murder. Kyivans now fled, to Odesa, where French troops were located, or abroad. Real estate was sold, secretly, at half price: what remained of its value would depend on whether foreign troops would rescue Kyiv from the revolution.56 As chaos enveloped Ukraine in 1919, Kyiv changed hands five times. In midFebruary the disintegrating army of the Directory abandoned Kyiv, and Soviet troops recaptured the city, this time without resistance. Bolsheviks quickly took control of the Kyiv Soviet and began to establish workplace cells: fourteen in one week in March alone, mostly in print shops, according to one source.57 In March they shut down the Menshevik paper Vperiod (Forward). Kommunist (Communist) became Kyiv’s main Russian-language paper, and the Bolsheviks published in

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3.17 Red Army on Khreshchatyk Street, 5 Feburary 1919 (RGAKFD)

Ukrainian as well. The ‘Committee for the Strategic Resettlement of the Bourgeoisie,’ headed by an eighteen-year-old activist named Sheinin, confiscated apartments and property, giving evicted residents twenty-four-hour notice. Some intelligenty were conscripted into forced labour brigades; others fell victim to V.U.Ch.K (VUcheka, a precursor of the KGB) executioners, including several Hetmanate officials and numerous members of the Nationalist Club, including the respected and apolitical jurist N.N. Raich.58 Harsh policies were justified by the ongoing military threat: in April, for example, anti-Communist guerrilla units struck the city on thirty-eight separate occasions, according to Soviet sources.59 Sugar refineries and vodka distilleries were nationalized in February, banks and shoe factories in March, metal-working and mechanical plants in April. By July, eighty-nine enterprises had been nationalized in Kyiv, including the electric utility and tram, the railroads, and the medical and pharmaceutical facilities, but hundreds of small producers of food, tobacco, and leather products were left in private hands. Kyiv became a major supplier of boots, coats, and uniforms for the Red Army. In May, some 1600 tailors were reportedly making clothing for the Red Army (another 3000 were said to be unemployed). Up to 8000 were put to work in agricultural communes outside the city, which provided jobs while producing food for the urban population. Greter & Krivanek

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3.18 Denikin’s troops marching on to St Sophia Square, 31 August 1919 (RGAKFD)

worked three shifts and dispatched four armoured trains to the front by early summer, including one that bore the name ‘Kyiv Communist.’60 By then more than half of Soviet locomotive stock had been rendered inoperable, and locomotives rusting in their ‘cemeteries’ symbolized the near collapse of the railway system. Ironically, ‘Our locomotive, fly forward’ had been a favoured revolutionary slogan, derived from Marx’s view that revolution was the locomotive of history.61 The Violent World of the Volunteer Army In June 1919 Kyiv males ages eighteen to forty were mobilized when General Anton Denikin’s White Volunteer Army seized the Donbas and threatened Kharkiv. ‘There are no traitors in the family of workers,’ the Kyiv Soviet announced, authorizing a special campaign under the slogan ‘Everyone to the Rescue of Red Kharkov.’62 In August, Kyivans were mobilized once again as Denikin approached from the east and Petliura’s Galician Ukrainian Army approached from the west. In mid-September, the Bolsheviks fled by boat, and the ‘nattily attired Galicians,’ armed with the latest in weapons, entered Kyiv, hoisting their blue and yellow flag above the city. ‘Now that was an army!’ artist Klyment Redko recalled.63 On that same day, Denikin’s forces entered the city, initiating a new wave of terror that led to the quick arrest of perhaps 1700 Kyivans.64 Many institutions had continued to function under Bolshevik rule, among them the schools and university, but now the banks and the old courts reopened. Prices

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fell, but the new regime attacked Ukrainian institutions and burned Ukrainianlanguage books. Theatres were heavily taxed, forcing many to shut down. Kievlianin started up again, and several new papers were begun, including the anti-Semitic Vechernie ogni (Evening Lights) and the socialist (but non-Bolshevik) Kievskaia zhizn (Kyiv Life), the offspring of Kievskaia mysl.65 Kievlianin railed against ‘Ukrainian traitors and Jewish executioners.’ The Bolsheviks had indeed relied heavily on Jews to staff their police arm. In 1919 about 75 per cent of the Kyiv Cheka were Jews, a figure that probably subsequently declined.66 Liberated by the February Revolution, Kyiv’s Jews remained politically and intellectually divided. In May, 300 Jewish leaders met in Kyiv, trying unsuccessfully to iron out the differences that divided Orthodox, Zionist, and secular liberal and socialist points of view. Most Jews undoubtedly continued to avoid public activism. Communal elections held in January 1918 apparently evoked little interest in the Jewish community and produced a Zionist and Orthodox majority that seemed ill-prepared for the forthcoming violence. Kyiv Province would account for 384 pogroms and 132 ‘excesses’ during the Civil War, 42 per cent of all recorded pogroms and 53 per cent of the official number killed.67 In Fastiv, just outside Kyiv, an August–September 1919 pogrom killed 600 and wounded 3250, some of them refugees from pogroms in other towns. Plunder, more than politics, was the objective: a bottle of samogonka (home-brew) could cost a soldier 1000 rubles, a safe apartment for an officer 10,000 rubles a night. All too typical was the experience of a certain Fridman (first name unknown), who paid Volunteer soldiers 10,000 rubles to spare his life. Fridman was killed anyway with a bullet to the mouth. When a second group of Cossacks entered his home, intending to kill his seventeen-year-old son, Fridman’s wife Gitel threw herself over the boy, begging the Cossacks to shoot her instead. She was beaten with an iron rod and then shot in the forehead. In all, ten people were killed in the Fridman home, which was subsequently burned down. Gitel’s children tried to carry her to the hospital, but Cossacks shot at them. Somehow Gitel survived and made it to Kyiv’s Jewish Hospital. Two Christian families managed to shelter 400 Fastiv Jews, but many more sought refuge in Kyiv, boarding trains disguised as peasants, sometimes accompanied by Christian neighbours. Soldiers searched the trains at stops, killing Jews who were discovered.68 Kyiv’s first full-scale Civil War pogrom occurred on 1 (14) October 1919, when Volunteer forces began to plunder Jewish residences after the Bolsheviks launched a surprise attack on the city. Goldenveizer describes this pogrom, somewhat tonguein-cheek, as more ‘peaceful and business-like,’ more focused on extorting relatively prosperous Jews. Unlike 1905, there was no street mob, no broken glass. Troops took their victims to secluded spots before killing them.69 ‘Cultured’ senior officers sometimes apologized to their victims, especially to women, and occasionally returned stolen items. Vechernie ogni published a long list of homes where Jews had allegedly fired at Volunteer soldiers, though there was no evidence to support this allegation. Once again, as in 1905, Kievlianin called the pogrom a patriotic necessity. Now, however, Shulgin worried that the violence might evoke a backlash of sympathy for Jews.70 As in tsarist times, authorities acted belatedly. General Bredov signed an order prosecuting plunderers, which was published two days later, but

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by then the pogrom had essentially ended. At least 836 apartments on 52 streets had been looted. Podil and Ploskaia (the district along the river beyond Podil) were hardest hit. Nearly 300 were killed and another 50 or so injured.71 General Denikin apparently worried that pogroms undermined the discipline of his army and at one point ordered troops to stop the violence, but his order was ignored.72 The Volunteer Army held on for two more months. The battered Jewish community established the Jewish Committee to Assist the Revival of Russia, but it could do little but ask Jews to fully support the government that had decimated them. Because of the fighting in the countryside, Kyiv lost its transport connection to Odesa and could barely communicate with the centre of Volunteer operations in Rostov-on-the-Don. Coal from Kharkiv came only sporadically, and the electric utility operated on a day-to-day basis. Unemployment reached an estimated 40,000. Rumours of imminent evacuation produced waves of panic: one evacuation actually began in November before it was stopped.73 Understandably, many Kyivans yearned for the days of 1918 under the Germans and the Hetmanate.74 The Bolsheviks Return Instead, on 16 (29) December 1919, the weary Bolsheviks returned, routing the Volunteer remnants in Odesa and Rostov-on-the-Don as well. As they left, the Volunteers may have murdered dozens of Kyivans.75 Bolshevik rule was less cruel, but it was corrupt. Prices now rose by 30 or 40 per cent per month. A new threat emerged from Poland, where Field Marshal Jozef Piłsudski dreamed of extending his newly independent country’s borders to the east. On 20 April (3 May) 1920, a Polish airplane dropped bombs on Kyiv; a week later the Bolsheviks abandoned the city. Polish troops entered on 8 (21) May. Piłsudski hoped that the capture of Kyiv would lead to the rapid creation of a friendly Ukrainian army,76 but he encountered only hostility. In June 1920, the Bolsheviks returned for good to a city that was desperately short of food and firewood. In addition to the karbovantsi, hryvni, Polish marks, and Russian, Soviet, and tsarist currencies that circulated, enterprising Kyivans made their own money at home with brushes and cheap watercolours, not even bothering ‘to hide their tools when strangers walked into the room.’77 Unfortunately, there was nothing to buy. ‘We are completely exhausted physically, spiritually, and morally,’ Goldenveizer wrote to his brother. ‘Life is unbearable, and it worsens, without interruption, no matter who takes over.’ Goods from the plundered warehouse of the American Red Cross appeared in the markets, and hungry Kyivans got their first taste of American cocoa.78 Rumours of new invasions persisted. Kyivans searched Romanian and Polish newspapers for hints of possible foreign intervention whenever these newspapers could be found. Ration cards bought mainly sugar, salt, and matches, but bread was often unavailable except in the bazaars. The Bolsheviks encouraged cooperatives, for a time, but in general tried to abolish private trade. Decree followed decree, and Communism – Soviet style – began to take shape. ‘Mercilessly and without any reservations, they divided the population of the city into worthwhile people and human rubbish,’ Paustovsky wrote.79 You couldn’t move a mattress from one apartment to another without permission, Goldenveizer added. For

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Table 3.1 Kyiv’s population by nationality in percentages* Ukrainians

Russians

Poles

Jews

Others

1874

60

15

6

10

9

1897

22

54

7

12

5

1917 (Sept.) 1919 (Mar.)

16 25

50 43

9 7

19 21

6 4

1920 (Aug.) 1923

14 27

47 36

4 3

32 31

4 3

* I. Vikul, ‘Liudnist’ mista Kyiva,’ Pratsi demohrafichnoho instytutu Akademiia nauk URSR, vol. 7 (1930) 221.

whatever reason, trade in cigarette lighters and boots (from stolen tires) was permitted, but most transactions took place ‘at the back door.’ ‘The Bolsheviks successfully fought off ... Denikin, Kolchak, Petliura and Piłsudskii,’ Goldenveizer concluded. ‘But they could not vanquish the shopkeeper. From all of their decrees he only grew richer ... With the nationalization of trade, everyone became a trader.’80 Kyiv’s Changing Demography Kyiv’s population fluctuated sharply during the period of revolution and civil war. In January 1917 it reportedly had 512,000 people; by September 1917, 467,000. In early 1919 Kyiv had 544,000 residents, reflecting the fact that 1918 had brought relative peace and prosperity and many refugees from Russia. An August 1920 census, taken during a period of great privation that accompanied the recapture of the city by the Bolsheviks from the Poles, revealed that the population had fallen to 367,000. Between 1920 and 1924 the city population averaged about 420,000.81 Table 3.1 provides a rough estimate of Kyiv’s ethnic composition by percentage as it was recorded in six censuses. The 1874 census included the odd language category obshcherusskie (‘common Russian’), and Vikul’s data apparently assume that most of those who designated themselves as such were Ukrainians. In 1917, the figure of 16 per cent describes those who considered themselves Ukrainian or ‘Little Russian’ for whatever reason. If native language is used, the percentage falls to 14 per cent; and to 11 per cent if conversational usage within the family is used as the definition. The corresponding figures for Russians increase to 55 per cent (if native language is used) and 62 per cent (conversational language within the family), indicating that some who spoke Russian as their native language considered themselves to be Ukrainians. The censuses of September 1917, March 1919, and August 1920 were compiled during turbulent times and rely on self-designation – the personal testimony of the respondent. Thus, all may understate both the Ukrainian and Jewish populations. Jews were more likely to conceal themselves from census takers than any other group. When Bolsheviks controlled the city, as in 1920, many Kyivans may have decided it was safer to call themselves Russians rather than Ukrainians.82

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3.19 Women at the proclamation of the Ukrainian National Republic (photo: Le Miroir, Paris, 30 March 1918; with the permission of Oleksander Kucheruk)

Late-imperial Kyiv had been a predominantly male city, but women came to outnumber men during the Civil War. If the entire population is considered, Kyiv had 771 females per 1000 males in 1874; 883 in 1897; 1236 in 1917; and 1305 in 1920.83 In 1897, nearly 35 per cent of Kyiv’s male population had been 20 to 29 years of age. That figure dropped to 15 per cent in 1920, and rose to 20 per cent in 1923. For this age cohort, there were 540 females in the city for every 1000 males in 1874, 522 in 1897. In 1920, there were 2024 females for every 1000 males, in 1923, 1393. The data reveal similar imbalances for the 30–39 age group.84

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Military mobilization accounts for much of this change. The Red Army alone had mobilized five million men. Moreover, men were probably more likely to go into the countryside in search of food, and the collapse of large-scale industry had reduced the demand for male labour. In April 1919, when Bolsheviks controlled the city, one registry listed 290 enterprises that produced leather goods, mostly boots, 460 that turned out clothing and other finished goods, 60 that made wood products, and 189 that made metal products. Most of this output went to the Red Army.85 Clearly, most of these enterprises were small workshops where women could be employed as easily as men. And finally, pogroms had victimized Jewish males more than females. In one set of data for 15,026 pogrom victims whose gender could be determined, 76 per cent were male.86 Other cities experienced similar changes in gender ratios. Moscow, which had a male–female ratio of 132:100 in 1897 saw that ratio drop to 119:100 in 1912; 98:100 in 1917; and 95:100 in 1926.87 By 1926 Kyiv’s population had grown to a reported 503,913, and an even gender balance had been restored.88 Literacy rates for Kyiv males were high in 1897 (69 per cent) and higher in 1920 (80 per cent). In rural Kyiv Province only 28 per cent were literate in 1897, 40 per cent in 1920. Only 51 per cent of Kyiv’s females were literate in 1897, 68 per cent in 1920. By contrast, 6 per cent of the females in the surrounding countryside were literate in 1897, 12 per cent in 1920.89 High levels of rural illiteracy reflect both the inadequate number of schools and the fact that Russian, and not Ukrainian, was the language of instruction. The Onset of Soviet Rule Not everyone mourned the end of the Civil War. Trotsky and other high-ranking Communist officials feared that the disappearance of the all-consuming cause would diminish revolutionary fervour and inhibit ideological mobilization. But most Kyivans surely welcomed its conclusion. Few would miss waiting out the chaos of governmental change in their cellars or huddling in the relative safety of their kitchens, which were ‘located near the backs of the buildings, where bullets seldom penetrated. There was something comforting in the smells of food which clung to the kitchens, and sometimes a little water would trickle out of a faucet. In an hour, you might collect a whole teapotful and brew yourself some strong tea out of dried bilberry leaves ... [I]t was our only strong support in those times,’ Paustovsky recalled, ‘a kind of elixir of life and a panacea against all grief and misfortune.’90 Some 840 residential buildings had been destroyed in Kyiv during the Civil War. Supplies of good water, inadequate before the War, had fallen by another 50 per cent. It could have been worse. An American relief worker found Kyiv ‘less battered and demoralized’ than Odesa, where 15 per cent of the buildings were either destroyed or left unfit for use. Then, in 1921–2, famine hit Southern Ukraine hard, and relief workers were astonished to learn that the Soviet government sent grain from the Kyiv region to the Russian Volga provinces rather than to hard-hit Kherson and Odesa. In 1921–2, about two-thirds of Kyiv’s working classes were given free garden plots to supplement their own food stocks.91

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Kyivans suffered the effects of epidemics (during the typhus they ate garlic or carried strings of garlic cloves in their pockets), and they suffered from inflation. Between October 1921 and April 1922, prices grew by more than twenty times. Adult workers received a ration of 200 grams of bread per day and 600 grams of sugar per month (even though Kyiv Province accounted for nearly one-third of the Soviet Union’s sugar at this time). In 1923, 1448 apartments remained uninhabited.92 The city’s fragile infrastructure further deteriorated. The American Relief Association opened four dispensaries beginning in May 1922, including a dental clinic and X-ray facility. It inoculated as many as 300 patients daily and treated more than 121,000 Kyivans.93 In early 1920, the Bolsheviks had tried to kick-start the economy, starting with massive imports of locomotives and railway stock. Naively, Lenin spoke of overcoming the economic crisis and building a modern, socialist industrial economy in a matter of months.94 Kyiv’s first Voskresnik, or work-Sunday, occurred on 8 February 1920: ideologically committed or coerced workers unloaded rail freight, stocked firewood in an infirmary, and repaired tramway rail lines.95 Voskresniki would disappear, but subbotniki, work-Saturdays, would remain a permanent part of Soviet life. By 1921, industry barely functioned in Kyiv, and the proletariat itself seemed destined to disappear. Greter & Krivanek, now nationalized and run by the ‘Kyiv Province Metallotrest,’ employed fewer than 200 workers, while South Russian Mechanical could turn out only 5 per cent of its pre-war production. Production began to increase in 1922, and by 1924 Greter & Krivanek, now called Bolshevik, attained 50 per cent of its pre-war output. Red Ploughman, an amalgamation of two nationalized Czech firms, reached 75 per cent. By 1925 nearly all the major enterprises exceeded their pre-war production levels, according to Soviet sources, but the state controlled 88 per cent of the city’s industrial production either through outright ownership or by means of cooperatives.96 In May 1921 the nationalization of small-scale industry ceased. Under the socalled New Economic Policy (NEP), private trade was allowed, but there was little available capital. In the late-imperial period, Jews had come to dominate much of Kyiv’s commerce, and this remained the case under NEP. By 1923, Kyiv had 8882 shops and commercial establishments, most of them presumably in the private sector.97 However, the Bolsheviks disdained private business, tolerating it only as a temporary need. In their effort to create a new, more ‘rational’ socialist consumer culture, they favoured large, state-run retailers and they campaigned against traditional practices such as haggling over prices and ‘calling,’ that is, haranguing customers to enter their shop. They assigned new labels to shop personnel – for example, rabochie prilavki (workers behind the counter) rather than prikazchiki (shop assistants; literally, order takers) – in an effort to eliminate the idea of servility to customers and bosses and bring clerks and shop workers into the larger realm of the proletariat.98 Even under the tsars, the merchant soslovie had been losing prestige. N. Chokolov, a Kyiv merchant and city council member, noted in 1899 that ‘many merchants and especially their children looked to merchant status as a transitional step to acquiring a more honourable public position to which they aspire.’99 But the NEP brought a new, more organized bias against private entrepreneurial

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3.20 Cover of the journal Solntse truda (Labour’s Sun), no. 1, 1919. Design by Heorhy Narbut

3.21 Andriivsky Sobor (St Andrew’s) in Kyiv

activity. One Jewish scholar asserts that ‘the struggle of the Soviet government against the private sector and its representatives is to a great extent a struggle against the Jewish people.’100 Jews were said to comprise about one-quarter of Ukraine’s unemployed in March 1927. Literacy and Education In the 1920s, under NEP, Ukraine’s struggle for political, economic, and cultural autonomy in the Soviet Union had its greatest successes. The Soviet government was not yet powerful enough to force its will on the population. Nor did Ukrainians exist as a nation or ‘act as a single entity,’ in the words of Andrew Wilson. Ukrainian national identity would be forged under Soviet rule.101 In March 1919 the Communist Party decreed that schools had to teach Ukrainian history and geography and the Ukrainian language, which spread rapidly as a language of elementary instruction, especially in the countryside. The Bolsheviks understood that vernacular literacy would expedite their ability to promote their ideology and create a productive work force, and they attacked illiteracy with a vengeance. Between March and June 1919 alone they opened forty-three ‘schools’ for adult Kyivans that taught arithmetic, history, and political subjects, as well as literacy. A training program for literacy teachers initially enrolled 150.102 In 1923 Ukrainian became the language of Ukraine’s literacy schools, and by 1925 81 per cent of these litpunkty had been Ukrainianized. Knowledge of Ukrainian became a precondition for admission to higher education in 1927; and by the end of the decade three-quarters of literate Ukrainians could read Russian and Ukrainian.103 The number of Ukrainian-language newspapers in the Soviet Union grew from one in

‘Special and Bewildering’: Late-Imperial and Early Soviet Kyiv 79

1922 to thirty-one in 1925, representing 21 per cent of the total circulation. In 1931, 89 per cent of Ukraine’s newspapers were published in Ukrainian.104 In 1923, nearly all of Kyiv’s teachers took retraining courses in MarxismLeninism, but many elements of continuity were maintained in the schools as well. As in tsarist times, elementary teachers relied on the traditional cycle of dictation, memorization, and drill to teach literacy and arithmetic. ‘Teachers consistently demonstrated the folly of policies that were far in advance of the capacities, for good or ill, of those citizens required to accept them.’105 Higher education remained beyond the financial reach of most. In 1924, few of Kyiv’s Polytechnical Institute students came from working-class families, and still fewer from peasant families. Fifty-eight per cent were Jews.106 Moreover, Ukrainianization was resisted in larger, more russified, cities such as Kyiv, where in 1921 approximately 25 per cent of the schools used Ukrainian.107 For many of the upwardly mobile, Ukrainian remained a peasant language, and derisive jokes about it were common. (One example: ‘Do you speak seriously or in Ukrainian?’) According to George Shevelov, for most city dwellers, ‘Ukrainianization was but a mimicry, a pretence, a ruse.’108 In one Kyiv factory where Ukrainian workers constituted a majority, a 1931 tradeunion report indicated that workers were giving up the Ukrainian language.109 The 1926 census reports that 216,528 Kyivans (or 42 per cent of the city’s population) called themselves ‘Ukrainians.’ About 65 per cent of them listed Ukrainian as their native language, while about 35 per cent listed Russian. However, in absolute numbers the Ukrainian language was becoming increasingly widespread. In 1917 only 48,000 Kyivans had listed Ukrainian as their native language; by 1926 that number had increased to more than 139,000.110 An Extraordinary Explosion of Artistic Talent In the 1930s Stalin would tear down many of Kyiv’s churches. During the Great Patriotic War, entire districts would be reduced to rubble. Post-war reconstruction would bring the erection of endless rows of prefabricated tenements and giant statues favoured by Communist devotees of socialist realism. But late-imperial and early Soviet Kyiv was a city of breathtaking beauty, and its antiquity, glittering onion-domed hilltop monasteries, wooded ravines, and spectacular vistas, ‘the arabesque outlines of its horizon,’111 clearly captivated. Painter Klyment Redko marvelled at the beauty of the steep Right Bank bathed in sunlight as he crossed the Dnipro each morning on his way to Trukhanov Island. (See colour plate 6.) Sculptor Oleksander Arkhypenko (Alexander Archipenko, 1887–1964) found inspiration in the ‘baroque facades that grace Kyiv’s hilly landscape.’112 Scholaractivist Serhy Yefremov (1876–1939) contrasted the beauty of Kyiv with ‘dirty’ Kharkiv, the ‘refuse-heap of Moscow.’ ‘In some places it is even hard to cross the street.’113 Yefremov’s comments may have reflected a displeasure with the Bolshevik decision to make Kharkiv the capital of the Ukrainian SSR, for Kharkiv had a beauty and a charm of its own, and at least one scholar regards it as a more important centre of leftist artistic expression than Kyiv.114 Nevertheless, Kyiv became a Mecca ‘for the extraordinary explosion’115 of Ukrainian artistic talent that emerged in the first three decades of the twentieth

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century. As Dmytro Horbachov and others in this volume observe, the Revolution of 1905 allowed for much freer cultural and political expression, and by 1908 painter Alexandra Exter (1882–1949), who had come to Kyiv from Belostok, and others had organized Imperial Russia’s first avant-garde exhibition, called Zveno (Russian: The Link). (See colour plates 4, 9, 21.) Known for her explosive use of colour, Exter found Kyiv’s ‘architectural volumes’ to be ‘suffused by a splendidly diverse and comprehensive dynamism ... Here the streets jut directly against the sky. The forms are full of tension, the lines are assertive. They fall and splinter, they sing and gambol. This dynamism is accentuated by the pulsating rhythm of the city, with which it is in harmony.’116 In 1910 Exter helped organize Vladimir Izdebsky’s Salon, which continued to bring the latest trends in European, Russian, and Ukrainian art to the city. ‘Thanks in no small degree to her advocacy, artists and intellectuals in Kyiv were able to discover and appreciate trends such as NeoPrimitivism and Cubism.’117 Oleksander Bohomazov (1880–1930), who painted Kyiv’s Lvivska Street, organized another important exhibition called ‘Kiltse’ (Ukrainian: The Ring) in Kyiv in 1914. (See colour plates 2, 3.) Jewish artists participated in this artistic bloom. Kultur-Lige (Culture League), founded in Kyiv in 1918 to promote Yiddish secular culture (and discussed in this volume by Gennady Estraikh), became an important source for Post-Cubist Expressionism and may have attracted the Russian avant-gardist El Lissitzky (born Lazar Markovich Lisitsky, 1890–1941) to the city in 1919. In February–March 1920 leftist Jewish artists held the First Jewish Exhibition of Sculpture, Graphics, and Design at the Kultur-Lige Hall.118 (See colour plate 20.) During the Civil War, Exter designed sets for theatre and abstract designs for agit-prop trains and ships, as well as cubist street decorations for Communist celebrations.119 In 1921 she participated in Kyiv’s 5 x 5 = 25 exhibit, in which five artists displayed five works each. ‘The mathematical equation was intended to underscore the practical; painting and graphics were to be mined for their utilitarian ideas.’120 Dancer Bronislava Nijinska, who had been a ballerina with the Kyiv Opera in 1915–16, fled Russia for Kyiv, opening the École de Mouvement (1919), which operated for two years. Combining classical steps with contemporary movements, she used ‘stark images and strange new rhythms’ in an effort to energize ballet.121 (See Maria Ratanova’s essay on Nijinska in this volume.) Dadaism enjoyed some popularity in the early twenties. Spectralist painter Viktor Palmov joined the Kyiv Art Institute in 1923. Mykhailo Boichuk (1882?–1937) and his followers painted frescoes in Kyiv public spaces, inspired in part by the frescoes of Kyiv’s ancient churches.122 Overall, Kyiv and Ukraine – as Myroslav Shkandrij and Myroslava Mudrak attest in other essays in this book – contributed mightily to what has often been called ‘Russian avant-garde art,’ and remained among its last refuges when repression began in the 1920s.123 Ukrainian theatre had been severely repressed by tsarist authorities. A small itinerant Ukrainian troupe was allowed to assemble in 1881, but it rarely performed in Kyiv. ‘In Petersburg [theatre] is art,’ observed Kyiv’s governor, ‘but in Kyiv it’s politics.’124 The melodramas favoured by tsarist censors generally depicted Ukrainians as dancing, hard-drinking peasants. As Mayhill Fowler has already shown in his chapter, satire and history were off limits, and middle and

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3.22 Les Kurbas

upper-class characters had to speak Russian. ‘Further, Ukrainian plays were allowed only if a Russian play were staged first on the same night and consisted of the same number of acts – a policy requiring considerable stamina from both audience and actor.’125 In the relative freedom that followed 1905, a stationery Ukrainian theatre troupe formed in Kyiv, performing some European classics as well as contemporary native and foreign plays. After the collapse of the monarchy, Ukrainian theatre artists met freely, on 12 March 1917, and voted to support an autonomous Ukraine. Among the participants was Les Kurbas, who had come to Kyiv in 1916. Kurbas turned to the classics, producing four modernist versions of Macbeth between 1919 and 1924. According to Irena Makaryk, ‘If Ukrainians were hitherto often seen on stage as drinking and dancing peasants, then merely speaking Shakespeare or Sophocles in Ukrainian suggested a major redefinition of national stereotypes and identities.’126 Kurbas educated and influenced ‘hundreds of actors, directors, and designers.’ By 1922 he had come to endorse the proletarian revolution, and his new troupe, the Berezil, produced revolutionary theatre. At its height, the Berezil Artistic Association had 400 members in its six studios (three in Kyiv, and one each in Odesa, Bila Tserkva, and Boryspil).127 Kurbas, Exter, Redko, Archipenko, Vladmir (Volodymyr) Tatlin, Sonia Delaunay, and others from the Kyiv avant-garde were as much at home in Paris and the European capitals as they were in Kyiv. Moreover, these Ukrainian and Russian artists brought the colourful motifs from their embroidery, carpets, dolls, iconography, and painted Easter eggs to the European modernist movement, confirming ‘the historical role of Ukraine as a crossroads between various cultures, a borderland – albeit still today an ‘undiscovered’ cultural bourn.’128 All of this transpired amid economic collapse, which meant that jobs and patrons were difficult to find. In 1923, for example, St Petersburg artists managed to sell only 22 of the more than 1600 paintings and other works of art they had exhibited.129 In the summer of 1920, Kurbas’s Kyiv Dramatic Association (Kyidramte) left Kyiv for the countryside, where food was more readily available. Finding a responsive audience in the peasantry, Kurbas produced Macbeth in Bila Tserkva in 1920.

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The company returned to Kyiv only in 1922, but actors and writers had to find work as manual labourers to survive. Even as late as 1927, ‘hardship was the norm.’130 The Communist Party became a prime patron, but it favoured art forms that were understandable to the masses, so it recruited folk artists and others associated with street fairs and other traditional forms of entertainment. Posters and satirical drawings and caricatures quickly became a staple of Bolshevik culture. Many of the bestknown poster artists had published satire and drawings in pre-Revolutionary journals. During the First World War, posters had been used to garner support for wartime victims and orphans. Perhaps the most famous was Help for War Victims, designed by Leonid Pasternak, father of the novelist Boris Pasternak. A postcard version sold by the hundreds of thousands and appeared on the labels of various products. In 1918 the Bolsheviks used the poster, which depicted a weary and discouraged soldier, as an anti-war poster. Of course, not all poster artists supported the Bolsheviks. Pasternak, for example, declined an invitation to make Civil War posters for the Communists and emigrated to Germany in 1921.131 One of the most prolific artists, Dmitry Moor, spent part of his youth in Kyiv. Moor produced more than fifty political posters during the Civil War, most of them for Litizdat, the Bolshevik Literary-Publishing Department established in June 1919. Moor was one of the few artists to sign his name to his work. Most were reluctant to identify with the new regime, fearing that it would not survive.132 Many posters emphasized the heroic or the satirical. ‘The revolution was intoxicating,’ recalled Redko, who helped spread thousands of posters throughout Ukraine. ‘How Petliura Betrayed Ukraine’ blended xenophobia, class warfare, and Bolshevik heroism by combining six drawings depicting Petliura’s compacts with German and Polish forces, his persecution of workers, and the efforts of the Red Army to defeat the nefarious forces of counter-revolution. ‘With the weapon of satire, Kyiv artists fought bandits, kulaks, deserters, and other enemies of the workers, agitated for universal military training, and urged everyone to join the Red Army.’133 Artists worked ‘day and night’ in Kyiv’s Tramway Park, painting one ‘agit-tram’ after another. ‘Artists were as necessary as grenades and shells,’ Redko believed.134 Other posters simply encouraged kulturnost – the use of soap, the importance of washing one’s hands before eating, the need for sobriety. Visual art could educate in a culture where illiteracy was still common. Moreover, newsprint was hard to come by. Much of it had come from the Baltic provinces, which had separated from the Soviet Union. The inability to find skilled workers or spare parts for machinery and the disruption of the transportation network also limited book and newspaper production. The number of book titles published between 1918 and 1920 was only one-sixth the pre-war average, and the number of copies had fallen by more than one-half. Thus, the print media could not serve as an effective communication tool even for the literate audience. Posters and lubok pictures (cheap woodcuts) accounted for about 20 per cent of Litizdat’s publications between June 1919 and January 1921, and most of its remaining publications were simply proclamations, open letters, and appeals.135 Motion pictures had debuted in Kyiv in 1897 (as Oleh Sydor-Hybelynda explains later in this book), but most historians date the beginning of a serious

‘Special and Bewildering’: Late-Imperial and Early Soviet Kyiv 83

Russian film industry to 1908, when longer films with more complex characters began to be produced. Screens, probably linen sheets, appeared to the young Konstantin Paustovsky as ‘wet, grey cloths’ on which ‘an ominous green light flickered’ and across which ‘black spots darted.’136 Greed, vengeance, and sexual intrigue prevailed thematically. During the First World War, attending movies became an extremely popular diversion. Large theatres were built, some with a thousand seats, and some showed five and six films per day. According to Louise McReynolds, 10 per cent of the urban population saw a film every day in 1916. At least twenty-seven specialized journals and forty-one cinema-oriented newspapers were published in the final years of the Empire.137 By contrast, there was no real sports press in the Empire at this time, and newspapers, including the penny press, gave little coverage to sports.138 Lenin viewed film as the most important of the arts. Film afforded greater opportunity for management and control than theatre, where actors could add nuance and make suggestive inferences in any given performance. In the early twenties, revolutionary intellectuals eager to serve the Party dominated the industry. Kyiv’s film studio Red Star produced some twenty agitational films on similar themes in 1919–20, as well as numerous documentaries about life in the young Soviet state. Foreshadowing the socialist realism of the 1930s, the first Ukrainian film comedy, Soviet Medicine, depicted a well-to-do man who had lost his humanity because of his parasitic lifestyle, only to recapture it through commitment to the Soviet cause. The Brotherly Union of City and Village and From the Basements to the Upper Floors spoke to the new social relations that were said to be arising with the end of exploitation. Films were shown in public squares, at railway stations, in barracks and workers’ clubs, in display windows of shops, and anywhere an agittram could travel. By 1923 there were sixteen movie theatres or projection booths in Kyiv. About 60 per cent of the films were Soviet-made.139 Workers’ clubs were another means of creating proletarian culture. In 1919, before Denikin’s troops recaptured the city, the Party managed to open twenty-one clubs in Kyiv, often where cabarets and night clubs had previously operated. By the end of 1920 the Bolsheviks founded fifty-two workers’ clubs in the city.140 In order to win the hearts and minds of the young, ‘the best actors and musicians were mobilized,’ Redko recalls. ‘Children must understand how the Bolsheviks care about their generation above all else; the heroic struggle for the ideals of the proletariat must be imprinted in their young hearts.’141 By 1925, the Party had also established 336 krasnye ugolki (red reading rooms and recreational nooks) to spread its message among children and adults alike.142 However, workers’ clubs were plagued by poor leadership, high turnover, and budgetary woes. Political pragmatists battled with militant activists, some of whom opposed ‘frivolous’ activities such as dances. In 1924 and 1925 Pravda complained that workers’ clubs were under-utilized as centres of political influence. Attracting adult workers away from their favourite taverns was not easy, and debate raged over whether workers’ clubs should serve beer. In 1925 it was left for each club to decide.143 In 1919, at the height of Allied military intervention, Nikolai Bukharin and E. A. Preobrazhensky published Azbuka kommunizma (An ABC of Communism), which foresaw the emergence of a proletarian Europe that would expedite the

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rapid development of a proletarian, socialist Russia. By 1921 new realities had set in, and Bukharin and Lenin now called the compromises of the NEP ‘a coming of age, when childish fantasies about a perfect world and unlimited power had to be put aside like the dolls with which ... utopians were wont to play.’144 Nevertheless, the visionaries did not disappear. New rituals and symbols rose and fell, replacing those of the tsars and the short-lived Ukrainian National Republic, whose currency, crest, and flag would not surface again until 1991. Colourful infant names mindful of the New Era – such as Ninel (and other varieties of Lenin), Parizhkommuna, Industriia, Dinamo, and [my favourites] Traktoryna and Elektrifikatsiia – enjoyed, perhaps, some brief, localized popularity. Trotsky himself took an interest in ‘Octobering,’ which substituted Lenin iconography for that of Jesus in a ceremony designed to counter baptism. One Komsomol counter-festival to Easter bore the slogan ‘The smoke of a factory is better than the smoke of incense.’ Kyiv musicians organized one of the Soviet Union’s eleven conductorless orchestras. Their purpose was to dramatize the end of old-style authority and illustrate the equality of all under socialism.145 A rich hierarchy of new awards for economic achievement became a mainstay of the new regime. Workers at Kyiv’s Arsenal received the Order of the Red Banner of the Ukrainian SSR and telegraphed Lenin on his birthday in 1923 to relay the news that they had exceeded pre-war productivity levels under their new Red Director.146 Meanwhile, Party activists and ideologists continued to debate proper forms of socialist behaviour. Writer Maxim Gorky condemned ‘the corruption of capitalism’s entertainment and pleasure industries,’ while Leon Trotsky countered that ‘the longing for amusement, distraction, sightseeing and laughter is the most legitimate desire of human nature.’ Trotsky apparently did not pass judgment on what forms socialist amusement should take.147 One influential group in the early twenties, the so-called Hygienists, attacked organized sports, arguing that competition was harmful to physical and mental health and impeded the growth of collective consciousness. Calling for an end to grandstands and spectators, they succeeded in limiting the number of spectator events. Soccer, boxing, gymnastics, and other sports were subsequently banned from the First Trade Union Games in 1925.148 The so-called Proletarian Culture Movement (Prolekult) sought to replace spectator sports with pageants and mass participatory proletarian games such as ‘Rescue from the Imperialists,’ ‘Smuggling Revolutionary Literature across Frontiers,’ and ‘Indians, British, and Reds.’ Nevertheless, sports stars did emerge and attract popular followings. Most were supported by the army or the security apparatus, where it was believed that high-performance sports and military preparedness went hand in hand.149 Soccer, in particular, continued to grow in popularity. Introduced to St Petersburg by British factory managers in 1897, soccer leagues began to form in major towns. Czech industrialists introduced the game to Kyiv, and a few factories built small stadiums with bleachers. Professors at the Polytechnical Institute organized the first local team in 1906. Others soon followed, and by 1911 Kyiv had a soccer league and championship. Teams from St Petersburg, Moscow, Kyiv, and Kharkiv were to take part in an all-Russian Empire championship in 1912, but the Kyivans refused to play the more powerful St Petersburg squad. During the Civil War, despite the

‘Special and Bewildering’: Late-Imperial and Early Soviet Kyiv 85

3.23 Pavlo Kovzhun, The City. From Sviatoslav Hordynsky, Pavlo Kovzhun, 1896–1939 (Krakow, Lviv: Ukrains’ke vydavnytstvo, 1943)

severe hardships, championships were held in Kyiv and other towns. All-Ukrainian and all-Soviet championships began to be held in 1922, and the sport came to be included in conscript training.150 Nevertheless, the Bolsheviks did little to encourage organized spectator sports, preferring instead to emphasize physical fitness and exercise. During the Civil War, many dance halls were closed because they were said to be hangouts for counter-revolutionaries. Regardless, new, sexually suggestive dances remained hugely popular. Some carried names such as ‘Tango of Ecstasy,’ ‘Tango of Death,’ and ‘Hashish Tango.’ One Komsomol activist likened the ‘decadent’ Charleston ‘to a kind of uncontrollable seizure.’ Other activists considered even the foxtrot to be inappropriate and ‘uncivilized.’ Soviet flappers seemed to

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identify with the bourgeois West. Shouldn’t youth be directed towards museums and inspecting factories instead? ‘By labelling flapper fashions petit-bourgeois, party and Komsomol leaders helped create the image of the decadent ‘other’ against which the communist ‘self’ could be developed and defended.’151 Sexual consumption became a metaphor for social corruption,152 but the Soviet government inherited a young population (about one-third of its citizenry was under twenty-one), and it continued to place much of its hope for revolutionary transformation on its youth. During the NEP, towns filled again with street hawkers selling everything from sewing machines to medical cures. The government favoured state products over privately produced competing goods, and used commercial advertising to promote them. Advertising also raised revenue for the agitational press, including Pravda and Izvestiia. Constructivist artists designed and promoted new products that could build collective revolutionary consciousness. As part of an effort to change peasant conceptions of time, one 1925 poster admonished: ‘You’re not a human being unless you’re wearing a watch.’153 Some critics accused the regime of spending too little on propaganda and of favouring amusement over indoctrination. ‘The NEP dealt a serious blow to the cause of artistic enlightenment,’ bureaucrats from one agency complained in 1923. ‘The content and character of all forms of art, but especially the theatre and the film, are determined today by what the public wants.’154 The extent to which Kyivans took to cultural innovation is difficult to determine. It was one thing to remember that the South Russian Mechanical Factory was now called Lenin Forge, but it is unlikely that Vorovsky Street, which replaced the Khreshchatyk, ever caught on.155 Many undoubtedly viewed ideology with scepticism, for it had often come at gunpoint from a variety of marauding armies. But for some, cultural novelty may have brought hope or at least relief from the grimness of the daily fight for survival. Kyiv in 1925: Some Conclusions By mid-decade, Kyiv’s population had returned to its pre-war level. Of the 513,637 residents recorded in the 1926 census, 216,528 (42 per cent) designated themselves as Ukrainians, 125,514 (25 per cent) as Russians, and 140,256 (27 per cent) as Jews. Ukrainians predominated in the outlying districts such as Solomianska; Russians prevailed in Pechersk; and Jews constituted majorities in Podil (67 per cent) and Troitsky District (60 per cent), but significant numbers of all three groups could be found throughout most of the city’s neighbourhoods.156 Literacy rates were high among all three groups, as table 3.2 indicates. Moreover, all three groups were well represented in most of the city’s free professions, those who might have provided civic leadership had the country moved in the direction of political and cultural freedom. To be sure, beggary was highly visible. Boys, girls, and adults slept together in the city’s crowded shelters, where abortions were not uncommon even for 14- and 15-year-old girls. Gangs of homeless youths roamed about, terrorizing the citizenry. Unemployed intelihenty picked beets from sunup to sundown for 35 kopecks a

‘Special and Bewildering’: Late-Imperial and Early Soviet Kyiv 87 Table 3.2 Literacy rates by percentage* 1897

1917

1926

Ukrainians (male)

57

82

87

Ukrainians (female)

28

55

67

Russians (male) Russians (female)

66 50

82 65

89 76

Jews (male) Jews (female)

64 42

89 79

90 82

* I. Vikul, ‘Liudnist’ mista Kyiva’ 238. Table 3.3 Ethnic composition of selected free professions as recorded in the 1926 census* Ukrainians Writers & editors

Russians

Jews

(m)

12

4

(f)

1

1

2

(m) (f) (m)

12 11 49

11 17 16

24 7 29

Teachers (uchitelia)

(f) (m) (f)

9 341 187

8 133 272

2 533 355

Doctors & veterinarians

(m)

20

13

34

Dentists

(f) (m)

4 4

7 10

11 62

Actors & directors Artists, sculptors

Attorneys

10

(f)

7

16

101

(m) (f)

44 0

38 1

76 6

* Vsesoiuznaia perepis’ naseleniia 1926 goda, vol . 42, table IV, 136.

day, a sum that did not cover their room and board.157 Yet, in 1925 Kyivans had many reasons to be optimistic. The violence of the Civil War had not recurred, and elements of normalcy were rapidly returning. In 1925, the generation of electricity surpassed 1913 levels for the first time, and power, water, and sewer lines were being extended into the outlying neighbourhoods. Repair of the tram system provided Kyivans with 150 kilometres of usable lines, about the same figure as that of 1913. In 1925 ten city buses made their initial appearance, and 5000 telephones were in use in the city. Forty thousand pupils were enrolled in Kyiv’s schools, about half of the school-age population.158 Seeds of a vital civil society had been planted. More than 125,000 Kyivans had joined trade unions. (These unions would not become completely subordinate to the tasks of production and whims of the state until after the political defeat of Mikhail Tomsky and the Rightist Opposition in 1929.) Wages were rising on an average – by 23 per cent in 1924–5 and another 35 per cent in 1925–6.159

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At mid-decade, the prospects for the Ukrainian language and culture seemed promising. In 1923 the Communist Party had advocated the equality of the Ukrainian and Russian languages, and a year later Mykhailo Hrushevsky returned from abroad, reviving the study of Ukrainian history at Kyiv University while founding several scholarly journals. In 1925–6, writer-satirist-pamphleteer Mykola Khvylovy (1893–1933) wrote boldly in support of a new Ukrainian Communist culture, headed by writers who were oriented not towards Russia but towards ‘the Europe of Goethe, Darwin, Byron, Newton, [and] Marx ...’160 In April 1925, despite resistance from many officials, Ukrainian Party boss and Stalin’s henchman, Lazar Kaganovich (1893–1991) began to push for ‘Ukrainian linguistic hegemony. Russian would remain Ukraine’s link language with the centre and therefore would continue to be a mandatory subject in all Ukrainian schools. Otherwise, Ukrainian was to be the exclusive language of the public sphere.’161 Nevertheless, in 1931–2, the Department for the Liquidation of Ukrainian Illiteracy (Likuknep) found that 58 per cent of the Kyivans that it tested did not know Ukrainian and that many governmental offices had reverted to Russian.162 By then the policy of Ukrainianization was forcibly on the wane, but so rapid a death would have been hard to predict in 1925. For artists, Kyiv offered much in the way of inspiration: spectacular vistas and wooded ravines; majestic churches and monasteries; a colourful mix of peoples, especially in the markets, in the Jewish quarters, and at the river port. Kyiv was a fresh environment – an open stage – for it had no strongly entrenched indigenous artistic tradition to challenge and dislodge. After all, the parameters of cultural expression had long been defined, narrowly, by a distant government in St Petersburg. After 1905, innovation in the arts quickly gained a foothold. By 1908, Kyiv had established itself as a centre of modernist exhibition. The search for a national style, by Ukrainians and by Jews, added drama and a pioneering spirit. Revolution in 1917 brought a whole range of new possibilities, for now the arts were to build revolutionary consciousness. In the New Era, art had to reach the masses: variety and innovation were thus required. As in Germany, the artists of the New Era liberated and expanded what had already begun prior to 1914.163 It is also true, however, that by 1925 the importance of conforming to political correctness was already becoming clearer. In 1925 the Central Committee of the Communist Party published a call for ‘realism’ in literature and the arts, and Leninskii deklamator (Lenin’s Reciter), Ukraine’s first anthology of poetic tributes to Lenin, was published in Kyiv.164 The actors and stage personnel of the Zankovetska Theatre (named for the great Ukrainian actress Maria Zankovetska) decided to pursue Marxist self-education in an effort to find appropriate ‘social motifs.’ And by 1925, Panas Saksahansky (1859–1940), ‘the dean of Ukrainian actors,’ had already stood accused of ‘bourgeois nationalism,’ and officials were denying his ethnographic theatre long runs in Kyiv.165 Avant-garde would lose its ascendancy, and by the end of the decade cultural innovation would all but disappear. But in 1925, despite the disappearance of the old class structure, the small size of the proletariat, and the growing authoritarianism of the government, Marxism could still fire interest, particularly when its practitioners showed pragmatic flexibility and openness to new ideas. As party leader

‘Special and Bewildering’: Late-Imperial and Early Soviet Kyiv 89

Grigory Zinoviev (1883–1936) noted that year, ‘The battles that will decide the fate of the Revolution continue, although they are ‘bloodless,’ silent, and without the accompanying roar of cannon fire.’166 The assault against civil society that would define the Stalinist Revolution was just around the corner, but in 1925 rigidity had yet to destroy artistic and intellectual vision, and the battle within the Communist Party over control versus creativity was still to be decided.

NOTES 1 The author thanks Paul Robert Magocsi for his helpful comments, editors Irena Makaryk and Virlana Tkacz for providing certain source materials, the IREX and Fulbright Programs, and Centre College for funds for travel to Kyiv and Moscow. 2 Ruth Kedzie Wood, The Tourist’s Russia (New York, 1912) 10. 3 Kyiv: Vchora, s’ohodni, zavtra (Kyiv: Mystetstvo, 1982) 28. 4 V.S. Ikonnikov, Kiev v 1654–1855 gg. Istoricheskii ocherk (Kiev: Imperatorskii Universitet Sv. Vladimira, 1904) 5. 5 For a discussion of the commercial, industrial, and spatial development of Kyiv, see Michael F. Hamm, Kiev: A Portrait, 1800–1917 (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993), esp. chap. 2. The Russian spellings used at the time were Podol, Pechersk, and Khreshchatik. 6 I. Vikul, ‘Liudnist’ mista Kyiva,’ Pratsi demohrafichnoho instytutu Akademii nauk URSR 7 (1930): 278 provides a year-by-year table of Kyiv’s growth from 1897 through 1928. 7 Iuzhnaia zaria (Ekaterinoslav), 13 Mar. 1913. Elsewhere in Ukraine, on the eve of the First World War, Odesa had about 630,000 people, Kharkiv (Khar’kov) 245,000, Katerynoslav (Ekaterinoslav) 212,000, and Lviv (then Lemberg in the Habsburg Empire) 206,000. 8 Ikonnikov, Kiev 167; Jan TabiĞ, Polacy na Universytecie Kijowskim, 1834–1863 (Cracow, n.d.) 5. 9 Maksym Slavins’skyi, ‘Spomyny’ [Kyivs’ke ukrainstvo v rokakh 1877–95], Ameryka (Philadelphia, 1960) 108. For a fuller discussion of the ethnic and linguistic blending in Kyiv, see Hamm, Kiev: A Portrait, chap. 4. Functional bilingualism grew stronger in Ukraine during seven decades of Soviet rule. See Andrew Wilson, The Ukrainians: Unexpected Nation (New Haven: Yale UP, 2000) 218–21. 10 Martha Bohachevsky-Chomiak, Feminists Despite Themselves: Women in Ukrainian Community Life, 1884–1939 (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 1988) 43, cites one instance. 11 S.M. Dubnow, History of the Jews in Russia and Poland, trans. I. Friedlaender (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1916–20) 3: 19–20. 12 In 1913, 9288 Kyiv residents and enterprises paid property taxes. About half (4916, or 53%) were assessed at 1500 rubles or more, which allowed their owners to vote and run for municipal office unless they were Jews. Of this number, 474 (10%) were Poles and 521 (11%) Jews. Property-tax assessments were based on dokhodnost’ (the incomeproducing potential of real estate or commercial enterprise). In the top bracket, which consisted of those whose dokhodnost’ exceeded 10,000 rubles, 316 (17%) were Jews and 201 (11%) Poles. The number of Ukrainians cannot be determined because they were

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16

17

18

19

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21 22

23

Michael F. Hamm lumped together with Russians under the heading ‘Orthodox.’ Data are from Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv (RGIA), f. 1288, op. 5, d. 170, p. 130. Ninety-six individuals (1%) were Germans. In Kishinev, of the 2673 residents with the minimal level of income-producing property required for enfranchisement, 40% were Jews. In Vil’na, Poles constituted 41% and Jews 50% of the top property valuation category (dokhodnost’ of more than 10,000 rubles), while in Riga, Germans constituted 39% of the top category, Latvians 19%, and Jews 10% (RGIA, f. 1288, op. 25, d. 7, p. 49; op. 25, d. 36, p. 352). V. Lukin, ‘Ot narodnichestva k narodu (S. A. An-skii–etnograf vostochno-evropeiskogo evreistva),’ in D. A. El’iashevich, ed., Evrei v Rossii. Istoriia i kul’tura. Vyp. 3 (St Petersburg, 1995) 125–61. Arnold D. Margolin, The Jews of Eastern Europe (New York: Thomas Seltzer, 1926) 165. Margolin represented Mendel Beilis in the famous trial and provides a detailed description of that event. Hamm, Kiev: A Portrait, chap. 5 discusses the evolution of Jewish Kyiv, and chap. 8 describes the 1905 pogrom, based in part on first-hand accounts from Kyiv newspapers published during the several weeks of press freedom that followed the October Manifesto. Civilian and military authorities contributed to pogrom violence either by participating in it or by refusing to disperse the mobs, usually until the third day of the pogrom. See Hamm, Kiev: A Portrait, chap. 8, and Weinberg, The Revolution of 1905 in Odessa (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993), chap 7. See Roshanna P. Sylvester, ‘Making an Appearance: Urban “Types” and the Creation of Respectability in Odessa’s Popular Press, 1912–1914,’ Slavic Review 59.4 (Winter 2000). Grigorii Moskvich’s Odesa guidebook is cited on p. 802. RGIA, f. 1288, op. 5, d. 170, l. 135. The figure is for 1910. About 45% of eligible Kyivans voted in 1902 and 1906, 59% in 1910 – impressive turnouts by Imperial Russian standards if ‘Germanic’ Riga is excluded. See Michael F. Hamm, ‘Khar’kov’s Progressive Duma, 1910–1914: A Study in Russian Municipal Reform,’ Slavic Review 40 (March 1981) 17–36 for an examination of municipal politics in late-Imperial Russia. Voter turnout for 19 major Imperial Russian cities can be found on 34–5. Gorodskoi vestnik (Samara), 18 Sept. 1913. In 1914 Kyiv was turned down for a loan in Belgium, France, and Germany before finding a lender in England. The Belgian business press wrote that the scandalous behaviour of Kyiv officials further damaged the already poor reputation of Russian cities in European financial circles. See an account from Birzhevyia vedomosti in RGIA, f. 1288, op. 7, d. 184 (1913), 64. Izvestiia Moskovskoi gorodskoi dumy 2 (1912) 41–2. ‘Gorodskaia duma i vodianoi golod,’ Kievskaia mysl’, 10 May 1914. For Zverynets, see 1 June 1913 issue. See also Kievskaia mysl’, 30 Apr. 1914 and N. Drobinskii, Gorodskoe delo 9 (1915) 499. In 1912 Kyiv Polytechnical Professor D.P. Ruzskii, a former engineering dean, enlisted the help of the city council to create a special institute for the technical study of water and sewerage issues. Whether it ever was created is unknown (Gorodskoe delo 1 [1913] 22–5). For 1909, see Gorodskoe delo 14 (1909) 694. More than 80 per cent were enrolled in publicly financed city schools. For 1914, see Kievskaia mysl’, 7 Feb. 1914.

‘Special and Bewildering’: Late-Imperial and Early Soviet Kyiv 91 24 V.G. Sarbei, ed., Istoriia Kieva: Kiev perioda pozdnego feodalizma i kapitalizma (Kiev, 1983) 2: 376. 25 Gorodskoe delo 6 (1915) 336–7; 5 (1916) 212–14. 26 Peter Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1999) 54–5, 246 n. 76. 27 Lewis H. Siegelbaum, The Politics of Industrial Mobilization in Russia, 1914–1917 (New York: St Martin’s P, 1983) 102–3. 28 Kievskaia mysl’, 4 Feb. 1915 reported a figure of 8.4 million rubles for 1915. 29 Kievskaia mysl’, 23 Jan. 1915. 30 Gorodskoe delo 6 (1915) 326–8. 31 Kievskaia mysl’, 27 June 1914. 32 Khronika revoliutsionnogo rabochego dvizheniia na Ukraine (1900–1917). Spravochnik (Kiev: Naukova dumka, 1987) 310–15, 324. 33 For 1915–16, see the chronology in Khronika 327–54. 34 Sarbei, Istoriia Kieva 2: 378–80. 35 N.I. Suprunenko, ed., Istoriia Kieva: Kiev Sotsialisticheskii (Kiev, 1985) 3, book 1: 25. 36 A.A. Gol’denveizer, ‘Iz Kievskikh vospominanii (1917–1921gg.),’ Arkhiv russkoi revoliutsii 6 (Berlin, 1922) 161–4, 175. 37 Ukrains’ka Vil’na Akademiia Nauk u SShA, Velyka ukrains’ka revoliutsiia. Kalendar’ istorychnykh podii (New York, 1967) 7–10. This work provides a useful chronology of Ukrainian activities from February 1917 through March 1918. 38 Myroslav Shkandrij, Modernists, Marxists and the Nation: The Ukrainian Literary Discussion of the 1920s (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 1992) 20. 39 Both Hrushevs’kyi and the Rada’s socialist majority strongly supported minority rights. According to Yury Boshyk, Jewish and Ukrainian Social Democrats had a history of cooperation, based on a shared ideology and respect for each other’s national goals, although few Jews had joined the broader Ukrainian national movement and organizational relations between Ukrainians and Jews remained weak. ‘Between Socialism and Nationalism: Jewish-Ukrainian Political Relations in Imperial Russia, 1900–1917,’ in Peter Potichnyj and Howard Aster, eds, Ukrainian–Jewish Relations in Historical Perspective (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 1988) 193–4. 40 Gol’denveizer, ‘Iz Kievskikh vospominanii’ 174. 41 On 20 October, 965 delegates to the All-Ukrainian Soldiers’ Council convened in Kyiv, of which 639 were Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionaries and 101 were Ukrainian Socialist Democrats. Velyka ukrains’ka revoliutsiia 26–9. 42 V.M. Boiko, ‘Uchast’ ukrainskykh partii u munitsypal’nii kampanii 1917 r.,’ Ukrains’kyi istorychnyi zhurnal 5 (1997) 30. See also George Liber, ‘Ukrainian Nationalism and the 1918 Law on National-Personal Autonomy,’ Nationalities Papers, vol. 15.1 (1987) 34. The proportional electoral system prohibited voting directly for individual representatives, requiring voters to choose from about 15 party or coalition lists, even though few voters had party affiliations. The Ukrainian socialists won 26% of the vote in the fall elections to the all-Russian constituent assembly. 43 Gol’denveizer, ‘Iz Kievskikh vospominanii’ 193. Although the Duma surely had a Russophone majority, Martha Bohachevsky-Chomiak, Feminists Despite Themselves 132, indicates that it voted to use Ukrainian in its deliberations. 44 Gol’denveizer, ‘Iz Kievskikh vospominanii’ 191.

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45 Ibid. 173–4. George Y. Shevelov, The Ukrainian Language in the First Half of the Twentieth Century (1900–1941): Its State and Status (Cambridge: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 1989) 76–7, provides the figure for the Ukrainian dailies. 46 Istoriia Kieva (Kiev: Akademiia Nauk Ukrainskoi SSR, 1964) 2: 18; Suprunenko, Istoriia Kieva 3.1: 42. City tram, electrical, and water plant workers refused to join the December strike (Velyka ukrains’ka revoliutsiia 33). 47 Shkandrij, Modernists 11. 48 Gol’denveizer, ‘Iz Kievskikh vospominanii’ 204, 206, 209. For Hrushevs’kyi’s home, see Velyka ukrains’ka revoliutsiia 51–2. 49 Suprunenko, Istoriia Kieva 3.1: 64–6. 50 Paul Robert Magocsi, A History of Ukraine (Seattle: U of Washington P, 1996) 491. 51 Pravda, 17 May 1918. 52 Gol’denveizer, ‘Iz Kievskikh vospominanii’ 226–9. 53 Konstantin Paustovskii, The Story of a Life, trans. Joseph Barnes (New York: Pantheon Books, 1964) 567. 54 From reports published in Kievshchina v gody grazhdanskoi voiny i inostrannoi voennoi interventsii (1918–20 gg.) (Kiev: Politicheskaia literatura USSR, 1962) 112, 128–9. 55 Paustovskii, The Story of a Life 586–7. Haidamaks were eighteenth-century Orthodox peasant and Cossack guerrillas who fought against Polish Catholic landlords and clergy as well as Jews. 56 Kliment Red’ko, ‘Iskusstvo i Grazhdanskaia Voina,’ Avtobiograficheskaia povest’ ‘zrachki solntsa, 1935 g.,’ unpublished manuscript supplied by Dmytro Horbachov, chapter 18, 57. 57 Kievshchina v gody grazhdanskoi voiny 183–4. 58 Gol’denveizer, ‘Iz Kievskikh vospominanii’ 232–3, 236–8, 250–2, 257–8. The Cheka was a political police apparatus designed both to spread the revolution and defend against its enemies. 59 Suprunenko, Istoriia Kieva 3.1: 84. 60 Ibid. 3.1: 75–7, 80–4; Kievshchina v gody grazhdanskoi voiny 234. 61 Anthony Heywood, Modernising Lenin’s Russia: Economic Reconstruction, Foreign Trade and the Railways (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999) 50–1. 62 Kievshchina v gody grazhdanskoi voiny 279–80. 63 Red’ko, ‘Iskusstvo’ 41. 64 Suprunenko, Istoriia Kieva 3.1: 94. 65 Gol’denveizer, ‘Iz Kievskikh vospominanii’ 259–63; Red’ko, ‘Iskusstvo’ 47. 66 Henry Abramson, A Prayer for Government: Ukrainians and Jews in Revolutionary Times, 1917–1920 (Cambridge: Harvard Ukrainian Institute, 1999) 151. 67 Nakhum Gergel, ‘The Pogroms in the Ukraine in 1918–21,’ YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Science 6 (1951) 239, 243, 249–50. As many as 60,000 Jews were killed in Ukraine during the Civil War. An estimated 40 per cent of the pogroms were committed in areas nominally under the authority of Symon Petliura’s Directory, though whether Petliura himself was an anti-Semite remains debatable. Bolsheviks generally sought to protect Jews and committed a relatively small percentage of the pogroms. 68 ‘Dopovid’ Kh. Hofmana pro pohromy v Fastovi voseny 1919 roky. 30 veresnia 1919 roku,’ in Volodymyr Serhiichuk, Pohromy v Ukraini: 1914–1920 (Kyiv: Vydavnytstvo Oleny Telihy, 1998) 477–88.

‘Special and Bewildering’: Late-Imperial and Early Soviet Kyiv 93 69 Gol’denveizer, ‘Iz Kievskikh vospominanii’ 267–8. 70 Ibid. 269. 71 ‘Zvit pro evreiskyi pohrom u Kyevi, vchynenyi denikinskoiu armieiu, 1–5 zhovtnia 1919 roku,’ in Serhiichuk, Pohromy 361–70. 72 N.I. Shtif, Pogromy na Ukraine (Berlin, Vostok, 1922) 84. 73 Suprunenko, Istoriia Kieva 3.1: 94; Kievshchina v gody grazhdanskoi voiny 307. 74 Gol’denveizer, ‘Iz Kievskikh Vospominanii’ 269–72. 75 Izvestiia Kievskogo gubrevkoma 1 (19 Dec. 1919) in Kievshchina v gody grazhdanskoi voiny 317. 76 Andrzej Garlicki, Jozef Piłsudski, 1867–1935, trans. and ed. John Coutouvidis (Hants, Eng.: Scolar Press, 1995) 99–100. 77 Paustovskii, The Story of a Life 587. 78 Gol’denveizer, ‘Iz Kievskikh vospominanii’ 275–6, 281–4. 79 Paustovskii, The Story of a Life 596. 80 Gol’denveizer, ‘Iz Kievskikh vospominanii’ 286–7, 299–300. 81 For details of Kyiv’s population growth, see M.V. Ptukha, Naselenie Kievskoi Gubernii (Kiev, 1925), esp. 21, 26; and Vikul, ‘Liudnist’ mista Kyiva’ 197–311, and esp. 278. 82 In the 1874 and 1897 censuses, Jews were designated by profession of faith. The 1917 data reveal that an almost identical number of Jews (18 per cent) could be designated by native language (Yiddish) as by self-designation (19 per cent), but only 13.5 per cent spoke Yiddish predominantly at home. Ptukha, Naselenie 31. In 1919, outlying Slobodky, Pushcha Vodytsia, and Sviatoshyn were added to the city data. 83 Vikul, ‘Liudnist’ mista Kyiva’ 216. 84 Ptukha, Naselenie 30, 37. Kyiv had 739 Ukrainian females per 1000 males in 1897, 1114 in 1920; 875 Russian females per 1000 males (1897), 1431 (1920); 931 Polish females (1897) compared with 1620 (1920); and 886 Jewish females compared with 1242 (1920). 85 Vesti Kievskogo soveta narodnogo khoziaistva 1 (16 April 1919). 86 Gergel, ‘Pogroms’ 250. 87 R.E. Johnson, ‘Family Life in Moscow during NEP,’ in S. Fitzpatrick, A. Rabinowitch, and R. Stites, eds, Russia in the Era of NEP (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991) 108. 88 Tsentral’noe statisticheskoe upravlenie SSSR. Otdel perepisi, Vsesoiuznaia perepis’ naseleniia 1926 goda, vol. 12, Ukrainskaia sotsialisticheskaia sovetskaia respublika (Moscow, 1928). Of the ‘continuous’ population of 503,913, there were 241,485 males (48 per cent) and 262,428 females. 89 Ptukha, Naselenie 32. Data are for people over the age of five. 90 Paustovskii, The Story of a Life 594. 91 H.H. Fisher, The Famine in Soviet Russia, 1919–1923 (New York: Macmillan, 1927) 259, 262–3. Suprunenko, Istoriia Kieva 3.1: 157–9, provides the data for Kyiv. Some of the garden plots were up to 50 kilometres from the city. 92 Istoriia Kieva 2: 144–5; Red’ko, ‘Iskusstvo’ 65, comments on the use of garlic. 93 Fisher, Famine 443. 94 Heywood, Modernising Lenin’s Russia 225. In 1920 the Soviet government planned to immediately import 5000 locomotives and 100,000 railway wagons. 95 Kievshchina v gody grazhdanskoi voiny 354. 96 Istoriia Kieva 2: 157. 97 Ibid. 152.

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98 See Marjorie L. Hilton, ‘Retailing the Revolution: The State Department Store (GUM) and Soviet Society in the 1920s,’ Journal of Social History 37.4 (Summer 2004), for an analysis of early Soviet consumer culture. 99 Cited in M.V. Briantsev, Kul’tura russkogo kupechestva (Briansk: Kursiv, 1999) 41. Jews themselves were rarely, if ever, allowed to enter the ranks of the kupechestvo. Most carried a lower social designation called meshchanstvo. 100 B.D. Brutskus, ‘Evreiskoe naselenie pod kommunisticheskoi vlast’iu,’ in Budnitskii, ed., Evrei 297, 309. 101 Wilson, The Ukrainians 122, 151. 102 Suprunenko, Istoriia Kieva 2.1: 116. 103 Bohdan Krawchenko, Social Change and National Consciousness in Twentieth-Century Ukraine (New York: St Martin’s, 1985) 86, 91. 104 Magocsi, A History 54l. 105 Larry E. Holmes, The Kremlin and the Schoolhouse (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991) 37, 144. See Suprunenko, Istoriia Kieva 3.1: 164 for the reference to teacher retraining. Kyiv had 1750 teachers in 1925. 106 Serhii Iefremov, Shchodennyky 1923–1929 (Kyiv: Rada, 1997) 54. 107 Shevelov, Ukrainian Language 100–1. 108 Ibid., 122, 127–8. 109 Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2001) 103. 110 Vsesoiuznaia perepis’ naseleniia 1926 goda, table IX-B, 191. Of the 84,500 literate Ukrainian boys and men, about 67 per cent regarded Ukrainian as their native language, and 33 per cent Russian. Of the 64,369 literate girls and women, 59 per cent were Ukrainian by native language. 111 Myroslava M. Mudrak, ‘Rupture or Continuum? Ukraine’s “Avant-Garde” in Search of a System,’ in M.Shkandrij, ed., The Phenomenon of the Ukrainian Avant-Garde, 1910–1935 (Winnipeg: Winnipeg Art Gallery, 2001) 27. 112 Red’ko, ‘Iskusstvo’ 28; Mudrak, ‘Rupture or Continuum’ 27. 113 Iefremov, Shchodennyky 45. 114 A.V. Kursanov, Futuristicheskaia revoliutsiia 1917–1921, book 2 (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2003) 258. Kursanov also regards Odesa as more important. 115 Wilson, The Ukrainians 135. 116 These are the words of Cubo-Futurist painter Oleksandr Bohomazov, Exter’s close associate. Dmitri Horbachov, ‘A Survey of the Ukrainian Avant-Garde,’ in Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker, Igor Jassenjawsky, and Joseph Kiblitsky, eds, Avantgarde and Ukraine (Munich: Klinkhardt and Biermann, 1993) n.p. 117 Georgii Kovalenko, ‘Alexandra Exter,’ in John E. Bowlt and Matthew Drutt, eds, Amazons of the Avant-Garde (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2000) 131. 118 Danzker et al., Avantgarde 30, 68; Kursanov, Futuristicheskaia revoliutsiia 256. 119 Danzker et al., Avantgarde and Ukraine 33. 120 Charlotte Douglas, ‘Six and a Few More: Russian Women of the Avant-Garde Together,’ in Bowlt and Drutt, Amazons 53. 121 Irena R. Makaryk, Shakespeare in the Undiscovered Bourn (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2004) 58. 122 E.D. Kashuba, ‘Sotsial’nyi dadaizm v tvorchestve Viktora Pal’mova,’ in Russkii Avangard 1910–1920–kh godov v evropeiskom kontekste (Moscow: Nauka, 2000) 223–4; Mudrak, ‘Rupture or Continuum’ 28.

‘Special and Bewildering’: Late-Imperial and Early Soviet Kyiv 95 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143

144 145

146 147 148

149 150 151

152 153

Wilson, The Ukrainians 135. Makaryk, Shakespeare 10. Ibid. 10. Ibid. 16, 26. Ibid. 69. Ibid. 29. V.S. Manin, Khudozhestvennaia zhizn’ Rossii 1917–1941 gg. (Moscow: Editorial URSS, 1999) 101. Makaryk, Shakespeare 66. Stephen White, The Bolshevik Poster (New Haven: Yale UP, 1988) 14–15. Ibid., 3. Istoriia Kieva 2: 138. Red’ko, ‘Iskusstvo’ 2, 15, 23, 28. White, Bolshevik Poster 19, 40. Paustovskii, The Story of a Life 55. Louise McReynolds, Russia at Play: Leisure Activities at the End of the Tsarist Era (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2003) 255–6, 268–9. Robert Edelman, Serious Fun: A History of Spectator Sports in the USSR (New York: Oxford UP, 1993) 31. Istoriia Kieva 2: 140–1; Suprunenko, Istoriia Kieva 3.1: 166. The percentage of Sovietmade films is for 1925. Suprunenko, Istoriia Kieva 2.1: 115. Red’ko, ‘Iskusstvo’ 20. Suprunenko, Istoriia Kieva 3.1: 165–6. John Hatch, ‘The Politics of Mass Culture: Workers, Communists, and Proletkul’t in the Development of Workers’ Clubs, 1921–25,’ Russian History/Histoire Russe 13.2–3 (Summer–Fall 1986): 134–8, 143–5. Eric Naiman, Sex in Public: The Incarnation of Early Soviet Ideology (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1997) 9. Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams. Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (New York: Oxford UP, 1989) 110–12, 138. The description of counter-Easter comes from Leningrad in 1924. The Kyiv Conductorless Orchestra apparently came into existence in 1926. A similar situation occurred in the theatre, where the prompter was banned. Istoriia Kieva 3: 136–7. Edelman, Serious Fun 8–9. Frances Lee Bernstein, ‘‘‘What Everyone Should Know about Sex”: Gender, Sexual Enlightenment, and the Politics of Health in Revolutionary Russia, 1918–1931,’ PhD diss., Columbia U, 1998, 277–8. Edelman, Serious Fun 34–5. B.A. Pirogov, Futbol: Khronika, sobytiia, fakty (Moscow, 1995) 9, 20, 24–7. Anne E. Gorsuch, Flappers and Foxtotters: Soviet Youth in the ‘Roaring Twenties,’ Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies (University of Pittsburgh), no. 1102 (1994) 11–12, 20. David Hoffmann, Stalinist Values: The Cultural Norms of Soviet Modernity, 1917–1941 (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2003) 117, 124. Randi Barnes Cox, ‘The Creation of the Socialist Consumer: Advertising, Citizenship and NEP,’ PhD diss., Indiana U, 1999, 16, 58, 218.

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154 Peter Kenez, The Birth of the Propaganda State: Soviet Methods of Mass Mobilization, 1917–29 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985) 136. 155 Stites, Revolutionary Dreams 66. The Khreshchatyk was renamed in 1923. 156 The 1926 data also record 13,706 Poles (3%) and 17,633 (3%) ‘others.’ See Vikul, ‘Liudnist’ mista Kyiva’ 221, and for settlement data by district, 224–5. 157 These observations are recorded in Iefremov’s Shchodennyky 54, 95, 120, 223, 370. In one child shelter in 1924, Iefremov wrote about 80 recent abortions (54). 158 Suprunenko, Istoriia Kieva 3.1: 157–60. School data can be found on 163. 159 Istoriia Kieva 2: 159. 160 George S.N. Luckyj, Literary Politics in the Soviet Ukraine, 1917–1934 (Durham: Duke UP, 1990) 65. 161 Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire, 88. About 20 per cent of Ukrainian government business was conducted in the Ukrainian language in 1925. 162 Ibid. 118–21. 163 For Germany at this time, see Peter Gay, Weimar Culture (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), esp. chap. 1. 164 Suprunenko, Istoriia Kieva 3.1: 171–2. 165 Makaryk, Shakespeare 125–6. 166 Quoted in Naiman, Sex in Public 11.

Sweet Michael and the Golden Gates In the dark times when the Tartars came, they attacked many towns and were making their way to Kyiv. At that time there was a famous knight in Kyiv called Sweet Michael. One day Sweet Michael climbed to the top of the highest tower and shot an arrow from his bow. His arrow flew right through the centre of a bowl that the Tartar Khan was holding. So the Khan gingerly placed the bowl on the table and sat down to eat. He was just saying grace when another arrow pierced the roast on his plate. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘this is the work of an extraordinary marksman. There must be a great knight in Kyiv!’ ‘Oh there is,’ said his guard as he pulled out the arrow. ‘This arrow belongs to Sweet Michael.’ ‘Go,’ said the Khan to his guard, ‘and tell the people of Kyiv to hand Sweet Michael over to me and I will spare their city.’ The people of Kyiv buzzed and buzzed and the council met. ‘Well, let’s hand him over,’ they decided. Then Sweet Michael addressed the council, ‘If you hand me over you will never see the Golden Gates of your city again.’ But his words fell on deaf ears. So Sweet Michael got up on his horse and turned to the council and said: Oh, people of Kyiv, oh councilmen! Your decision is a bad one: If you had harbored me The enemies would have never taken Kyiv For as long as the sun shines. Then he picked up the great Golden Gates on his lance, like you would pick up a sheaf of wheat. He rode off to Byzantium right through the entire Tartar army. The Tartars did not see him, but they saw that there were no gates to the city. They poured into Kyiv, inundating it. And Sweet Michael lives in Byzantium to this day. On his table stands a glass of water and a consecrated host; he eats nothing else. And the Golden Gates stand in Byzantium. People say they will stand there till the day Sweet Michael returns to Kyiv and puts the Golden Gates in their proper place again. And when that happens and people passing by say, ‘O Golden Gates, it is good that you now stand in the place where you’ve always belonged,’ then the gold on the gates will glisten and shine. But if the people say nothing, or think, ‘O Golden Gates, you don’t belong here,’ then the gold will grow dull and fade from the old walls of the city. Legend collected by Panteleimon Kulish in Kyiv, 1856–7 Translated from the Ukrainian by Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipps

4 Three Novels, Three Cities taras koznarsky

In late December of 1833, Nikolai Gogol (Ukrainian: Mykola Hohol) wrote to his compatriot Mykhailo Maksymovych: ‘To Kyiv, to ancient, beautiful Kyiv! It is ours, not theirs, isn’t it true? There, or around there, the events of our antiquity took place.’1 The letter highlights a short yet critical period in the life of Gogol when the author was anxious about his vocation and obsessed with Kyiv as a spiritual and creative refuge. Gogol’s letter also encapsulates what I shall call here the text of Kyiv: ours, not theirs. Who are we and who are they? Who has the right to claim the beauty and antiquity of the city; who can appropriate it, by virtue of what claim? Nationality, ethnicity, religion, class, ideology, language? These issues run through the city’s cultural history, shaping, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a dynamic conglomerate of topoi, narratives, and spatio-historical coordinates that can be called the text of Kyiv.2 This article will examine three novels written in the 1910s–1920s – Yama (The Pit) by Aleksandr Kuprin, Belaia gvardiia (The White Guard) by Mikhail Bulgakov, and Misto (The City) by Valerian Pidmohylny – that engage in defining the identity of Kyiv and the writing of the text of Kyiv in very different ways. The text of a city can be understood as an ‘inevitable’ semiotic and symbolic product of human transformative relationship with the natural, social, and cultural environment that emerges where a certain critical mass of manifestations of a city (literary, journalistic, intellectual, visual, folkloric) meet with public recognition and even expectation of urban textuality. These expectations entice the receiver of information to treat the text as a whole, as having a special orientation, direction, even a ‘plot.’3 The production of the text of a city also depends on larger socio-cultural trends, such as interest in urban settings.4 Moreover, the text of a city never exists in isolation. A city’s text always relates to a larger space, be it empire, continent, or universe, and always involves a taxonomy of cities or spaces (for example, opposition between the imperial-metropolitan and provincial spaces or between Asiatic and European vectors of civilization). Kyiv was known as the spiritual, cultural, and political cradle of the Russian empire. The city’s symbolic significance and special importance within the empire were linked to its place as the second Jerusalem, a holy city and site of Orthodox pilgrimage; the first capital (pervoprestolnyi) of Rus; and ‘the mother of Russian cities’ (as well as the Slavic Pompeii, that is, the repository of antiquity).5 These roles,

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4.1 Pilgrims at Pecherska Lavra (Monastery of the Caves)

with the first most dominant, filtered into travelogues and novels, tourist guides and journalistic essays, urban lore and scholarship.6 A destination of Orthodox pilgrims for centuries, Kyiv in some years attracted as many as a hundred thousand visitors – ranging from Ukrainian peasants (the majority of pilgrims) to the middle class and nobility (including the royal family) – all eager to see holy churches and relics and acquire blessings and absolutions from sins, as well as souvenirs.7 In the following excerpt from Vladimir Izmailov’s travelogue, Kyiv appears to the traveller-pilgrim as a cathartic revelation: The majestic Dnipro ... unfolds in front of me. I see an amphitheater of mountains, rising from hill to hill and supporting, like a magnificent pedestal, the seven-domed Monastery of the Caves and St Andrew Church, as if a gift from the earth to the sky ... I see thousands of pious pilgrims hurrying to the river bank, thousands of people covering a spacious meadow … a multitude of women who bravely climb the hills.8

The city is perceived as a sacred vertical where the ritual of elevation and ascent towards the divine takes place. Movement of approaching, grasping the horizontal and vertical space, catharsis of beholding – this experience of Kyiv, repeated and amplified by others, became the key element of perception of the city and the most reproductive textual model, generating future encounters, discoveries, and expectations. This ‘holy city standing as if in the air or in the sky,’ where every site ‘is marked either by sacredness or history,’ served as a grand portal into the intertwined realms of the sacred and of the ancient native past.9 Throughout the nineteenth century, the Kyivan legacy was of strategic importance within the imperial system of values, yet the integration of this legacy into the Russian framework was not seamless, meeting competition from Polish and

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4.2 Golden Gates of Kyiv (early-20th-century postcard)

Ukrainian alternative cultural and ideological agendas. For example, in order to eliminate ungainly seams between Kyiv and Russia, the renowned Russian historian Mikhail Pogodin proposed a demographic hypothesis according to which the ancestors of Ukrainians living in the Kyiv region had migrated from the Carpathian mountains after the ‘original’ autochthonous population left the territory, devastated in the thirteenth century by the Mongols, and settled in the north-eastern Rus lands near Moscow.10 At the same time, Kyiv was also central to Ukrainian tradition. The Topographic Description of Kharkiv Region (1785), for example, points out the filial devotion of Southern Russians (Ukrainians) to Kyiv, the ‘mother of their ancient settlements’ and site of their pilgrimages: ‘When they gather for worship in Kyiv coming from the East, Volga and Don, from the West, Galicia and Lodomeria, and from places around Kyiv, they look upon one another not like foreigners (inoiazychnye), but compatriots (odnorodtsy),’ even though they are separated by varieties of language, customs, and administration, and even by differences in faith (that is, Orthodox and Greek Catholic).11 In the Polish historic tradition, the vision of the great Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was contingent on Kyiv as gate to its eastern frontier and anchor of the Polish ideology of Sarmatianism. Kyiv’s Golden Gates, a key component in the vocabulary of elements that constitute the text of Kyiv in Russian and Ukrainian visions of the city, were integrated into the narratives of Kyiv as a site of ancient glory and picturesque ruins (Slavic Pompeii).12 In the Polish historic imagination, the Golden Gates represent first of all the precedent of Polish supremacy over the capital city of Rus, as put forth by Michał Czajkowski: ‘In the Great city of Kyiv ... the sword of Bolesław the Brave dented a scar in the Golden Gates – to be remembered in later ages ...’13 In the Jewish literary imagination and geography, Kyiv is commonly termed Yehupetz, a large city, a generic and desired place of activity and prosperity wrought at the same time with driven materialism and danger of persecution and violence. Note

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4.3 St Volodymyr Cathedral

Sholom Aleichem’s passionate call: ‘So what are we? ... Where is our “Jerusalem thy city” that we repeat day after day? ... We remember Jerusalem every day, but what we have in mind is Yehupetz.’14 As we see, each of these examples presents a claim along the lines of Gogol’s letter: it is ‘ours, not theirs.’ These claims and distinctions reflect the often competitive if not confrontational character of the text of Kyiv, of its very syntax. Thus, unlike the more monolithic texts of St Petersburg or Moscow, the unique essence of the Kyivan text, heterogeneous par excellence, lies precisely in the process of appropriation and beholding of the city – with its overlapping, contrasting, ruptured, readjusted discursive practices – through which the city of Kyiv acquires its textuality. The narrative of appropriation imbedded in the text of Kyiv is further complicated by the protracted history of the city. If Kyiv was one of the great cities, it was also a place whose ‘golden age’ could be found in the very remote past and whose grandeur could be perceived through the text of its literary and architectural monuments, its centuries-old institutions, its ruins and landscapes. Yet as the text of Kyiv evolved, filtering through a number of cultural projects and avenues (Ukrainian, Russian, etc.), indeed as the city itself evolved, it ‘caught up’ with its symbolic and textual significance: the legacy of the Kyivan past came into sharp relief with issues of modernity as Kyiv went from a backwater provincial centre of about 20,000 inhabitants in the first decades of the nineteenth century to one of the larger centres in the Russian empire, with a quarter-million inhabitants in 1897

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and half a million by 1916.15 The city itself – its rapidly forming urban life, its cultural and ideological atmosphere – became central to both public discourse and cultural imagination, alongside issues of transportation and education, sewage and public entertainment, private wealth and political organizations. Late imperial Kyiv was a peculiar combination of timeless holiness and antiquity and modern urban civilization, of ideological backwardness and radicalism. The crumbling of the empire, social and ethnic tensions, intensification of revolutionary and national agendas, and experiences of revolution and war went hand in hand with a cultural and literary flowering in a city that had become a major hub of modern cultural life.16 It is in the first decades of the twentieth century that we can speak of the text of Kyiv acquiring a qualitatively and quantitatively new level of textuality through the works of Aleksandr Kuprin and Volodymyr Vynnychenko, Sholom Aleichem and Pavlo Tychyna, Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz and Valerian Pidmohylny, where the issues of tradition and modernity, of the city’s identity and place in the world, were articulated anew. In the shaping of the text of Kyiv, three novels have played particularly important roles: The Pit (Yama) by Aleksandr Kuprin targets the moral decay epitomized in prostitution in the urban milieu at the turn of the century; The White Guard by Mikhail Bulgakov captures the tragic world of revolutionary Kyiv in 1918; while The City by Valerian Pidmohylny traces the progress of a young Ukrainian who comes from the village to conquer the city in the mid-1920s. Although the combined chronological span of these novels only covers about thirty years, these texts represent drastically different ages: the late imperial period, the civil war, and the early Soviet era. While the depiction of Kyiv differs dramatically in all three novels, they share an important feature: none of the novels names Kyiv directly. Instead, the reader is offered such designations as ‘a southern city’ and ‘the city.’ Yet the topography of Kyiv is recognizable in each novel; the role of Kyiv’s specific urban space is crucial in all of them; and most important, each attempts to address directly and rewrite the text of Kyiv. A Southern City: Aleksandr Kuprin In Aleksandr Kuprin’s The Pit (Yama), published in several instalments between 1908 and 1915, the author uses the medium of the novel to explore the phenomenon of prostitution and its social and moral origins.17 At the centre of the work is a depiction of everyday life in a mid-level brothel in the red light district ‘Yamskaia Street’ on the outskirts of Kyiv.18 Kuprin denied that his novel was documentary in nature, stating, ‘Yama the pit is Odessa, and Petersburg, and Kyiv.’19 Repeatedly in the novel, the author refers to the setting as ‘a large southern city,’ never naming it directly. At the same time, he does not conceal attributes and topography of Kyiv.20 Kuprin thus focuses our attention on the universal moral ulcer of prostitution while amplifying the impact by setting the novel in the holy city of the Russian Jerusalem, as Kyiv was widely known: the sacred vertical and well-known image of the lofty golden-domed hills are replaced with a pit, the abyss of sin, social oppression, and moral destitution where the action of the novel is concentrated.

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4.4 Aleksandr Kuprin

At the thematic core of the novel we see the mirroring of the ‘normal world’ and its urban underbelly. The façade of propriety and normalcy that obscures immorality, oppression, and adultery is contrasted with the urban underworld where underneath a surface of sin, corruption, and ruthless sexual exploitation the writer discovers suffering and even at times morally aware souls.21 The interaction between the author’s broad didactic purpose (achieved through shock therapy and literary sensationalism) and the specificity of place (conveyed in a journalistic style) results in a certain dissonance between the general narrative and thematic structures of the novel, on the one hand, and, on the other, Kyiv as a text with an extensive and specific cultural legacy and its own repertory of themes and narrative models. Kuprin’s story of prostitution, with all the intended seriousness of a modern moral diatribe, begins to mimic the conventional text of Kyiv, bringing about its subversion, if not unintentional parody. In order to give his work the air of well-researched truth, Kuprin precedes his narrative proper with a ‘documentary’ description of the Pit’s history: A long, long time ago, long before the railroads, the stagecoach-drivers used to live, from generation to generation, at the very farthest confines of a large southern city. That entire area was called Yamskaia Sloboda ... or Yama – The Pit. Over time, when hauling by steam killed off transportation by horses, the mettlesome tribe [plemia] of the stage-drivers little by little lost its boisterous ways and its brave customs, went over into other occupations, fell apart and scattered ... There began to spring up brothels, permitted by the authorities, regulated by official supervision and subject to strict rules. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, both streets of Yama – Great Yamskaia and Little Yamskaia – proved to be entirely occupied, on one side of the street as well as the other, exclusively with houses of ill-fame.22

Integrating oral prehistory (‘A long, long time ago ...’) and a ‘scientific’ explanation of the origins of the pit, the narrator takes on the curious role of a modern chronicler of society, who, as if evoking the epic scope of the Primary Chronicle (‘this is the tale of bygone years; from whence came the Russian land ...’) applies that serious narrative model, which described the origins of a civilization and catalogues

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Slavic tribes, to portray the origins of urban transgression (from whence came the Pit). Thus, in The Pit, the micro-history of the seedy street mimics the grand narrative of the macro-history of a cultural universe – indeed presenting itself as a story of the origins of modernity in the form of deviation from normal life and combining the biblical notion of original sin with the sin of modern urban civilization. In his earnest attempt to convey the scope of this urban transgression, Kuprin further relies on the subversion of the sacred models imbedded in the text of Kyiv. As presented, the life and functioning of the Pit are a demonic inversion of the model of the Kyivan pilgrimage:23 When it has barely grown dark out of doors, hanging red lanterns are lit before every house, above the tented, carved street doors. It is just like a holiday out on the street – like Easter ... Until the very morning hundreds and thousands of men ascend and descend these staircases. Everybody frequents the place: half-shattered ancients, seeking artificial excitements, and boys – military cadets and high-school lads – almost children; bearded paterfamiliases; honorable pillars of society, in golden spectacles; enamored bridegrooms, and honorable professors with renowned names; and thieves, and murderers, and liberal lawyers ... clear-eyed, handsome fellows and monsters maliciously distorted by nature, deaf-mutes, blind men, men without noses, with flabby, pendulous bodies, bald, trembling, covered with parasites – pot-bellied, hemorrhoidal apes. They come freely and simply, as to a restaurant; they sit, smoke, drink, convulsively pretend to be merry ... So passes the entire night. Towards daybreak, Yama grows quiet, and the bright morning finds it depopulated – plunged into sleep.24

We see a curious synthesis of sacred and demonic texts of Kyiv (developed in nineteenth-century travelogues and Russian romantic literature).25 This description of the Pit is produced as a grotesque subversion of the very foundations of life: night and day, centre and periphery, top and bottom, heaven and hell, Jerusalem and Babylon, salvation and decay, liturgy (note the reference to Easter) and orgy are inverted in the ‘cosmic’ depiction of the street as an apocalyptic kingdom of the Antichrist. The narrator’s journalistic style gives way to the preachy posturing of a modern prophet castigating the world. Since the reader knows the action takes place in Kyiv, the anti-sacredness of this description conjures the notion of Apocalypse enacted within the text of Kyiv-Jerusalem: a city distinguished by divine grace, adorned with miracles and saints, furnished with holy temples and relics. In so many words, we have here an image of an anti-Kyiv and anti-pilgrimage, a descent into hell, set within the city limits of the Russian Jerusalem! The interaction (and interference) between Kuprin’s didactic aims and the models of the Kyivan text leads to a strange combination of realism and heavy-handed abstraction, documentary effect and rampant literary cliché, moralism and sensationalism, and tragedy and melodrama that seriously affect the narrative and thematic fabric of the work.26 The main locus of narrative action is the middle-brow establishment of Anna Markovna Shoibes, depicted as a sisterhood of fallen women surrounded by the walls of a bordello. Kuprin describes a gallery of types, that is, individuals exemplifying certain qualities of character, social, and ethnic background, each with a history of her fall. Yet because the narrator strives to endow

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4.5 An encounter (early20th-century postcard)

the inhabitants of this microcosm with moral dignity and humanity by detailing their suffering, this gallery of prostitutes unintentionally resonates with another Kyivan genre of text, that of the collection of lives of monks, the Paterikon. The Paterikon, a collection of edifying tales of monks formed in the 1200s, remained popular for centuries. Documenting human struggle with sin wrought with suffering and a thirst for God, the Paterikon buttressed the role of Kyiv as a holy city under the special graces of divine providence, in which Kyiv’s Lavra (Monastery of the Caves), the site of an unending chain of miracles, remained a paramount attraction of Orthodox pilgrimage.27 The Pit, in the subverted world of anti-Kyiv, is an anti-Paterikon. Whereas the Paterikon details the lives of monks at the Monastery of the Caves who laboured, mortified their flesh, and endured suffering for the sake of salvation, The Pit describes the lives of women initiated into an enclosed internally regulated sisterhood (which involved taking a new name, as in a monastery) whose ‘self-sacrificing’ and exhausting labours provided worldly pleasures to outsiders, dooming the women to moral and physical decline, as well as disease. The heavy reliance on description of types rather than plot gives The Pit a peculiarly formulaic thematic structure.28 Kuprin concludes his story with an apocalyptic termination device, a violent brawl that escalates into the destruction of the entire street and a consequent ban of brothels by city authorities.29 In wrapping up his eschatological treatment of Kyiv as the subverted anti-Jerusalem while suggesting its thematic repertory, spatial vertical, and narrative mould, Kuprin provides ‘sociological’ (and teleological) descriptions of the main causes of this destruction: Kyiv’s rapid industrial growth and urban boom as heralded by a massive agricultural exhibit, ‘the building in the vicinity of three new sugar refineries ... the commencement of work in the laying of an electric trolley and of a sewer system; the building of a new road to the distance of 750 versts; but mainly, the fever of building which seized the whole town.’30 The second major cause given for the end of the Pit is the celebration of ‘the millennial anniversary of its famous abbey [a reference to the Monastery of the Caves], the most honoured and the richest among all the monasteries of the Russian Empire. From all the ends of Russia,

4.6 Pecherska Lavra, Dormition Cathedral (11th century) (from Pateryk Pechers’kyi, 1702)

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4.7 Mykhailivsky sobor (St Michael’s Cathedral complex). Unknown artist; first published in 1900 (Petersburg: Marx), with a text by D.I. Yavornytsky

out of Siberia, from the shores of the Arctic Ocean, from the extreme south – the Black and Caspian Seas – countless pilgrims had gathered for the worship of local sanctities.’31 In Kuprin’s treatment, the demands placed on the services of the Pit by the overflow of visitors lead to the collapse of its infrastructure. Thus, in this designed coincidence the upheaval is brought about by the force of urban modernity colliding with holy antiquity within the limits of the same city. In sum, in The Pit Kuprin fashions a negative reflection of the Kyivan sacred text and topographic vertical, turning it into Kyiv-Babylon. The low, transient, and worldly Kyiv of the seedy streets and brothels is in sharp contrast with the traditional and expected image of the elevated, ancient, immutable, and sacred Kyiv of churches and monasteries. Yet the interaction between these two aspects of Kyiv in Kuprin’s novel, designed as an earnest, in-depth, and truthful exploration of the ulcers of modernity, infuses the work with the thematic and narrative elements of the text of Kyiv, thereby undercutting Kuprin’s design for the city in The Pit to be ‘not only Kyiv.’ This returns us to our discussion of the meaning and purpose of Kuprin’s geographic-topographic designation of Kyiv as ‘a southern city.’ What does it imply? First of all, it connects with Kuprin’s task of creating a generic rather than specific imagined space that would exemplify the moral crisis within the Russian Empire. Second, it provides a degree of geographic and cultural specificity – the imperial

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South, with its repertory of literary clichés and cultural stereotypes that were familiar throughout the empire at the turn of the century: the south of the empire as a resort-like exoticized yet domestic place blessed with mild climate, rich soil, and abundant produce, and endowed with a ‘dancing and singing tribe’ (Pushkin) – that is, Ukraine as ingrained in the Russian imperial imagination from the times of Gogol. At the same time, the text of the imperial South contains an alternative or rather complementary repertory of thematic attributes – a land tinged with languor, leisure, and lust; a seemingly domesticated terrain that upon closer inspection reveals a demonic, dangerous, and alien side (again, as portrayed in Gogol’s stories). If the formula ‘a large southern city’ provides a gesture of symbolic ‘dissolution’ of Kyiv as a specific city into the universal space of the Russian Empire, the attribute ‘south’ in this same formula implies another substitution: the dissolution of Ukraine into the space of the empire as one of its generic-geographic variants expressed by occasional use of the adjectives ‘southern’ and, rarely, ‘Little Russian.’ Moreover, the adjective ‘southern’ implies the imperial administrative designation of Ukraine as a ‘southwestern land’ (Iugo-zapadnyi krai), thus emphasizing the territory as Russian32 over ethnic, linguistic, or cultural specificity. In the late imperial context, Kuprin could have used the term Little Russia (Malorossia) to indicate regional specificity of Ukrainian territory. The designation Ukraine (Ukraina) would have borne suspect separatist connotations (a ‘Ukrainian issue’ in the language of imperial policies).33 In sum, the designation ‘southern city’ purposely divorces Kyiv from any sense of its having a specific local historic and cultural tradition, emphasizing its Russianness. Earlier in this section I demonstrated how Kyiv, shifted to the periphery in the symbolic urban topography of The Pit, becomes nonetheless manifested through the patterns of its own text, even invading the novel with its own meanings. Something similar occurs with the notion of Ukraine, found at the periphery of the fictional setting, through occasional figments of ‘southernness’ (climate, rich land, native songs) in Kuprin’s topography of Russia. While the imperial formula ‘southern city’ and the lightly veiled topography of Kyiv preclude the question ‘Whose city is it?’ and while the drama of identity is enacted mainly on the plane of morality, the issues of whose city it is lurk in the cultural and national dimensions. I would argue that The Pit is not only a catalogue of cultural representations of prostitution – it also contains a repertory of cultural representations of Kyiv (the text of Kyiv) and, by its ‘southern’ extension, of Ukraine. Mirroring Kuprin’s subversion of the notion of Kyiv-Jerusalem, the novel plays with the conventional attractions of the languorous South and Kyiv as the Russian Empire’s ‘southern pearl’ (iuzhnaia zhemchuzhina, another formula often applied to the city). In a conversation between the disguised pimp-trafficker Gorizont and an officer travelling to Moscow through Kyiv, the former offers the following description of the city: Remarkable city. Entirely European city. If you only knew what kind of streets it has, electricity, street cars, theatres … And if you only knew what kind of cafés-chantants! You’d lick your fingers … I urge you – go to Château de Fleurs, Tivoli, also go to the island. It’s something special. And women, what women! … It is truly remarkable –

Three Novels, Three Cities 109 neither in Paris nor in London … will you find such sophisticated kinds of pleasures as in this city.34

Explaining the reasons behind such fortunate circumstances, the pimp points to ‘the mingling of Polish, Little Russian, and Jewish blood (schastlivoe sochetanie krovei: polskaia, malorusskaia i evreiskaia).35 Each of these components suggests a benefit that together constitute an unbeatable combination: European sophistication, elegance, and nobility are represented by the Polish blood; the Ukrainian element suggests autochthonous health and peasant docility; while the Semitic component promises stereotypical oriental passion and languor. This formula of peerless pleasure, however, suggests yet another aspect of the imperial southern frontier city, connoting danger as well as pleasure. The fictional world of The Pit, upon closer inspection, is saturated with frontiers and boundaries, not only social and moral, but also ethnic and cultural – transgressed, mingling, reshaped, contrasted, overlapping. For example, the most expensive establishment in the Pit, ‘Treppel,’ is housed in a Ropet-like building ( fin-de-siècle national Russian stylization, with whimsical carving and folk elements) staffed with Baltic German prostitutes. Among the median, two-ruble establishments, the very name of the ‘Old-Kyivan’ (Starokievskii) can be read as a compact formula of subversion of Kyiv-Jerusalem: ‘Old Kyiv’ would normally refer to a section of the town that was the core of the Rus princely capital in the tenth to twelfth centuries, with its many relics of antiquity and its central attractions for tourists and pilgrims (the St Sophia and St Michael Cathedrals, Golden Gates, etc.). The brothel where the action takes place isn’t given a name. Owned by a Jewish proprietress, Anna Markovna Shoibes, who is assisted by a German, Emma Eduardovna Tizner, the brothel is presented as a remarkable assembly of individuals of various backgrounds: Liubka, formerly Irina Voshchenkova, comes from a village (that is, she is Ukrainian); Zoya features a ‘kind face of a Russian prostitute’; Sonka Rul is Jewish. The doorman Semen is local and ‘an animal, almost certainly a killer,’ who extorts money from the prostitutes and beats them. He is also fervently dedicated to the details of Orthodox liturgy and speaks a Ukrainian-Russian mixture, or surzhyk (we know he is a local Ukrainian since an ethnic Russian would have spoken to university students in Russian).36 This network of entangled and contrasted backgrounds allows Kuprin to ponder the phenomenon of prostitution in the Russian empire: The fate of a Russian prostitute – oh, what a tragic, pitiful, bloody, ridiculous, and stupid path! In it, everything conflates: Russian god, Russian expansiveness and recklessness, Russian desperation in the state of fall, Russian uncivilized ways, Russian naiveté, Russian patience, and Russian shamelessness.37

This list captures the underlying theme of the novel and its national essence, which sheds light on the identity of the large southern city. Behind the Ropet-style façade of Kyiv-Jerusalem, we see the city as a moral and ethnic frontier zone, a locus of Russian identity in extremis. The fallen Slavic souls are revealed and contrasted with the ‘other.’ In the entangled world of The Pit, Kuprin defines this ‘other’ through the opposition not only of social class, but also of ethnicity. In this context,

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4.8 ‘The eyes of a Kyiv girl are looking at you’ (early-20th-century postcard)

the opposition acquires xenophobic overtones: The Pit catalogues not only literary clichés about prostitution but ethnic stereotypes as well. Two groups serve most prominently as ‘others,’ as foils to the suffering of Russian prostitutes and the Russian soul: Jewish and German. The former in Kuprin represents a cynical, predatory, and corrupt mercantile spirit (the trafficker Gorizont, the proprietress Shoibes). The German element is a foil to the suffering Russian soul as the embodiment of self-perceived superiority, calculation, brutality, and soullessness itself. Emma Tizner, who succeeds Anna Shoibes as the owner of the brothel, combines cold calculation, cruelty, and superiority with the mortal sin of lesbianism (indicating sterility and utmost deviation). The Baltic German prostitutes from ‘Treppel’ appear to the opera singer Rovinskaia, who visits the Pit, as the most disgusting amoral creatures, mechanical and cow-like (that is, devoid of any moral sense and human dignity), since they are fully satisfied with their position, find it comfortable, and use it to accumulate wealth. The Ukrainian element in Kuprin’s frontier zone is not distinguished from the Russian – it is part of the general picture of the Russian state of affairs and the Russian soul in extremis. However, one episode provides an instance of a direct encounter with Ukraine, and it is revealing indeed. Likhonin, a student, goes to a marketplace, where he runs into a Little Russian woman, Baba Gripa (that is, Horpyna), with whom he has had an occasional relationship, and he has some fun in the company of the salesfolk: A fat woman about forty-five years old, still attractive, with red fleshy lips, drunken eyes, happily shining under the high arches of her brows … All art and wonder of her dance consisted of her lowering her head and throwing her arms to the sides so her huge breasts shook under her red blouse.38

In the embraces of Baba Gripa, Likhonin not only forgets his troubles, but after some beer he gave three ridiculous speeches: on the independence of Ukraine; about the virtues of Little Russian sausage as connected with the beauty and familial virtues of the Little Russian women; and, finally, for some reason – about trade and industry in the South of Russia.39

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As experienced by Likhonin and narrated by Kuprin, we find, in the peripheral and transitory space of the marketplace, a grotesque intermingling of music and dance, eros, food, violence, and politics. Ukraine is characterized as a corporal, consuming, demonic (witch-like) presence. The brief sequence of Likhonin’s speeches reveals a rhetorical and topical structure punctuated by the narrator’s use of political and geographic designations. The first and most loaded topic, the independence of Ukraine, is purposely rendered in Kuprin’s Russian text as a hybrid of Ukrainian and Russian words – o samostiinosti Ukrainy – suggesting the bowdlerized, illegitimate, grotesque character of the very notion of such separatism. This topic, in Likhonin’s performance, is instantly overridden and diverted into a discourse on regional cultural variants within the Russian Empire (Little Russia). The discourse on Ukraine’s difference is minimized and undermined in Likhonin’s second speech by its location in the realm of sausage and women – that is, food, gluttony, and the low corporeal and comical axis of reality. The reference to the ‘beauty and familial virtues’ of Ukrainian women is ironically subverted by the grotesque appearance and lustful behaviour of Baba Gripa. Moreover, the combination of Little Russian sausage and women is aimed at the target of independence through its loaded gender symbolism: this speech epitomizes Ukraine’s femininity (that is, emasculation, dependence on, and coupling with Russian men such as Likhonin), in which the separatist ‘masculine’ drive and agency is substituted by sausage, made by the homemaking Little Russian women for general consumption. Finally, the third topic, trade in the South of Russia, cancels out the previous deviations altogether as absurdity, purging even the lowly sausage of its Ukrainian separatist connotations and relocating it into its proper ‘logical’ and ‘serious’ context: that of Russian industry and trade. In this episode, we see in action the imperial mechanisms of identitymaking that aim at bracketing the subversive notion of Ukraine from the southern frontiers of the Russian Empire. Kuprin’s ‘large southern city,’ the lightly veiled Kyiv, reveals an imperial terrain embroiled in corruption, oppression, and exploitation. As an entangled network of identities and boundaries, it represents a frontier zone wrought with tension and violence. Kuprin purposefully uses topography to define this space as a generic geographic corner of Russia, thus detaching the notion of Ukraine and precluding a connection between Kyiv and Ukraine. Yet in the frontier zone of Kuprin’s novel, the peripheral urban topography of Kyiv nonetheless meets Ukraine at the periphery of imperial topological geography, and the place of their meeting teems with danger. The Russian City: Mikhail Bulgakov Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The White Guard (written in 1922–4), from the time of its publication in the 1920s and especially since its re-emergence (albeit in a censored version) in 1966, has acquired cult status in Kyiv and beyond. The interest in his life and work has generated a kind of ‘Bulgakov and Turbin industry,’ documenting every Kyivan step of the writer and his likeable Turbins (a middle-class and decent family who happen to live in a catastrophic time and space), leading to the formation of clubs and, eventually, to the creation of the apartment-museum at 13 Andrivsky Street – the site of the events of The White Guard. This instance of a grassroots (if not dissident) literary public sphere was at least an alternative to

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4.9 Mikhail Bulgakov

official Soviet literature: a writer outside the Soviet canon, Bulgakov served as a link to the ‘forbidden’ literature of the twentieth century, and his White Guard provided a conduit to a more complex, unorthodox and non-Soviet version of Kyiv’s history in the revolutionary years. The Bulgakov industry around The White Guard, while admirable for the dedication, curiosity, and idealism of its supporters, also abounds in epistemological trappings: for some, the programmatically shaped aesthetic reality of the novel replaced material reality and was to be read as history and truth.40 Scholarship on The White Guard encompasses biographical and cultural commentary and treatments of the novel as a stage in the stylistic evolution of Bulgakov, a vehicle for the development of his motivic and symbolic repertory.41 By fusing historic and private worlds in his novel, by animating the conventional text of Kyiv with his highly personal experience, Bulgakov created a powerful model of representing and perceiving the city’s identity. For my analysis of The White Guard, I will begin with an examination of his essay-feuilleton ‘Kiev, the City’ (Kiev-gorod), which belongs, with The White Guard, to Bulgakov’s works of the 1920s wherein he explored various urban themes and spaces. Published in 1923, ‘Kiev, the City’ is emblematic of Bulgakov’s attitude to early Soviet Ukrainian Kyiv. Even though it is set within the parameters of a very

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different (comical and descriptive) genre, the highly charged thematization of the city is close to that in The White Guard. Interestingly, while parallels are often drawn between ‘Kiev, the City’ and the novel, there has been to date no satisfactory reading of the feuilleton as a whole in Bulgakov scholarship. Bulgakov’s feuilleton is structured as a mock guidebook of Kyiv, with historic, topographic, ethnographic, and cultural commentary (like a much shorter descendant of Kiev Then and Now, a lavishly illustrated book published in 1888 on the nine hundredth anniversary of the Baptism of Rus). As is common to the guidebook genre, the text opens with a brief historic overview and proceeds to a description of contemporary life, tourist attractions, local mores, and the religious and cultural atmosphere of the place. At the beginning of his historic detour, Bulgakov lists the prettiest formulae and clichés applied to Kyiv, namely, the popular vocabulary of the text of Kyiv: the beautiful city, the mother of the Russian cities, the Dnipro, the green hills, the monument to Prince Volodymyr, Khreshchatyk.42 Yet, as the tour continues, the city appears stripped of its former conventional yet lofty role as the Russian Jerusalem. This loss is described as the result of historic cataclysms: ‘As if a Wellsian atomic bomb exploded above the graves of Askold and Dir, and for 1000 days, it thundered, bubbled, and blazed not only over Kyiv, but in its environs.’43 The chronological axis of this cataclysm is set, on the one hand, by a familiar landmark of Kyiv’s antiquity (Askold and Dir) and, for the upper limit, by reference to universal modernity, even futurity (e.g., the atomic bomb). However, the cosmic catastrophe of Kyiv is introduced by a most prosaic, comical agency: the deputy Bublikov (Pretzel), the ‘famous accountant’ Petliura, and scores of conquerors, extravagantly dressed by the narrator, such as Germans wearing washbasins on their heads and Polish lords in furs – causing eighteen coups d’état in Kyiv before finally being driven away by Bolsheviks. This tragedy cum travesty compels Bulgakov to predict the creation of a new Tolstoyan epic about the ‘grand battles of Kyiv’ (a tongue-in-cheek reference to his own work in progress tackling the period of war and peace ‘of the year of Our Lord 1918,’ as described at the beginning of The White Guard). Bulgakov continues his survey of Kyiv, summarizing the contemporary situation with the clinical Latin formulation status praesens.44 The city’s diagnosis is not entirely desperate, but it is in shabby condition: the place is full of fragments, gaps, and ruins. Under the rubric of tourist attractions in the new Kyiv, Bulgakov concentrates on the ridiculousness of Ukrainian-language signage, filled with inconsistencies and hybrids, as the only curiosity worthy of a traveller’s attention.45 He derides the anachronistic mores of Kyivites compared to those of Moscow dwellers, and having blasted Kyiv’s three Orthodox denominations situation, Bulgakov completes his tour with a section entitled ‘Sciences, Literature, and Art,’ summed up by the opening one-word assessment: ‘None’ (Net).46 The thrust of this section mirrors the section on landmarks (despite a paragraph targeting a ridiculously amateurish black bust of Karl Marx): the new Kyiv, stripped of Russian identity and flooded with Ukrainian signs (that is, Ukrainian language), cannot claim other landmarks (that is, cannot have history, cannot produce meaning) and cannot have culture. Considering contemporary Ukrainian Kyiv as void of cultural significance, Bulgakov in effect rejects a city turned alien on him. He concludes with an

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incantation (more serious in tone than the rest of his feuilleton) that advocates the return of Kyiv’s former identity and the erasure of its Ukrainian pseudomorphosis: ‘Above the river loved by Gogol, the majestic city will rise again. And the memory of Petliura – let it vanish.’47 The cultural and ideological agenda expressed in Bulgakov’s feuilleton runs through The White Guard as well, developed by different means of characterization, handling of space and time, and creative engagement with the text of Kyiv. Andrzej Drawicz aptly defined The White Guard not as a historical novel, but as ‘a novel about history unfolding in Kyiv in a new form, as experienced by a certain milieu for which this unfolding was a matter of life and death.’48 Thus the city of the novel serves as a playground where its common, shared, familiar cultural text, its historic and cultural legacy and identity, are all intertwined with Bulgakov’s family history.49 Underpinning the emotional tenor of the novel are the irreversibility of the loss of life, the shaking of the very foundations of being. These themes reverberate through the personal, historic, and cultural layers of a text in search of closure. In the novel, the unfolding of history in Kyiv is structured through a series of interrelated and dynamic oppositions of a spatio-temporal and cultural character. The action takes place within the realms of micro- and macrocosm, the Home and the World, the domains of family history and the grandiose eschatological scheme of the revolution, and within transitory and eternal temporal dimensions.50 Myron Petrovsky, in his erudite and insightful study of Kyiv as the spatial and cultural model of Bulgakov’s entire oeuvre, addressed the attributes of Rome and Jerusalem in the representation of Kyiv in The White Guard and the overlapping of these models.51 In this article, I shall concentrate only upon the dialectical relationship between the models of Jerusalem and Rome for defining the identity and destiny of Kyiv in Bulgakov’s novel.52 The most illuminating element for understanding the position of Kyiv in Bulgakov’s novel is its designation as The City (the capitalized Gorod). The City first of all implies, as Petrovsky points out, the notion of Rome: Urbs, Eternal City, World City, and a City equal to the world.53 The conceptual, structural, and philosophical connections between Kyiv and Rome are further buttressed by the similarity of their natural settings: each city is spread over hills above a river. Unlike Kuprin’s generic Southern city, Bulgakov’s city is endowed with extraordinary importance as a place ‘where supra-historic and mysterial meanings are revealed.’54 At the same time, Bulgakov’s designation of Kyiv is intended to challenge and expand the conventional role of Kyiv as Jerusalem. This conflation of Rome and Jerusalem, Petrovsky suggests, removes the traditional opposition between Moscow (third Rome, metropolis) and Kyiv (Jerusalem, holy city, provincial by nature), allowing for the transformation of Kyiv into the centre of his fictional universe.55 Petrovsky examined a repertory of elements that connect Kyiv to Jerusalem, ranging from traditional holy sites such as the Monastery of the Caves to lateimperial artefacts such as the monumental panorama-exhibit ‘The Golgotha.’ According to Petrovsky, The City of The White Guard, as strange as it may be, includes both Rome and Jerusalem. Events taking place in the novel are double-edged and bi-partite … All that is marked

Three Novels, Three Cities 115 by the features of the operetta, of imperial and dubious genre, is related to Kyiv as Rome. All that is marked by Apocalypse and eschatology belongs to Kyiv as Jerusalem.56

This statement, however, provokes questions. The holy city of Jerusalem does not necessarily hold the patent on eschatology. As Petrovsky later notes, ‘All eternal cities fall in Bulgakov,’ referring to the nomenclature of Kyiv, Rome, Jerusalem, Moscow, and Constantinople.57 The apocalyptic revelation of heavenly Jerusalem is preceded by the demise of the worldly and sinful Babylon, and it is the effect of the ‘flickering’ and conflation of the opposite worlds of Rome and Jerusalem simultaneously manifested in Kyiv that creates the Babylon of the city plunged into the turmoil of revolution and civil war. The White Guard, as a text of Kyiv in extremis, accomplishes something similar to the thirteenth century’s ‘Encomium to Prince Volodimer,’ a programmatic Kyivan text that legitimized and glorified the legacy of the capital city in the face of its imminent decline by placing it among the great imperial and holy cities: Jerusalem, Rome, and Constantinople.58 In The White Guard, all three allusions overlap in Kyiv: the holy place of Jerusalem, the imperial splendour of Rome (and its destruction by barbarians), and the God-protected second Rome of Constantinople (synthesis of Rome and Jerusalem), whose destiny offers a vivid lesson in eschatology: a shrinking, crumbling, yet still glorious world surrounded by a swelling wave of infidels, and the last emperor falling on the walls of the city, defending it, in desperate need of a miracle … How do we reconcile these notions, and where do we locate them in the fictional world of The White Guard? All three allusions fit the novel within their own, albeit asymmetrical, parameters. The opposition between Rome and Jerusalem is suggested at the very beginning of the novel in the image of a sky dominated by two stars: ‘quivering red Mars’ (a symbol of war and conquest as well as of Rome) and pastoral Venus (suggesting the Holy Land, Bethlehem, Jerusalem). The dialectic of Rome and Jerusalem runs through the entire space of the novel. The city of Kyiv as the centre of the Turbins’ universe/macrocosm on the verge of collapse, as a landscape and public urban space, as a sea of worldly injustice (Hetman’s–Kaiser’s– ‘Caesar’s’?), and the last refuge from the imminent threat engulfing the world, is linked to Rome. The holiness of the city (Jerusalem), the divine grace that rests ‘upon these hills’ – shrinks from the public urban space and retreats to the private intimate sphere – namely, the microcosm of the Turbins’ home and of the heart of one who is true and just. In this context, the home of the Turbins becomes a refuge against outside threat, the last resort of order and normalcy, the locus where prayers, visions (Aleksei Turbin’s dreams), and miracles (Elena’s vision of the Virgin Mary) occur. The link between Kyiv and Constantinople is suggested through the eschatology of the violent fall of the city, with the twist that while the last emperor (Nicholas II) had already fallen, the pretender Hetman has no intention of falling on the walls of the city, choosing escape instead. In the end, the allusions, suggestions, and clues conflate to make the catastrophic text of Kyiv self-referential: that is, evoking the violent fall of Kyiv to the Mongol hordes of Batu Khan in 1240. The saturation of omens results in another important allusion: the apocalyptic presence

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of Babylon in the very midst of Kyiv, suggested through both physical attributes and symbolic signs such as the terraced (hanging) orchards on the hills, the apparition of Petliura under the number 666, and, most significantly, the representation of the parade of Petliura’s army in St Sophia Square as the march of the Antichrist. Conflation, aberration, and disorientation, the flickering of the tragic and the comical in the space of Kyiv – these qualities suggest the imminent Apocalyptic end of time in the fictional universe of The White Guard. This catastrophe of Kyiv, where Jerusalem and Rome became unnaturally conflated and where antiquity and holiness became infused with modernity, is rendered palpable by the narrator’s lyrical descriptions of the city: All the City’s energy, stored up during a summer of sunshine and thunderstorms, was expended in light. From four o’clock in the afternoon light would start to burn in the windows of the houses, in the round electric globes, in the gas street-lamps, in the illuminated house-numbers and in the vast windows of electric power-stations, turning people’s thoughts towards the terrifying prospect of man’s electric-powered future, those great windows through which could be glimpsed the machines whose desperate, ceaselessly revolving wheels shook the earth to its very core. All night long the City shone, glittered and danced with light until morning, when the lights went out and the City cloaked itself once more in smoke and mist. But the brightest light of all was the white cross held by the gigantic statue of St. Vladimir atop Vladimir Hill. It could be seen from far, far away and often in summer, in thick black mist, amid the osier-beds and tortuous meanders of the age-old river, the boatmen would see it and by its light would steer their way to the City and its wharves.59

The beauty of this urban panorama is complicated by the ambiguities of urban modernity: natural energy is dispersed in the form of the entropy of unnatural man-made light; and external shimmer disorients the flow of time and destabilizes the boundaries between day and night, nature and civilization, Jerusalem and Rome, good and evil. The illusory human mastery of power as electricity contributes to an ominous future indicated by the shaking of foundations and the loss of integrity as the city changes its guises and even gender, oscillating between misty cloaks and frivolous glitter. In the same way, spiritual energy, the inner invisible light, and traditions gathered through centuries of deeds and sacrifices are to be dispersed in the tragic entropy of revolution. Thus, the ancient space of Kyiv conflated with modernity turns deeply ambiguous despite seeming stability: St Volodymyr with his electrically lit cross cannot guarantee the peace and enlightenment he once brought to his realm, nearly a millennium before. Instead, the cross, turned to sword later in the novel, heralds war, and the lyrical panorama of Kyiv produced in the paragraph above in the mould of pilgrimage and revelation, is subjected to the rapacious eye of the conqueror. The attributes of Jerusalem and Rome thus conflate again, and in this tragic situation, the White Guard, epitomized by the Turbins’ circle, represents God’s army, a last desperate crusade against encroaching darkness. The paradox of modernity and antiquity that permeates the novel is carried further onto its meta-textual level. As Edythe Haber has remarked, while Bulgakov’s

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4.10 Monument to St Vladimir (Volodymyr)

novel, ‘with its combination of the features of the family novel and the national, historic saga,’ refers to the canon of Russian literature, the world of Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky (we must add Gogol here as well), ‘it would be a mistake to look upon the novel as merely a return to the realistic tradition of the nineteenth century. Rather, coexisting with its psychological realism, The White Guard adopts modernist techniques to reflect the growing chaos, the dissonance characteristic of both much modern art and modern life.’60 This interaction between the old and the new in the fabric of the novel mirrors, to quote Petrovsky, ‘the peculiar combination in Kyivan urban culture of secular and religious elements, of the petty and the existential, of vanity and eternity.’61 Moreover, the ambiguous interaction between old and new literary models is manifested on the level of the urban text itself. The Kyivan text of The White Guard is produced at the intersection of the traditional text of Kyiv, the Russian Jerusalem, and the high-modernist text of St Petersburg as epitomized by Andrei Bely.62 We can further concur with Petrovsky that the ‘myth of KyivJerusalem received in the novel its most dramatic artistic reflection,’63 adding that

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4.11 Velyka Volodymyrska Street

this myth/text is produced in highly preservationist (imperial, monarchist), even exclusionary, ideological and cultural terms. With its universal scope, emotional exaltation, and tragic messianism, the portrayal of the Apocalypse of Kyiv is perhaps the most powerful accomplishment of the novel. Important to our discussion is its palpable national dimension. The tragedy of the Turbins’ universe is hinted at in the opening of the novel, stylized as a chronicle, in the description of ‘columns of heat looming over the dark red Ukrainian fields.’64 As the appearance of omens escalates, Ukraine, conventionally beloved as a tame fairytale land of plenty, turns deadly and becomes the ‘terrifying land of Ukraine.’65 In contrast to Kuprin’s purposeful definition of the fictional space of The Pit as the generic Russian imperial South, Bulgakov operates within a different set of historic and spatio-ideological coordinates. Chronicling the fate of the Turbins, the writer directly addresses Ukraine (a toponym used throughout the novel). If, in Kuprin, Ukraine is mentioned once in the context of the absurdity of the idea of its independence in Likhonin’s topsy-turvy speeches, in Bulgakov, Ukraine determines the character of the revolutionary eschatology of Kyiv as the ‘bloody operetta,’ a tragicomedy of vast and devastating scope. Bulgakov’s city, thematized as Urbs, Eternal City, the World City, and a City equal to the world, represents the

4.12 Corner of Velyka Volodymyrska and Prorizna Streets, Kyiv (early-20th-century postcard; photo: D. Markov)

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continuity of Kyiv’s Russian history, culture, and life – vis-à-vis Ukraine as a spectre that engulfs Kyiv from outside the boundaries of the normal human world. Kuprin’s demonization of the notion of Ukraine is amplified in Bulgakov such that the imminent destructive reality of Ukraine is depicted in The White Guard as the unnatural antithesis to history, culture, and life itself. Bulgakov’s thematization of Ukraine adds up to a text of Ukraine set in sharp opposition to the traditional Russian text of Kyiv. The text of Ukraine is encapsulated by the term ‘bloody operetta.’66 The phrase alludes to the ridiculousness of Hetman Skoropadsky’s regime, and in the cultural and ideological topography of the novel suggests the place of Ukraine as a comical theatrical genre of kitschy and sentimental singing and dancing – yet this frivolousness is bloody in its consequences. At the core of Ukraine as articulated by Bulgakov lies the absurd claim to Kyiv, the issue of ‘whose city’? The first Ukrainian People’s Republic of 1917 is characterized as an incomprehensible and sudden emergence of strange people in military overcoats and wide trousers (sharovary), yet lacking boots, who declare that ‘they will stay here in the City, because it’s their City, a Ukrainian city, and not at all a Russian one.’67 The violence of this political metamorphosis is mirrored, in the words of the main protagonist Aleksei Turbin, by the ‘vile comedy of Ukrainization’: terrorizing the population ‘with this vile (gnusnyi) language that doesn’t even exist in the world.’68 Thus, for Turbin, the Ukrainian language represents a symbolic violence that threatens to completely overwrite the identity of Kyiv. Turbin is not at all infallible as a character in The White Guard, yet his position is nonetheless privileged and taken on by the narrator of the novel. The ‘bloody operetta’ of Ukraine is fully manifested in The White Guard through Petliura’s attack aimed at possessing Kyiv and seizing its identity: ‘in order to conquer Ukraine, he is coming to capture the City.’69 The phrase points to the centrality of Kyiv for the definition and fate of Ukraine. The grotesque, apocalyptic, and chthonic ‘mirage’ of Petliura’s Ukraine appears in Bulgakov’s Kyiv as the realization of an old legend of the demonic, pagan side of the city: ‘It is neither a grey cloud with the dragon’s belly spilling over the city, nor the turbid brown rivers flowing down the old streets – it is Petliura’s innumerable army.’70 Petliura’s power is conveyed as surreal, as an almost incidental combustion of peasant rage and anti-Russian striving of the petty provincial intelligentsia.71 The brutal and senseless violence brought into the City of the Turbins by Petliura is mirrored in the novel by the equally demonic subversion of its symbolic realm, the very system of values to which the Turbin circle adheres. The march of Petliurite military forces into the holy space of St Sophia is described through the eyes of the Turbins as the ultimate desecration of Kyiv’s historic and cultural legacy, a violent symbolic bacchanal aimed at the destruction of Kyiv as the Russian Jerusalem. These events so alienate the Turbins in the midst of their familiar world gone awry as to make their existence in the City untenable. The Ukrainian language is central to this destruction and alienation: in a pointed orchestration of an exchange of utterances at St Sophia Square, the narrator quotes slogans that Ukraine is no Russia and that the Moscow language and Russians must be expelled from Ukraine, and contrasts these with someone’s naively posited question, ‘Is it possible that the Orthodox native tongue won’t be allowed?’ The Ukrainian transformation of

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4.13 Valerian Pidmohylny

Kyiv’s text and legacy is exposed as absurdly alien, artificial, and anti-spiritual.72 Bulgakov’s representation of the Ukrainian procession in the square ranges from the absurd to the apocalyptic. Summoning his most intense vocabulary of demonization, his darkest palette (black, deep purple), and sacrilegious aural effects (hysterical ‘barking of bells’) he captures this monstrous ‘free Ukraine.’ The Ukrainian City: Valerian Pidmohylny Valerian Pidmohylny enacted a Ukrainian appropriation of Kyiv in The City, the action of which takes place in the mid-1920s. In this appropriation he took on the existing text of Kyiv, and, as Tamara Hundorova has pointed out, set it within a larger modernist framework, dominated by negation of tradition.73 In her insightful survey of the cluster of strategies employed by Ukrainian modernist writers, the scholar characterizes this novel as a programmatic profanation of the conventional text of Kyiv-Jerusalem. She focuses on the transformation of Kyiv’s apocalyptic myth into ‘the ironic and demonic myth’ of the city, on the radical transformation of Kyiv’s sacred topography and spiritual vertical into a modern urban theatre of life dominated by Eros, ambition, and consumption.74 In the section that follows, I expand on Hundorova’s locating of Pidmohylny into a modernist framework, and her productive discussion of the Ukrainian modernist rewriting of Kyiv in general, through an analysis of the interplay between universal and national elements in the treatment of the city in this novel and the reshaping of the city’s legacy. 75 The issue of modernity and modernism in the reconfiguration of the text of Kyiv has wide implications beyond the boundaries of one national literary tradition. Is Bulgakov’s The White Guard a modernist novel? Most studies dedicated to this writer would concur in this assessment. Yet what kind of modernity does he advocate? For Bulgakov, true modernity in his Kyivan agenda would mean a return to and reconfirmation of the city’s tradition as a Russian Jerusalem. As I tried to demonstrate in the previous section, Bulgakov’s text of Kyiv is based on his rejection of a city transformed by the whirlpool of revolution and, specifically, Ukrainian national revolution, which for the Turbins caused a most ‘catastrophic’ replacement of the language and text of Kyiv, its ‘atrocious translation’ into Ukrainian.

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Important to our discussion is Maxim Tarnawsky’s examination of Pidmohylny as a ‘traditionalist’ and his novel as a programmatic and creative filling in of one of the ‘lacunae’ in Ukrainian literature, that of the urban novel and European Bildungsroman.76 How are we to grasp the interaction of Pidmohylny’s compensatory and radical agendas set within the space of his novel? After all, only through the process of examining these agendas can we address the meaning of his title and the identity of his city. Pidmohylny’s choices of genre and stylistics are also of significance to our examination: if a novel such as The City is designed to subvert the tradition of Kyiv-Jerusalem, the holy and ancient city, then what and whose tradition is this? Novelistic tradition in general, Ukrainian literary tradition, Russian imperial popular tradition, universal Orthodox religious tradition? I would argue that Pidmohylny did not set out with the aesthetic or ideological task of destroying some previous Ukrainian traditional text of Kyiv, as advanced by Panteleimon Kulish or Ivan Nechui-Levytsky. Perhaps even to the contrary, The City continues the tradition of Nechui-Levytsky’s The Clouds (a specimen of the so-called populist tradition). If Pidmohylny were to have set out to subvert the text of Kyiv, it would be precisely a rewriting of Bulgakov’s (also modernist?) The White Guard. The City achieves the thematization and legitimization of the new Ukrainian urban experience (exorcised by Bulgakov) and of Kyiv as the central locus of this thematization that grants this Ukrainian urban experience universal meaning and resonance by virtue of its tradition.77 With this in mind we may look at the ways The City participates in the writing of the text of Kyiv and hypothesize about the author’s choices. Hundorova has analysed his cancellation of Kyiv-Jerusalem, the holy and apocalyptic city in the novel: it becomes a profane and philistine urban space where the protagonist Stepan Radchenko, the former villager and newcomer to the city harbouring high hopes for education, becomes quickly disoriented, disenfranchised, and humiliated. Stepan’s education and initiation by the city, his ‘pilgrim’s progress,’ and then his conquest of the city are revealed through the overlapping worldly realms of sexual control, social climbing, and cultural assimilation. This process is mapped by the physical topography of the successive spaces Stepan inhabits, the succession of jobs he acquires, and the women he conquers. In short, the novel with its omniscient narrator presents Radchenko’s personal text of Kyiv, based on his life experiences, his mental responses, and emotional reactions to the city. This text of Kyiv is written by the city on the tabula rasa of the soul of Stepan, who ventured to Kyiv ‘without the slightest idea about it.’78 This process of writing oscillates between Stepan’s rejection and acceptance of the city. At the same time, this experiential and highly emotional personal text interacts with the larger text of Kyiv as a kaleidoscope of places assigned with meanings and stories, a network of social and cultural coordinates (emerging or fading away, depending on the particular situation and its functions), and as a mobile conglomerate of common perceptions and expectations. This larger text of Kyiv runs through the novel as a seemingly objective reality. In other words, this ‘objective’ and ‘real’ text of Kyiv is paraded by the narrator as the agency that writes Stepan’s personal text of Kyiv, imprinting itself straight onto Stepan’s ‘soul.’ Yet at the same time, in the key moments of the urban initiation of Stepan and his urban progress, his personal

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experiences are recounted by the narrator with lyrical, ironic, or poetic verve, or rather with a mixture of all three, clearly indicating the deep personal investment of the narrator not so much in Stepan but in the textuality of the narrated experience. In so many words, Stepan’s crucial life experiences (his personal text of Kyiv) are matched, joined, and co-inhabited by the narrator’s experience of narrating them, through which his engagement in the very fabric of narration is exposed. In such instances the narrator is uncovering the writing of his own text of Kyiv, his engagement with the textual models and paradigms of the city. While the consciousness of Stepan and the consciousness of the narrator are clearly separate, these two entities are produced in an interactive way, and their relationship changes throughout the novel. Ranging from ironic distance to neutral objectivity and even cross-identification of the narrator with his character, the relationship reflects the ‘progress’ of Stepan within the city and the progress of the narrator in telling the story, during which he is contemplating his creation. The two evolving palimpsests complement one another, and in the key moments of the protagonist’s transformations reveal mini-rituals of textuality. At the beginning of his journey, Stepan approaches Kyiv with some fellow villagers. Since Stepan doesn’t know the city and his friend Levko, the Kyivan student, is a completely inadequate guide, the narrator fills in some gaps, contrasting his knowledge and perspective with Stepan’s initial impressions of Kyiv: From Revolution Street down the wide stairs to the Dnipro rolled a colourful wave of boys, girls, women, men – a white and orange stream of moving bodies anticipating the sweet comfort of sunshine and water. There were no sad faces in this crowd. Here, at the edge of the city, began a new land, the land of primordial happiness. The water and the sun welcomed everyone who had just abandoned pens and balance scales – every young lad, as if he were Kyi, every young lass, as if she were Lybid. Their pale bodies, oppressed by clothing for so many months, were now released from prison and blossomed into bronze lassitude on the hot sand, like savages lost on the banks of the Nile. For a moment they were resurrected into primal nakedness, and only their flimsy bathing suits marked the passage of a few millennia.79

Hundorova aptly sees in this episode one of numerous instances of the destruction of the mythological code of the city and Pidmohylny’s rewriting of the text of Kyiv achieved by emphasizing the corporeality of the crowd of bathers as opposed to the spirituality of pilgrims in the conventional text of Kyiv-Jerusalem.80 This opposition is further underscored by the physical movement of the crowd: not the elevation and climbing of the Kyivan hills in order to reach its churches, but a collective escape from the city, descent to the pleasures of water, sun, and nakedness. I would add that this ‘modern’ bathing also contrasts with the topos of apostolic baptism of Kyivites by Prince Volodymyr in 988: here, they are ‘un-baptized,’ that is, returned to happy savage paganism, to the legendary pre-Christian times of Polianian rulers and the autochthonous founders of the city, the brothers Kyi, Shchek, and Khoryv and their sister Lybid. In this episode, the reversal of cultural and spiritual coordinates that are conventional for Kyiv-Jerusalem (paganism– Christianity, Kyi–Volodymyr) leads to even further fragmentation of local tradition

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4.14 Kyiv panorama (photo: Irena R. Makaryk, 2000)

with the mention of the Nile, a reference to ancient civilization (treated tongue-incheek as savage), and universalism of the ancient scene of bathing, which is also an iconic fixture of modern life (and one of the ‘shocking’ themes of modernist and avant-garde art). In sum, the episode displays the narrator’s playful subversion and fragmentation of the traditional text of Kyiv, where millennia of culture and civilization are scraped away and pagan antiquity meets modernity. Moreover, this form of modernist leisure replaces urbanism with a colourful, albeit temporary, natural utopia. In contrast to this description, Stepan reacts gloomily to what he sees as excess, overkill; part of this gloom, is, of course, due to the fact that the scene contradicts his own movement into the city and his serious purpose in coming there. The first urban experience of Stepan inside the city is described in terms of a ‘pagan’ (if not demonic) rite of initiation, humiliation, and rejection. Reaching the centre of Kyiv, Khreshchatyk, he hopes to boost his self-esteem and assert himself in the city (his initial encounters with a few Kyivites had given him a sense of his physical and class superiority). Yet his modern pilgrimage to the heart of the city results in the shock of humiliation and alienation. In opposition to the traditional mode of movement within Kyiv-Jerusalem, that of pilgrimage (a collective movement towards holy relics with the purpose of touching sacred objects to heal and purify oneself), here Stepan himself feels objectified, emasculated, and even physically violated by the chaotic, seemingly purposeless flow of the crowd:

Three Novels, Three Cities 125 Stepan reached the Khreshchatyk and found himself in a crowd of people. He looked around and saw the city at night for the first time. He even stopped. The shining fires, the rattle and bells of the streetcars that converged here and then ran off again, the hoarse howl of the buses whose large carcasses rolled so easily along the streets, the piercing cries of the individual automobiles and the shouts of the carriage drivers along with the dull clamour of the wave of humanity suddenly shattered his concentration. On this wide street he encountered the city eye-to-eye. Leaning against the wall, hemmed in by the shameless surges of the crowd, the boy stood and watched, letting his eyes wander along the seemingly endless street. He was shoved by girls in light blouses, whose thin cloth blended into the bare skin of hands and shoulders; by women in hats and veils, men in jackets; boys without hats in shirts with sleeves rolled up to their elbows; soldiers in heavy, stifling uniforms; chambermaids holding hands; sailors from the Dnipro fleet; teenagers; the raised caps of engineers, the light overcoats of the dandies, and the grimy jackets of the vagabonds.81

The initial impression of Khreshchatyk – of a modernist, chaotic urban jungle like London or Paris, bursting with light and piercing noises, thumping with the weight of the masses and machinery – leaves Stepan feeling powerless. His raw senses are aggravated by the tactility of the crowd: the touching of his body by others awakens his erotic urges, yet profoundly alienates him, and makes him feel deeply inferior, since this parading, self-satisfied flow of urbanites is completely beyond his control, its meaning and the rules of its game inaccessible, its emotional tenor alien. Again, the narrator is deeply involved both in the double illumination of the raw feelings of his characters and in the textual thematization of his narrative (his perceptive and narrative powers far outstrip Stepan’s capacity for expression). Stepan’s compensatory reaction to this experience is hostility, anger, even rage that mobilizes him to castigate this ‘mindless laughing crowd.’ The humiliation of being tempted and left unsatisfied summons Stepan’s imagination; at the same time, the narrator steps in to show the highly charged textuality of the experience in question. While Stepan’s frustrated expectations are of a sensual and emotional, rather than spiritual, nature, his castigation of the crowd acquires the curious form of exhortation and exorcism of demons, as if Stepan were trying on the garb of an ascetic violently rejecting the material world of Kyiv as a rampant demonic orgy set to corrupt and destroy him. The narrator wryly comments of his protagonist: ‘like a pious man in the middle of a witches’ Sabbath.’82 The image of the ascetic monk, rejecting the world by labours, seclusion, and meditation on God, and battling the demons with prayer and incantation, was a fixture of the Kyivan text from the time of the Paterikon of the Monastery of the Caves.83 The discrepancy between Stepan’s reaction and its thematic realization and textual manifestation reveals a visible, indeed vivid, rewriting of the Kyivan text. The demonic and sacred texts of the city clash in the locus of Stepan’s experience turned into ritual. This clash completely destabilizes, subverts, and fragments both texts of Kyiv as they begin to mimic one another. Stepan’s ravings against ‘these lecherous worms’ conflate the notions of the ascetic mortification of the flesh (as a way of spiritual purification) and corruption of the flesh by sin. He sees the holy Kyivan hills as demonic ‘reservoirs of poison,’ and his castigation of

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these conventional landmarks of the sacred text of Kyiv is nothing less than a highly textual ‘un-blessing’ of them by a self-appointed apostle; that is, the undoing of the very cornerstone of the text of Kyiv-Jerusalem.84 The models of pilgrimage and asceticism involuntarily tried on by Stepan by virtue of being subjected to the reality of Kyiv and oversaturated with the text of Kyiv mark his traumatic initiation into the city, and lead towards his transformation. The pilgrimage and ascetic rejection of the material world are followed by the model of conquest: For the first time this evening, Stepan tore his eyes away from the earth and raised them to the heavens. A curious trembling overcame him when he saw the horn of the moon amid the stars above, the same moon that shone for him in the village. The tranquil moon, a rural wanderer, companion of his youth, confidant of his adolescent dreams, subdued in him that anger that had been provoked by the street. The city must be conquered, not despised! ... The city-orchards, village-cities, that were promised by the revolution, these wonders of the future, about which the books had given him only a dull impression, were for him at that moment very close and comprehensible. They were the challenge of the future, the noble goal of his education, the result of all that he had seen, done, and would accomplish. The life-giving power of the soil that coursed in his veins and his mind, the powerful winds of the steppe that had given him birth, added passionate clarity to his fantasy about the shiny future of the earth. He dissolved in his boundless dream, which captivated him immediately and completely. It was his fiery sword with which he conquered everything around him. Descending Revolution Street to the grime of Nyzhni Val, he was ascending ever higher, to the passionate glow of the stars.85

In this episode, a pastoral vision of the sky suddenly reveals to Stepan the purpose of his arrival in the city and links the world of the village from his past with the present (Kyiv).86 The moon facilitates the union between the village (soil) and the city (culture) within Stepan’s soul, providing him with a miracle: a vision of future heavenly cities as promised by the revolution. Visions belong, of course, to the repertory of the sacred text of Kyiv. The revelation of Stepan’s vocation of conqueror, however, does not involve the conquest of his material urges and dedication to the spiritual life. On the contrary, the nocturnal revelation suggests his conquest of the material world by force. Stepan’s imaginary enactment of the vision reveals the ironic subversion of the sacred verticality of the city.87 More specifically, we see here a conflation of the sacred and the demonic/apocalyptic texts of Kyiv. Stepan’s descending the street possessed by the ecstasy of destruction is conflated with the ascent of a holy man towards the heavens, implying perhaps an even more specific conflation: the vehicle of God’s punishment for the city’s sins, equipped with a fiery sword (Batu Khan–like destroyer or angel of wrath), and the holy man, a vehicle of divine grace – such as the apostolic Prince Volodymyr (who would be equipped with a cross). At this point we shall return to the notion of Pidmohylny’s modernist breaking down of the traditional text of Kyiv-Jerusalem, the ancient and holy city. Once more, Hundorova’s insights are valid: We have established that Pidmohylny subverts the

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previous tradition.88 But whose tradition? Russian imperial historic and cultural popular tradition (Russian Jerusalem) or universal Orthodox religious tradition, which was also part of Ukrainian popular tradition (a more generic Orthodox Jerusalem)? Does he subvert the Ukrainian tradition of Kyiv? What was the Ukrainian literary tradition of the text of Kyiv competing for Pidmohylny’s attention and begging for subversion? Kulish, Nechui, Vynnychenko, Vorony, Tychyna, Zerov? Maxim Tarnawsky’s views on Pidmohylny as not just a modernist but a traditionalist are also helpful and valid: Pidmohylny recreates models of Bildungsroman and the psychological novel in The City. I would add that by doing so he extends and recreates the Ukrainian text of Kyiv. In this extension and recreation, within Pidmohylny’s aesthetic designs and thematic interests, the destruction of the text of the ancient holy Kyiv-Jerusalem was necessary not only for ideological reasons. (Pidmohylny, of course, knew what novels were expected to do in Soviet Ukraine in the second half of the 1920s and what experiences their characters could have.) The destruction of previous models was also necessary for the epistemological sake of the ‘objective’ reality it constructed. The resulting construct-text is that of Ukrainian Kyiv. By removing, subverting, and conflating the previous texts, Pidmohylny airs the city of its heavy symbolism, dispensing with the burden of its over-saturated cultural legacy (Jerusalem, Rome, Zion, Athens), thus clearing the space for his text of Ukrainian Kyiv – precisely to allow this Kyiv to be ‘objective,’ real, experientially rejuvenated, and epistemologically legitimate – a normal, secular Ukrainian Kyiv.89 Because the novel mimics consciousness and creates virtual time and space and because the narration in The City is anchored in and authenticated by the consciousness of Stepan, we buy into the illusion of the novel: we perceive Pidmohylny’s city as a world, as an infinitely varied, fluid and open-ended realm. This Kyiv-City purports to be equal to the World. Whose City, whose world is it? The answer to this highly contested question is transferred in Pidmohylny’s novel from the plane of cultural and national identity into the realms of social and personal appropriations of the city, where the answers, consequently, are by definition secular and individual. At the same time, the answer to the question ‘Whose Kyiv is it’ in cultural and national terms is presented as a given. The exasperating question, never raised, is: It is a Ukrainian city, what else could it be? On the several occasions when the question of the national-cultural identity of Kyiv arises, it is handled with objective distance or irony. When Stepan, having established himself at least initially in the city, undertakes a thorough study of Kyiv as a tourist, the narrator provides an extensive catalogue of places the protagonist visited, with objective commentaries about their state and the level of their interest to Stepan. Of these landmarks, the Khanenko museum is singled out, since its collection contained the items with which Stepan identified himself most closely; that is, with the Ukrainian historic tradition: ‘with great admiration he looked at ancestral [i.e., Cossack] weapons, antique furniture, tapestry and colourful porcelain china.’90 A description of Stepan’s Ukrainian-language exam is handled ironically, with the formulations of rules to be followed full of transgressions against these same rules.91 Pidmohylny, writing a highly self-referential novel about an emerging Ukrainian writer, saw the ambiguity and irony of his own role and position in the real world of Kyiv and Ukraine and in the world of Ukrainian letters.

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Here we can summarize our exploration of Pidmohylny: The City is a successful modernist novel and an ambitious rewriting of the text of Kyiv. It is ‘radical’ (I concur with Hundorova) in its rejection and destruction of the previous myth of Kyiv; it is ‘compensatory’ (concurring with Tarnawsky) in its thematic and even institutional task vis-à-vis Ukrainian literature (the novel as an institution and vehicle of national initiation); it is highly ironic and reluctant to trumpet ideological or national agendas such as Ukrainianization (to concur with Yuri Shevelov); and it is brilliantly ambiguous in its retrospection and introspection of Kyiv – the perfect palimpsest. As Shevelov wryly wrote: Pidmohylny’s work ‘is a novel about a human being, about the city, about life.’92 Indeed it is. In The City, Kyiv is a locus of Ukrainian life and a theatre of Ukrainian literature. Conclusions While the sequencing of the analysed texts reflects the chronology of their writing and publication, and also coincides with the chronological sequence of the depicted periods in the history of Kyiv, this order should not be read as a ‘logical’ or ‘comprehensive’ development of the text of Kyiv or as a reflection of some inevitable ‘progress’ in the history of the city. This history is certainly reflected in the novels, yet they represent a process of a virtual nature: the novelistic projects of reactivation and realignment of the Kyivan legacy and the Kyivan text through the realignment, re-labelling, and expansion of its components and their hierarchy. On the other hand, the virtuality of these novels and their cities is not removed from reality, but serves as a semiotic process of reflection and mediation. Depending on the literary quality and emotional and cultural resonance of these novels, these novels inform not only the corpus of subsequent Kyivan works but also the common text and popular imagination of Kyiv, and in this way shape the roles the city plays in the identities of its inhabitants, visitors, and larger imagined communities. I also contend that these three novels are in various ways ‘obsessed’ with Kyiv, and while they address different agendas, themes, and historic periods, the fictional worlds they create are contingent upon the identity of the city and its topographic and cultural coordinates. The fact that Kyiv is not mentioned directly in any of the three suggests that the city is deeply entangled in the process of symbolic and cultural reshaping a nexus of modernity and tradition; it is a frontier, indeed a theatre, where the competition for the city’s identity is thematized and dramatically enacted. These novels stand among the most prominent contributions to the making of the twentieth-century text of Kyiv. This text of Kyiv, at the same time, serves as a litmus test and commentary on the political, demographic, cultural, as well as symbolic and virtual transformation of Kyiv and its historic tradition on the map of the late Russian Empire, early Soviet Union, and Ukraine, indicating how crucial the city was for the competitive visions of Russian historic integrity, Ukrainian national identity, and Soviet reality. Aleksandr Kuprin, in The Pit, brings the tradition of the Romantic text of demonic Kyiv to conclusion, overwriting the tradition of Kyiv-Jerusalem with ‘a large southern city’ trapped in the narrative and thematic models of KyivJerusalem. In Kuprin’s Kyiv, the temporal modernity and timelessness of his moral

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agenda do not entirely come together because of ‘interferences’ from the traditional text of Kyiv. Moreover, Kuprin’s purposeful designation of his fictional topography as the South and southern city-frontier dissolves the cultural and historic space of Kyiv into the Russian Empire, where the notion of Ukraine is rendered as marginalized and absurd. Mikhail Bulgakov’s The White Guard produced a much larger, polyphonic, symbolically and culturally saturated Apocalyptic text of Kyivfrontier, the City shaped as a tragic historic conflation of Rome and Jerusalem – the City as the World at the time of its imminent collapse. The fall of the City is set by Bulgakov into the framework of conflict between the Russian world of Kyiv and the demonized Ukraine, an idyllic land gone awry, encroaching upon the city and claiming its identity. In terms of symbolic capital and emotional resonance, Bulgakov’s novel is still the most important single work in the corpus of literary Kyiv, and his Russian Kyiv still exerts a remarkable symbolic, thematic, if not ideological, gravity in the contemporary text of Kyiv.93 Valerian Pidmohylny in The City transformed Kyiv into a thoroughly modern and secular Ukrainian city, whose space nonetheless playfully interacts with the traditional repertory of the text of Kyiv. Developing the nineteenth-century tradition of the Ukrainian text of Kyiv (as initiated in Panteleimon Kulish’s Black Council and Ivan Nechui-Levytsky’s Clouds), he achieves his rewriting of the city and inscribes it into the space of Ukraine by the modernist means of irony and palimpsest as a thematic and narrative device. The three novels represent the creative zenith in the making of the text of Kyiv, integrating the traditional text of Kyiv into their respective frameworks of modernity and identity and, by their diversity, indicating the remarkable symbolic, cultural, and ideological saturation of this very text.

NOTES 1 Nikolai Gogol, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1937–52), 10 (1940) 288. 2 I use the term ‘text of a city’ in broad cultural terms, meaning a dynamic, yet also hierarchical, system of heterogeneous elements (objects, descriptions, narratives, values) that conditions the perception of a city by its own local and larger milieus and serves as a matrix for generating new elements and combinations. My use of the term is based on a number of studies, including Vladimir Toporov’s Peterburgskii tekst russkoi literatury (St Petersburg: Iskusstvo-SPB, 2003); collections of articles dedicated to the text of Moscow such as Moskva i ‘moskovskii tekst’ russkoi kul’tury (Moscow: Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi gumanitarnyi universitet, 1998); Vladimir Abashev’s Perm’ kak tekst (Perm’: Izdatel’stvo permskogo universiteta, 2000); and an important collection of articles, Sushchestvuet li peterburgskii tekst, Peterburgskii sbornik, vol. 4 (St Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo S.-Peterburgskogo universiteta, 2005). Vladyslava Os’mak put forth some general remarks on the notion of the text of Kyiv in an article, ‘Drevnii gorod slovno vymer (k voprosu o kievskom tekste),’ in Kievskii Al’bom: Istoricheskii al’manakh, vol. 1 (Kyiv, 2001) 7–12. Inna Bulkina provided interesting observations on the text of Kyiv in Russian Romanticism in her article ‘Kievskii tekst v russkom romantizme: Problemy tipologii,’ Lotmanovskii sbornik 3 (Moscow: OGI, 2004) 93–104;

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Taras Koznarsky and Serhiy Bilenky discussed the competition for the city’s cultural and historic legacy in the nineteenth century in ‘Battle of Visions: How was Kiev Seen in the 1790s–1840s,’ Toronto Slavic Quarterly 13 (Summer 2005) at http://www.utoronto.ca/tsq/13/index13 .shtml). Oleksii Tolochko’s extensive article ‘Kyievo-rus’ka spadshchyna v istorychnii dumtsi Ukrainy pochatku XIX st.’ offers many insights towards an understanding of the making of the text of Kyiv in the nineteenth century; in Ukraina i Rosiia v istorychnii retrospektyvi: Ukrains’ki proekty v Rosiis’kii imperii (Kyiv: Naukova dumka, 2004) 250–350. See Toporov 7, 25–6, 35. For example, very important contributions to the text of St Petersburg were made in the era of Romanticism and the so-called natural school (Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky), yet the actualization of the text took place in the era of modernism, so much so that the text of Petersburg itself can be called a modernist product. It is precisely in the works of modernists (Blok, Bely, Vaginov, etc.) that St Petersburg acquires mysterious purpose, astral connection, and cultural saturation – meeting with the readiness of creators, participants, and consumers to read the city as a text. See, for example, Mykhailo Maksymovych in Obozrenie Kieva v otnoshenii k drevnostiam izdannoe Ivanom Fundukleem (Kyiv, 1847), rpt. (Kyiv: Zadruha, 1996) i–ii; Mykola Sementovs’kyj’s Kiev, ego sviatyni, drevnosti, dostoprimechatel’nosti i svedeniia, neobkhodimye dlia ego pochitatelei i puteshestvennikov (Kyiv, 1864); Nikolai Zakrevskii’s (Mykola Zakrevs’kyi) monumental Opisanie Kieva, vol. 1 (Moscow, 1868) 1; and M. Zakharchenko’s Kiev teper’ i prezhde (Kyiv, 1888) 1–2. The sources of these attributes of Kyiv go back centuries. The central notion of Kyiv as a holy city originated with Kyivan Rus’. The eleventh-century Primary Chronicle relates a legend that would become the cornerstone of Kyiv-Jerusalem, of the Apostle Andrew travelling up the Dnipro on his way to Rome. The Apostle stayed for the night near the hills where Kyiv would later rise. In the morning, he said to his disciples: ‘See ye these hills? So shall the favor of God shine upon them that on this spot a great city shall arise, and God shall erect many churches therein.’ He ascended the hills, and having blessed them, he set up a cross. After offering a prayer to God, he descended from the hill on which Kyiv was subsequently built and continued his journey; from Serge Zenkovsky, Medieval Russia’s Epics, Chronicles, and Tales, 2nd ed. (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1974) 47. In Metropolitan Ilarion’s ‘Sermon on Law and Grace’ (mid-eleventh century) and Monk Iakov’s ‘Memorial and Encomium for Prince Volodymer of Rus’’ (late twelfth–early thirteenth century), the historic and providential destiny of the city is confirmed: ‘O the miracle! Kyiv appeared as the second Jerusalem in our land, and Volodimer appeared as a second Moses’; from Paul Hollingsworth, ed., The Hagiography of Kievan Rus’ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 1994) 180. ‘Memorial and Encomium’ developed a range of links that buttress the importance of the city: Kyiv–Jerusalem–Rome–Constantinople. The topos of Kyiv-Jerusalem was recycled and further developed (Kyiv as Ruthenian, i.e., Ukrainian Zion) during the Ukrainian Orthodox revival of the 1620s–40s. See Volodymyr Rychka, ‘Kyiv– druhyi Ierusalym’: Z istorii politychnoi dumky ta ideolohii seredniovichnoi Rusi (Kyiv: Instytut istorii Ukrainy NAN Ukrainy, 2005) as well as Nataliia Iakovenko, ‘Latyna na sluzhbi kyievo-rus’kii istorii,’ and ‘Symvol “Bohokhranymoho hrada” u pamiatkakh kyivs’koho kola (1620–1640-vi roky),’ in N. Iakovenko, Paralel’nyi svit. Doslidzhennia z

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istorii uiavlen’ ta idei v Ukraini XVI–XVII st. (Kyiv: Krytyka, 2002) 270–330. In the Russian imperial context, the notion of Kyiv as the Russian Jerusalem was utilized in a range of texts such as Vladimir Izmailov’s Puteshestvie v Poludennuiu Rossiiu (Moscow, 1800–2; 2nd ed., 1805); Aleksei Levshin, Pis’ma iz Malorossii (Kharkiv, 1816); Vadim Passek’s essays on Kyiv in Ocherki Rossii (Moscow, 1838–40); and especially in Andrei Muraviev’s Puteshestvie po sviatym mestam russkim. Kiev (St Petersburg, 1844). In contrast to these interpretations, Kyiv was fashioned as a Ukrainian Jerusalem in the writings of Panteleimon Kulish (Chorna rada, 1844–6, published 1857) and Ivan Nechui-Levyts’kyi (Khmary, 1870–1, published 1874). See Anatolii Makarov, ‘Kyivs’ke palomnytstvo,’ in Kyivska starovyna 5 (2001) 46–58, and the entry ‘Palomniki’ in his Malaia entsyklopediia kievskoi stariny (Kyiv: Dovira, 2002) 329–31. Izmailov, Puteshestvie v Poludennuiu Rossiu, vol. 1 (Moscow, 1800) 95–6. Andrei Glagolev, Zapiski russkogo puteshestvennika (1837), 2nd ed. (St Petersburg, 1845) pt. 1, 79, 89; also: ‘The Russian people haven’t forgotten their Jerusalem’ (80). Mikhail Pogodin, ‘Iazyk (pis’mo k I. I. Sreznevskomu),’ in M. Pogodin, Issledovaniia, zamechaniia i lektsii o russkoi istorii, vol. VII (Moscow: v tipografii L. Stepanovoi, 1856) 410–42. Opysy kharkivs’koho namisnytstva kintsia XVIII st. (Kyiv: Naukova dumka, 1991) 18; quoted in Oleksii Tolochko, ‘Kyievo-rus’ka spadshchyna v istorychnii dumtsi Ukrainy pochatku XIX st.,’ in Ukraina i Rosiia v istorychnii retrospektyvi: Ukrains’ki proekty v Rosiis’kii imperii (Kyiv: Naukova dumka, 2004) 319. See, for example, Mykola Sementovs’kyi, Kiev, ego sviatyni, drevnosti, dostopamiatnosti (Kyiv, 1864) 108–9. On the role of Kyiv as Slavic Pompeii in the historic imagination in the Russian empire, see Tolochko 318–31. Michał Czajkowski, PowieĞci kozackie (Paris, 1837) 115. Sholom Aleichem, ‘Why Do the Jews Need a Land of Their Own?’ from www .sholom-aleichem.org/why_jews_need2.htm, accessed 20 July 2007. Jewish KyivYehupetz is addressed in several of Sholom Aleichem’s stories from Tevye the Dairyman, The Railroad Stories, and in the The Letters of Menahem-Mendl and Sheyne-Sheyndl. The Kyiv Jewish urban setting is captured in his novels Bloody Hoax and In the Storm. Population statistics for Kyiv in the nineteenth century are provided in Patricia Herlihy, ‘Ukrainian Cities in the Nineteenth Century,’ in Ivan Lysiak-Rudnytsky ed., Rethinking Ukrainian History (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta, 1981) 136. See Michael Hamm, Kiev: A Portrait, 1800–1917 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1993), esp. chaps. 2 and 6. A detailed discussion of this phenomenon is provided in Vitalii Kovalyns’kyi, Kyivs’ki miniatiury (Kyiv: Kupola, 2005); vol. 4 is entirely dedicated to this topic. A fascinating sketch of corrupt mores of late imperial Kyiv is provided in Aleksandr Pataleev, ‘Staryi Kiev,’ published in Kievskii Al’bom: Istoricheskii al’manakh, vol. 2 (Kyiv, 2002) 41–51. For a useful, brief overview of prostitution in the late Russian empire with interesting statistics, see Vladimir Zverev, ‘Iama rossiiskoi imperii,’ in Rossiiskaia provintsiia 6 (1996) 134–9. Aleksandr Zholkovskii demonstrated that The Pit can be defined as an extensive compendium of narrative, psychological, thematic, moral, and aesthetic explorations

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Taras Koznarsky of the topos of prostitution in Russian and European literatures. (This take also suggests the lack of literary unity in this work.) See A. Zholkovskii, ‘Topos prostitutsii v literature,’ in A. Zholkovskii and M. Iampol’skii, eds, Babel’ (Moscow: Carte Blanche, 1994) 317–68. See commentary in Aleksandr Kuprin, Sobranie sochinenii v piati tomakh, vol. 4 (Moscow: Pravda, 1982) 452. These include the use of the actual name Iamskaia Street; direct references to Kyiv realia (Tsavskii Sad [Orchard], Château de Fleurs) and to instantly recognizable landmarks, even when they are not named directly (the Dnipro, the Monastery of the Caves); suggestive names (such as a brothel named Old-Kyivan); as well as lightly veiled elements (for example, reference to Besarabs’kyi Market as Novo-Kishinevskii). A. Zholkovskii and M. Iampol’skii, Babel’ 326–7. Quoted from Alexandr Kuprin, Yama the Pit, trans. Bernard Guerney (New York, 1927) 17. On the phenomenon of the Kyivan pilgrimage, see Anatolii Makarov, ‘Kyivs’ke palomnytstvo,’ in Kyivs’ka starovyna 5 (2001) 46–58, and the entry ‘Palomniki’ in his Malaia entsyklopediia kievskoi stariny (Kyiv: Dovira, 2002) 329–31. The text of the Kyiv pilgrimage evolved throughout the nineteenth century in Russian literature, where Kyiv figures as a Russian Jerusalem in the travelogues of Vladimir Izmailov, Aleksei Levshin, Andrei Muraviev, as well as in the novels of Panteleimon Kulish and Ivan Nechui-Levyts’kyi that develop this model through fiction (Kyiv as a specifically Ukrainian Jerusalem). Kuprin, Yama the Pit 19–20. The demonic text of Kyiv is developed in Russian Romantic literature, most notably in the works of Nikolai Gogol, Orest Somov, Mikhail Zagoskin, and Aleksandr Vel’tman. See Zholkovskii on Kuprin’s employment of literary clichés in the novel. See Muriel Heppel, trans., The Paterik of the Kievan Caves Monastery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 1989). Kuprin employs clichés even on the level of his characters’ names: his two key and sharply contrasted male characters, the student Likhonin and the journalist Platonov, trumpet their qualities through their names: woe (likho) and platonic love for fellow humans (prostitutes). These events were invented for plot purposes by Kuprin. See Anatolii Makarov, Malaia entsyklopediia kievskoi stariny 396. Yama the Pit 145. Ibid. 145–6. This celebration is also invented, with the closest real event being the 1888 celebration of the nine-hundredth anniversary of the baptism of Rus’ by Prince Volodymyr. A special and strategic administrative formation, Iugo-zapadnyi krai was also known as Kyiv general province (guberniia) and consisted of Kyiv, Podilia, and Volhynia provinces (i.e., encompassing Right-Bank Ukraine). It was formed by the imperial administration in 1832 in the aftermath of the Polish insurrection and existed until 1917. On the position and identity of Ukrainians within the Russian empire, see Andreas Kappeler, ‘Mazepintsy, Malorossy, Khokhly: Ukrainians in the Ethnic Hierarchy of the Russian Empire,’ in Andreas Kappeler, Zenon Kohut et al., eds, Culture, Nation, and Identity. The Ukrainian-Russian Encounter (1600–1945) (Edmonton and Toronto:

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34 35 36 37 38 39 40

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42

43 44 45 46 47 48 49

Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies P, 2005) 162–81, and Aleksei Miller, ‘Ukrainskii vopros’ i politika vlastei v russkom obshchestvennom mnenii (vtoraia polovina XIX v) (St Petersburg: Aleteiia, 2000). Aleksandr Kuprin, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 4: 108–9, translation mine. Ibid. 109. At one point he is quoted: ‘Idite-ka panychi, het’ behom. Druhoi raz vovse ne pustiu.’ Ibid. 251. Ibid. 69. Ibid. 159–60. She addresses Likhonin in surzhyk: ‘Akh ty zh serdyniatyn’ko moie … Dai mne tvoi buzi! Dai zhe mne tvoi buzyniatki!’ (160). Ibid. 161. As Andrzej Drawicz pointed out: ‘It is characteristic that Bulgakov’s choice is the one that has come down to later generations, thanks to the great artistic quality of The White Guard. Now as they read it they experience most forcefully something that for many eyewitnesses – albeit not the defenders of the city – was not the most memorable experience of the period. In the accounts of other observers, almost the same episodes as those shown by Bulgakov were trivial, as if seen through inverted binoculars.’ See Andrzej Drawicz, The Master and the Devil – A Study of Mikhail Bulgakov (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen P, 2001) 102–3. I will list only a few works that indicate the scope of this scholarship: Marietta Chudakova in Zhizneopisanie Mikhaila Bulgakova (Moscow: Kniga, 1988) provided a historic commentary to Bulgakov’s Kyiv years; Edyth Haber in Mikhail Bulgakov: The Early Years (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1998) discussed the place of the novel between the realistic tradition and modernism; Miron Petrovskii’s Master i gorod: Kievskie konteksty Mikhaila Bulgakova (Kyiv: Dukh i litera, 2001) examined the impact of Kyiv as a topographic, thematic, and even moral set of coordinates throughout Bulgakov’s oeuvre; Aleksandra Alekseeva in Ukrainskaia khudozhestvennaia traditsiia v proze M. A. Bulgakova (Kyiv, 2004) explored the connections between Bulgakov and the Ukrainian literary tradition. In this article, I do not intend to disentangle the historic reality from the events as depicted. The convulsive, ecstatic, and traumatic experiences have been recounted in the recollections and diaries of other witnesses of the revolution and civil war in Ukraine: private and public figures of various backgrounds, such as Serge Lifar and Volodymyr Vernads’kyi, Ievhen Chykalenko and Konstantin Paustovs’kii, Nadia Surovtseva and Vladimir Shul’gin, to name a few. Mikhail Bulgakov, Sobranie sochinenii v piati tomakh, vol. 2 (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1989) 307. The formula ‘beautiful and happy city’ contains an ironic quote from the song of the Venetian guest in Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera Sadko. Ibid. Ibid. 309. He points out, for example, a sign for a kindergarten, dytiachyj prytulok; one for a dining hall, idal’nia; and a Soviet abbreviation, S.M.R.ikhel’. Ibid. 315. Ibid. 316. Drawicz 104. To such dimensions belongs the biographical text of his childhood and youth and the painful impact of his mother’s death in Kyiv in 1923.

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50 These dichotomies of The White Guard were effectively highlighted in an article by N. Velikaia, ‘Belaia gvardiia M. Bulgakova. Prostranstvenno-vremennaia struktura proizvedeniia, eio kontseptual’nyi smysl,’ in Tvorchestvo Mikhaila Bulgakova, ed. Iu. Babicheva and N. Kiselev (Tomsk: Izdatel’stvo Tomskogo universiteta, 1991) 28–48. 51 For example, Petrovsky examined the theatricality of the city and the intertwining of the tragic and the comical, the fantastic properties of Kyiv’s urban space, and the matrioshka nature of the fictional world of The White Guard as a system of overlapping worlds or concentric circles. 52 Petrovsky also provides interesting insights into the specifics of Bulgakov’s handling of Kyiv’s urban topography, noting that some streets and landmarks (ranging from cathedrals, theatres and educational establishments to stores and monuments) are inscribed into the novel under their actual names, while others are given in slightly modified form, starting with Alekseevskaia Street, instantly recognizable as Andriivs’kyi Descent (Uzviz) and including aural adaptations such as MaloProval’naia St. instead of Malo-Pidval’na and Lubochitskaia instead of Hlybochyts’ka. Petrovsky astutely connects these transformations to the magical, illusory qualities of the space of Kyiv as the City of Bulgakov, where the aberrant names usually are connected to death and liminality. See Petrovskii 252–60. 53 Ibid. 271. 54 Ibid. 55 Ibid. 272. 56 Ibid. 272–3. For a discussion of motivic elements of Apocalypse in Bulgakov’s The White Guard, see Boris Gasparov, Literaturnye leitmotivy: Ocherki russkoi literatury XX veka (Moscow: Nauka, 1994) 101–6. 57 Petrovskii 280–2. 58 See The Hagiography of Kievan Rus’, ed. Paul Hollingsworth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 1994) 165–81. 59 Mikhail Bulgakov, The White Guard, trans. Michael Glenny (Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers, 1987) 56. 60 Haber 77. 61 Petrovskii 80. 62 As Lesley Milne has noted, ‘No aspiring author could pass Petersburg by, particularly if the task was to create a literary image for one of the three cities invoked in the Prologue to Petersburg: Moscow, Kiev, and Petersburg itself. The structure of Bely’s novel with its combination of suspense, complex chronology, precise topography, underlying mythic pattern, literary (and operatic) reminiscence and refrain of onomatopoeically ululating revolutionary threat created obvious possibilities for its successor from Kiev.’ See Lesley Milne, Mikhail Bulgakov: A Critical Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990) 77–8. 63 Petrovskii 277. 64 Mikhail Bulgakov, Sobranie sochinenii v piati tomakh, vol. 1 (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1989) 185, translation mine. 65 Ibid. 231, 229, 320. 66 First applied by the character Talberg, the term is then employed by the narrator (196–7) as the events ‘turned out to be a true operetta, yet not a simple one but one with great bloodshed.’

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71 72 73 74 75

76 77

Ibid. 197. Ibid. 208. Ibid. 239. Ibid. 386. These images refer to the folk legend of the hero Kyrylo Kozhumiaka, who defeated a dragon oppressing the city, and also suggest the destruction of Kyiv by the Mongol horde of Batu Khan. The ludicrous character of Petliura is underscored by his petty origins, blurred by urban rumours: a prisoner, a student, an accountant, a salesman in a tobacco store, a myth, who was seen eleven years earlier in Moscow walking with two rosy-cheeked and jolly Ukrainian girls, holding a guitar and plum brandy brought straight from blessed Ukraine, singing Ukrainian songs (ibid. 228–9). The description defines Petliura as an operetta character and thematically links the Ukraine of Bulgakov’s novel with that of Kuprin’s. Ibid. 230–1. Ibid. 383–4. Tamara Hundorova, ‘U kolystsi mifu, abo topos Kyieva v literaturi ukrains’koho modernizmu,’ Kyivs’ka starovyna 6 (2000) 75. Ibid. 79–80. The modernist reshaping of Kyiv’s text is contingent on the layer of text chosen for the making of a modern palimpsest, depending on the cultural and aesthetic agenda of a group or a writer. In the Ukrainian context, especially when dealing with Kyiv, the very notions of modernity and modernism at times were in opposition: in neoclassical poetry (certainly modernist), it is Soviet reality that is rejected as a pseudo-modern deformity, and instead, the tradition, antiquity, and spirituality of Kyiv are embraced in a reshaped cultural space co-inhabited by Ukrainian and European (universal) elements. In Mykola Filians’kyi, the rejection of the Ukrainian poetic tradition dedicated to civic causes and native landscapes resulted in his mystic adoration of antiquity. Thus, the scope of tasks faced by Ukrainian writers of the twentieth century, dealing simultaneously with the traditional canon and its deficiencies, made Ukrainian modernism a highly ambiguous and heterogeneous enterprise, both radical and compensatory (and the Ukrainian avant-garde, even more so). Maxim Tarnawsky, Between Reason and Irrationality: The Prose of Valerijan Pidmohylnyi (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1994) 110–16, 187–8. Let me clarify: I have no data to suggest that Pidmohyl’nyi wrote The City to address Bulgakov’s novel or even to indicate whether Pidmohyl’nyi read the instalments of The White Guard published in 1925. (Future biographic studies of Pidmohyl’nyi may provide answers.) In fact, the answer to this question matters only to a certain degree. The intertextual tension between Bulgakov and Pidmohyl’nyi is first of all of a topological nature. Both writers address the text of Kyiv as a virtual field most fully realized not so much in a specific Kyivan literary corpus (or corpuses), but in the popular culture of textbooks and guidebooks and popular perception – that is, at the very core of views and perceptions that program how a text such as Kyiv is located within the identity of a person, whether it be Turbin or Radchenko, Count Mawricki or Samzharenko. Moreover, the location of Kyiv within or at the core of identity means that Kyiv becomes a fundamental component of individual and collective historic and cultural self-perception and the perception of others. To make this argument in an even more pointed way: while Dostoevsky did not participate in the writing of the text

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Taras Koznarsky of Kyiv, the public may think it ‘knows’ what he would have written because of what it knows of his identity and how it fits with their identity. The text of Kyiv is entangled in the texts of multiple identities. Iuri Shevel’ov (a.k.a. George Shevelov, Iurii Sherekh), ‘Liudyna i liudy (‘Misto’ Valeriiana Pidmohyl’noho),’ in Iurii Sherekh, Porohy i zaporozhzhia: Literatura, mystetstvo, ideolohii, vol. 1 (Kharkiv: Folio, 1998) 87. Valeriian Pidmohyl’nyi, Opovidannia, povist’, romany, trans. Maxim Tarnawsky (Kyiv: Naukova dumka, 1991) 312. I am grateful to Maxim Tarnawsky for allowing me to use his translation of the novel. Hundorova 79. Pidmohyl’nyi, Opovidannia, povist’, romany 330. Ibid. 331. See, for example, the story of Lavrentii the Solitary, who exorcised a man possessed by a demon, or the story of Isakii the Cave-dweller, who is deceived by a host of demons masquerading as angels, yet later recognizes his mistake and expels the evil forces (Heppel, The Paterik of the Kievan Caves Monastery 146–7, 205–10). See Apostle Andrew’s prophecy in note 6. Pidmohyl’nyi, Opovidannia, povist’, romany 333. The theme of Stepan’s discoveries of the village in the midst of Kyiv is one of the motivic engines of the novel, facilitating Stepan’s integration into and conquest of the city. Hundorova 79. Hundorova traces how the city manifests itself through the urban crowd imbued with pagan sensuality; how the subverted topography of Kyiv in the novel inverts the conventional sacred vertical; and how the masculine (even phallic) Khreshchatyk, the symbol and centre of modern Kyiv, vividly contrasts with the feminine lecherous hills of the city that in the previous tradition were holy and linked to Jerusalem. The typological scope of these transformations supports Hundorova’s analysis. However, her formulation that ‘in Pidmohyl’nyi, the modern topos of Kyiv gravitates to ironic and demonic myth rather than the apocalyptic myth of the city’ (80) requires a comment: the demonic text of the city is also part of tradition, of the text of Kyiv (elaborated in Russian Romanticism, as noted above). Moreover, the depiction of Kyiv as a place of sexual and moral corruption can fit even the populist paradigm of Ukrainian literature, as in the story of Borys Lazarevs’kyi sarcastically entitled ‘Sviatyi horod’ (Holy City), describing the fall of a young peasant woman who comes to the city as a pilgrim. See Kievskaia starina 81:4 (1903) 108–31. The reality of Kyiv in demographic, social, and cultural terms was most likely different: in 1926, in a city of half a million inhabitants, Ukrainians constituted 42.3% of the population (24.5% Russians, 27.4% Jews). At the same time, Ukrainian was the native tongue for 27.9% of Kyiv’s inhabitants (versus 52.2% for Russian), and among Kyivites-Ukrainians, only 64.4% spoke Ukrainian (while about 35% of them spoke Russian and were literate in Russian only). See Steven Guthier, ‘Ukrainian Cities during the Revolution and the Interwar Era,’ in Rethinking Ukrainian History, ed. Ivan Lysiak-Rudnytsky (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 1981) 165–7. A detailed and most valuable demographic analysis of Kyiv’s population and its changes between 1917 and 1923, which significantly adds to Guthier’s data, is provided in Mykola Borovs’kyi’s ‘Natsional’no-sotsial’ni perehrupuvannia liudnosty mista Kyieva

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v porevoliutsiinykh chasakh (1917–1923),’ in Mykhailo Hrushevs’kyj, ed., Kyiv ta ioho okolytsia v istorii i pamiatkakh (Kyiv: DVU, 1926) 431–75. Pidmohyl’nyi 344. Pointed out by Iuri Shevel’ov, 82. Ibid. 91. A passionate ‘summoning’ of Kyiv as the Russian Jerusalem also takes place in Georgii Fedotov’s historiosophical essay ‘The Three Capitals’ (Tri stolitsy, 1926) as part of his utopian vision of Russia as a holy universal locus of culture through the mystical and cultural symphony of its three capitals, Petersburg, Moscow, and Kyiv (resurrecting the nineteenth-century formula of Mykhailo Maksymovych for new purposes).

I consider cinematography an empty, useless and even harmless amusement. Only an abnormal individual can put this vulgar circus on a par with art. It is all sheer nonsense and should not be encouraged. Tsar Nicholas II, 19131 In Church only one drama is performed and always one and the same, year in, year out, while ... The cinema amuses, educates, strikes the imagination by images, and liberates you from the need of crossing the Church door. The cinema is a great competitor not only of the public-house, but of the Church. Here is an instrument which we must secure at all costs! Lev Trotsky, 19232

1 Resolution made in 1913 on a report of the policy department concerning a letter from America to F.I. Rodichev, member of the State Duma, dealing with the outlook for building up a moving-picture industry in Russia. Quoted from an article by B. Vishnevsky in Soviet Cinema nos. 1–2, 1917, trans. Leon Rutman and repr. in New Theatre, Soviet issue, January 1935, 21. 2 Lev Trotsky, ‘Vodka, the Church and the Cinema,’ first published in Pravda, 12 July 1923; published in English in L. Trotsky, Problems of Life (London, 1924), chap. 3, 34–43; repr. in Richard Taylor and Ian Christie, eds, The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1988), 97.

5 Film in Kyiv, 1910–1916 oleh sydor-hybelynda

From the Editors: Singular, ‘special,’ mysterious Kyiv with its contested identities was, at the same time, part of an emerging global culture, particularly in the area of one of its newest arrivals: film. Here, as the next essay suggests, Kyiv becomes a synecdoche of cities, its popular repertoire of films revealing not an isolated nature but one shared with the rest of the world. Oleh Sydor-Hybelynda presents us with a rich panoply of the wide – and often amusing – offerings available to the average Kyivite before the First World War. As the citizens daily flocked to the cinema to be amused or informed, theatre artists such as Les Kurbas were alternately annoyed and inspired by its subject matter and tone, its new and exciting technology, and its growing ability to manipulate time and space. The following essay draws almost entirely upon primary sources of the period in Ukrainian and Russian in order to present us with an unmediated view of the entertainment scene in the early twentieth century as observed from the point of view of the paying customer. It should be noted that an unexpected tragedy, a flood in the newspaper archives of the Academy of Sciences in Kyiv, damaged many of the original documents, thus preventing the author both from extending his work into the early 1920s and also from making a final verification of his sources.

The very first demonstrations of film, the invention of the Lumière brothers, were presented at the Bergonier theatre in Kyiv in 1897 and included the brothers’ bestknown creations, Family Breakfast (Le déjeuner de bébé)1 and Arrival of a Train at La Ciôtat (Arrivée d’un train à la Ciôtat); both were first shown in between live performances.2 This seems to have been an uncannily symbolic event since, twenty years later, the Bergonier would become the home of Les Kurbas’s Young Theatre. Kurbas, who left a significant mark on the history of Ukrainian film – though one not equal to his impact on the theatre – directed three films in the mid-1920s, as well as film footage for use in two live theatrical shows.3 His work as a director was thoroughly permeated by cinematographic allusions and associations. Understandably, the blossoming of his creative work in the 1920s was dependent upon the impressions he had gathered over the previous two decades, especially from the film repertoire of the 1910s, when film was developing into an art form. The first attempts to create this form are connected with the aesthetic-educational initiatives of the Film d’art in France, examples of which also made their way to Ukraine as we will see below.

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5.1 Kyiv. Bergonier Theatre (early-20th-century postcard; photo: D. Markov)

Although deeply influenced by film, Kurbas’s attitude to this medium varied; at different times he was negative, annoyed, repelled, unhappily astonished (‘On this day of destiny, this greatest crisis in history, / How can anyone wish to go to see the pictures?’ inquires a character in Jimmie Higgins, a play based on the novel by Upton Sinclair that Kurbas dramatized).4 Nor were his opinions orthodox: Kurbas did not assess Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin positively, though he did not completely reject it either. In point of fact, he was influenced by it despite his initial opinion, since, of course, even negative impressions have a certain power. At the same time as Kurbas implied a distance between himself and Eisenstein, others linked their names. The great actor Amvrosy Buchma remarked, ‘In the course of my life, I have known only two great artists with a capital “A.” These were Les Kurbas and Sergei Eisenstein.’5 The aim of this particular essay is to recreate the structure of the leisure time of the Ukrainian intelligent on the cusp of great changes. Understandably, this will be done through the very specific, narrow viewpoint of the pre-Revolutionary film repertoire, an analysis based on my reading of reviews and advertisements in newspapers of the time, when film was hardly considered ‘cultural’ activity. Typical of the prevailing attitude is that of writer Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky who, describing his leisure activities in Capri, tersely commented: ‘On the last day we went to the cinematograph and then later out for a walk in the square where people were having fun.’6

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5.2 Poster for Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925)

When Kurbas arrived in Kyiv in 1916, he found a city much like any other large European city. The films shown there reflected the cultural politics of the ‘Silver Age,’ with many examples of mainstream cinema as well as showings of locally created films, international blockbusters, and half-baked clips created pretty much around the corner – all in all a repertoire not very different from what was shown in Lviv or Vienna (though, of course, Russian films were more generously represented in Kyiv): the same genres, the same stars, the same films. While the researcher must acknowledge the fact that there were some regional differences, the general outlines are, for the most part, nearly identical. The Pre-war Period In the pre-war period in Kyiv there were a few dozen cinemas, a significant number of which were found on or near the main avenues of the city. On the famous boulevard Khreshchatyk were the ‘Monte Carlo’ (no. 7 on this street), ‘Express’ (later the ‘Moderne,’ no. 25), the Movie Theatre of R. Schtremer (no. 27), ‘Corso’ (no. 30), ‘New World’ (no. 31), ‘Record’ (no. 34), ‘New Theatre’ (‘in the courtyard,’ no. 36), ‘Maxime’ (no. 36, upstairs), the Movie Theatre of A. Schantzer (no. 38), ‘Intimate Theatre’ (or ‘Arts,’ no. 43), and ‘Renaissance’ (now the ‘Coliseum,’ at the corner of Lutheranska Street, just above Liudmer’s store). Within walking distance were the ‘Odeon’ (on Velyka Vasylkivska, no. 14) and ‘Lotos’ (on Mala Blahovishchenska, no. 72); there were also other venues such as stage theatres and

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the circus (for special events). The network of ‘filmification’ was just being formed: the ‘Corso’ opened at the end of 1911, the Movie Theatre of A. Schantzer on 11 December 1912. Under the Soviets, most of these film theatres were nationalized and acquired numbers from 1 to 19 of the ‘Derzhkino’ (acronym of National Movie Theatres); in this schema, for example, the ‘New World’ became number 3, while the ‘Corso’ became number 5; their functions, however, remained the same.7 As a rule, the film program changed twice a week, on Tuesdays and Saturdays. The showings began at 4 pm (at Schtremer’s) or at 6 pm (at the ‘Express’); on days off they began at 12:00 pm or at 2:00 pm (sometimes at 5 pm) when showings were targeted at children (also on holidays, around 12 to 3, so-called children’s matinees); the work of the movie-house camera operators did not stop for Christmas or New Year’s. And although, as a whole, entrance to films was officially prohibited to high school students (‘they were prohibited from attending places of civic gatherings and cinemas’),8 some showings offered the particular warning: ‘entrance strictly prohibited to young people’ – as for the film Traffic in Souls (1915).9 The showings give the impression of a kaleidoscope: thus, in 1910 various theatres demonstrated without break from eight to ten film clips, which lasted over two hours. In March of the following year, eleven clips were shown (at the ‘Monte Carlo’). Already in 1916, however, an English version of Forever Young was accompanied by the following explanation: ‘In order to retain a unity of impressions, both parts of the series will be shown in sequence in one evening.’10 Generic eclecticism was completely changed by serials such as Vampires and Fantômas. The length of the average film also increased. The tendency to make long films began in 1911, an evolution that was complete by about 1920,11 although one may still find a program of ten films in 1914 in which generally two to three reels are shown (and where continuous entrance was permitted). New, significant films were shown in episodes, as, for example, Revenge at the ‘Coliseum.’12 The price of admission varied from place to place and also depended upon the time of day. Sometimes reductions were announced: ‘discounts: first gallery – thirty, second – twenty five, third – fifteen kopecks.13 Three years later, prices went up to fifty-five, forty, and twenty kopecks, respectively (although, at the ‘Express,’ they were only thirty, twenty, and ten kopecks). The Schtremer Movie Theatre advertised an ‘American ticket’: two-for-one, ranging in price from fifteen to fifty kopecks.’14 Schantzer’s Movie Theatre assured audiences that ‘because of the cinema’s anniversary, the price of tickets is considerably reduced.15 From that point on, the average official cost of tickets becomes twenty kopecks. One got progressively used to seeing the phrase: ‘Seats are sold at standard prices.’ From this, we can better understand the delight of a young intelligent who later nostalgically recalled his Kyivan past: ‘In 1907, having received one rouble and fifty kopecks to buy Kraievych’s book on physics, I spent it all at the cinematograph.’16 He had had the opportunity to go to the movies seven times! Despite its successes, the cinematograph was still being treated as entertainment of a very low quality. This status demanded ‘rehabilitative’ gestures in the form of support from other, more ‘noble,’ arts. Thus, in the ‘Contemporary Theatre’ (Suchasny teatr) in 1912, film reels take up the entr’actes of the live theatre show. For its part, the theatre responded to its young rival: in 1913 at the ‘Apollo’ the

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5.3 Poster for Louis Feuillade’s Fantômas (1913–14)

operetta ‘The Cinematograph’s Reel’ was produced as a direct ‘immersion’ into the new modes of popular entertainment. Another solution was to descend directly into the maelstrom of the marketplace: Thus, the fairly common appearance of such events as ‘two shows at the cinematograph ... after each showing – live Wild Men: twenty-five black men, women, and children from West Africa. Scenes and manners from their daily life.’17 And this at the same time as Isadora Duncan performed in Kyiv! Other such examples include the announcement at Miianovsky’s Theatre that, after the ‘comedy,’ a separate act, ‘The Mind-Reader Sofia Ratush’ would take place and, later, at the same location, ‘A Skating Championship,’ and ‘A Championship Fight of Real Lady Prize-Fighters.’ At Schtremer’s, the film Beyond All Is Love (1915) was followed by the ‘kino-declamation of the well-known actor V.A. Morsky (‘What is kino-declamation? It’s a new type of cinema-art which is winning over the public’).18

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5.4 Schantzer Theatre in Kyiv, upper foyer (with the permission of Yuri Tsivian)

The terrific Zigomar (1911), directed by Victorin-Hippolyte Jasset, included the ‘performance of a violoncello virtuoso.’ On 27 November 1911 the Kyiv spectator was offered a view of ‘the electric chair in America ... a scientific sensation, and the concert tour of the American Mr Bisgan.’19 In 1912, we have an exhibition of a group of monkeys – and all this back-to-back with the showing of film reels. Thus, it is completely understandable that there were inappropriate reactions from the spectators who, in turn, were urged by the management: ‘During the showing, kindly do not walk about, stand, or talk loudly.’20 In order to retain their clientele, the theatres offered different levels of comfort: ‘good-quality ventilation – not hot’ announced an advertisement in 1915;21 ‘stronger ventilation ... temperature not higher than 16 degrees’ was announced in the summer of 1917;22 ‘the theatre has once again been renovated and refurbished,’ we read about the movie theatre of A. Schantzer.23 Also – and necessarily – there was a program of musical accompaniment, the number of instruments sometimes reaching those of a large orchestra: forty players for the jubilee 1812 by V. Honcharov, K. Hansen, and A. Uralsky at the ‘Corso’ movie theatre in 1912 (shown at three locations at least in the city) or even sixty players (The World Reversed) at Schreder’s in 1913. Alternatively, one could find a potpourri of twenty-three musical fragments – by Schubert, Mozart, Beethoven, Rossini ... – to ‘illustrate’ Quo vadis? (1913). The daily practice of showing films was built on the thematic suitability of the aural to the visual, so that, for example, the melodrama The Soul of a Child (1916) was, according to the newspaper advertisement, to be accompanied either by the ‘Marche funèbre’ of Chopin or the G minor symphony of Mozart (1913). In reality what happened was more or less the following: From the hall drifted the hammering sounds of the piano, then the first violin sounded screechily, followed by the contrabass which grinded out its own awful noise, stubbornly

Film in Kyiv, 1910–1916 145 insisting with all its strength on the lower notes ... From the sounds which occurred at that moment, ‘The Writer’ could imagine the drama on the screen, when blood flowed, or when an abandoned and betrayed woman wept over the cradle of a little child born just the previous day.24

And so one can understand Kurbas’s ‘film fatigue,’ not expressed until 1925, when the situation of film demonstrations seemed to have actually changed for the better: ‘One can’t sit as long at a film as in the theatre. It’s tiring. When any one of us tried to watch two films in a row, we sat through the second showing with greater fatigue. That’s because music is used as background there, and it isn’t completely dedicated to the purpose of guiding the spectator.’25 In addition to these problems, the film operator frequently confused the reels, and the narrator who commented on the action was not always ready to re-orient himself; as a result, for example, the spectator might at first see ‘Vesuvius on the screen and the launching of a battleship, while the commentator continued to babble on about natural history and about some sort of pollen.’26 The general cacophony of impressions was abetted by one other situation which did not bypass the attention of a man of the time (who also incidentally noticed ‘even the intelligentsia’ among the masses of spectators): ‘On all the images appeared superscripts in different languages: French, German, English. In one play taken from ancient Greek life based on a text adapted from Schiller, each sequence was accompanied by superscripts with German poetry. Obviously, the assumption about the audience’s philological knowledge knew no bounds. Sometimes it happened that there were Russian superscripts, but these were little understood by the average spectator ... in as much as, stylistically, they did not serve to replace the image of “pretty Janet” or “the apparition of a dead sack.”’27 In such conditions inquiries about why there were no Ukrainian superscripts were superfluous. If inside there was confusion, outside, the entry to the temple of the tenth Muse looked very appealing and effective: ‘A huge advertisement flamed out from the cinematograph.’28 And that decided all. The Film Repertoire from 1910 to 1914 One is struck by the dominance on the Kyiv screens of films produced in France, an objective reflection of their leadership in this field at that time in the world. Such a specific genre as the ‘the fantasy’ or the ‘fairy tale’ ( féerique), which permitted the young art form to diverge from the documentary line of the Lumière brothers, took a back seat in film programs, occupying a not-very-prestigious third or fourth place. The general number of ‘fairy tales’ on the screens of Kyiv firmly declined. We note such examples in 1910 as Proud Diana, Snow White, The Charmed Tree, and Fred Sato and His Demonic Dogs; in 1911, Castle Mirage and Le Songe d’une nuit d’été; in 1912, La Légende des tulipes d’or and Journey to the North Pole (perhaps directed by the renowned Méliès under the title The Conquest of the Pole; his old chef d’oeuvre, Trip to the Moon, 1902, was shown at Miianovsky’s Theatre in an ‘extra showing’ on 10 September ten years later). In 1913 we find Knight of the Snows, Ali Baba, La forge infernale, and La boîte aux cigares (all directed by Segundo

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5.5 Poster for Le Bargy’s L’Assassinat du duc de Guise (1908)

de Chomón). (One cannot exclude the possibility that there were many more such films; I have named only those identified as ‘fantastic’; in that respect, the generic tags applied in this essay to other genres and their creators follow the same principle.) Not a few of these were especially aimed at screenings for children, a fact which demonstrates the logic of the artistic process that, at the beginning of the 1910s, had completed its early stage of infancy, and which was paradoxically reflected in the thematic priorities of early filmmaking – especially the interest (from the time of the Lumière brothers) in the ‘theme of infants.’29 From here we make an interesting excursion into the poetics of the ‘family album’ in early cinematography.30 The association of ‘Film d’art’ lived out an even shorter lifespan, beginning with its triumphant L’Assasinat du Duc de Guise (1908), after which it attempted to introduce the principles of ‘high aesthetics,’ but without its expected commercial success. Perhaps this explains the episodic nature of the appearance of their films on the movie screens of the city. In 1910, Cleopatra: ‘Inimitable,’ claimed an advertisement of the time.31 Other films included La Tosca (1909), produced by Charles Le Bargy with Sarah Bernhardt (who, in France, was able to have this film removed from the screens); Napoleon, Man of Destiny and The

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Call of the Blood (1913). Les Misérables, directed in 1912 by Albert Capellani (a rival competitor of the Association of Dramatists and Authors), clearly achieved a notable popularity in Kyiv. Not all films achieved such success. Meeting with fiasco because of its regressive return to the womb of theatrical art, ‘Film d’art’ was responsible for the creation of a whole series of film adaptations of literary texts, though without its earlier academic pedantry and without stars of the stage (we will look at this issue more carefully in the ‘thematic’ section, below). ‘Noble subjects – that is what film demanded of literature and theatre, trying to tempt a moneyed public into the movie theatre rather than the audience found at the marketplace puppet shows.’32 But even in 1926 Kurbas himself observed: ‘Classical dramaturgy ... is important still today in its construction, inasmuch as it arose out of a certain understanding of the laws of human reception.’33 Instead, comic films reached their apogee. Their worthy – though not unchallenged – representative in the pre-war period was Max Linder (born GabrielMaximilien Leuville), whose creative influence on Kurbas has been confirmed by documentary evidence. Indeed, the Ukrainian master set up his rehearsals with the comedic talent of the French actor in mind. Iryna Avdiieva recalled, ‘We all always copied someone ... We were training ourselves that way ... The unfashionable Max Linder with his Fool’s Face mask.’34 Typically, she confuses two popular French artists, the latter being André Deed (whose Russian pseudonym was ‘Glupyshkin,’ Fool-Face), who at the time seemed to have been ‘anachronistic’ in comparison with his younger contemporary (Linder). ‘I was terrified when I witnessed the success of Glupyshkin,’ wrote Kondradi in an article dedicated to Max Linder’s visit to Petrograd (he arrived in Kyiv in December).35 That occasion provoked an angry letter to the editor from a ‘Petro Yu.’: ‘And so the students carried Glupyshkin on their arms from the cabin of the train to the automobile as if he were an expensive jewel.’36 This is an odd confusion of names (Glupyshkin for Max), since Linder’s comedies were advertised and screened (in Kyiv as well as elsewhere) under the established persona called simply ‘Max,’ a gallant, worldly trickster, adventurer, and dandy. For lack of space, I will simply enumerate only a few of the films in which his name appears: Le Duel d’un monsieur myope, Max Patineur, Max est distrait, Max se trompe d’étage, Domestique hypnotiseur, Max manque un riche mariage (all from 1910), La Malle au mariage, Max prend un bain (Max Takes a Bath), Max se marie, Max Wants a Divorce, Max veut faire du theatre, Max dans sa famille (also known as Max en convalescence) (from 1911), Max lance la mode, Max reprend sa liberté, Max et son chien Dick, Le Roman de Max, Max contre Nick Winter, Max jongleur par amour, Max escamoteur (also known as Succès de la prestidigitation), Un Pari original, Max et les femmes (1912), Max pratique tous les sports, Max est charitable, Max fait des conquêtes, Le Duel de Max, Max virtuose (1913), Max asthmatique, Max Décorée, Max, Professeur de Tango, Max pédicure, and L’Anglais tel que Max le parle (1914). This is an incomplete list because it does not include his ‘nameless’ clips (such as ‘Marriage via the Telephone’ or ‘A Fearless Knight,’ his films produced between 1914 and 1917, or clips shot earlier). Despite service in the army, wounding, and a

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5.6 Max Linder

5.7 Asta Nielsen

subsequent lengthy medical treatment, he continued to be popular and his films continued to be shown on Kyiv screens. They were often repeated, sometimes under different titles, as well as in clips. In the most modest estimate, his films numbered over a hundred.37 To be fair, one should note that the comedies of André Deed (born André Chapuis) were also shown in Kyiv, though not quite as many: around forty comedies in the pre-Revolutionary period. Deed’s character was known as Boireau in France (later, he was renamed Gribouille), Cretinetti in Italy, Foolshead in England, and Glupyshkin in the Russian empire. His films included Boireau fait la noce (1908); Cretinetti si vuol suicidare (1909); Cretinetti impiegato di banca (Glupyshkin in the Bank), Cretinetti vittima della sua onestà (Glupyshkin, Victim of His Own Honesty), Cretinetti e il pallone, Cretinetti pescatore, Cretinetti vuol sposare la figlia del padrone (from 1910); Cretinetti al cinematografo (Glupyshkin at the Cinematograph, known in English as Foolshead at the Cinematograph) (from 1911); Cretinetti fattorino telegrafico (Glupyshkin the Telegrapher), Cretinetti domestico, Boireau, roi de la boxe (Glupyshkin, King of Boxing) (from 1912); André Deed veut être comique, Les Incohérences de Boireau (from 1913); and many, many others to 1916. The simultaneous existence in the repertoire of this time of two such different actors who never appeared together is a good indication of the syncretic nature of artistic life and is also an indicator of the absence of any basic hierarchy of creativity. The result, however, is a confusion of names even though the names are not at all alike. One may risk the assumption that Kurbas’s critique of the ‘naively talented, naively creative trapeze-jumpers of the balagan’ refers in part to Deed/ Glupyshkin.38 Of course, the ‘comic kaleidoscope’ in Kyiv was not exhausted by these two actors’ personas. We also meet the unlucky, marginal Rulanov (first name unknown; the short-lived character of Distorted Object, 1914), as well as the Englishman known by the name of ‘Little Peek’ (Little Became a Soldier, 1911). Also, the American John Bunny, known in Kyiv and throughout Russia as ‘Packson,’ ‘a comic character actor’ who played in domestic comedies of ‘middle class life ... avoiding all the eccentricities of the circus.’39 After his death in 1915, he was replaced in Russia by

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an imitator-impersonator, V. Zimovy. Bunny appeared in Pseudo Sultan, Chased by Bloodhounds, A Persistent Lover, The Troublesome Step-Daughters (1912) and Flaming Hearts (1913), among many others. There is no possibility of objectively classifying and evaluating this boundless sea of films, if only because few of them have survived to our day. They were all described in rhetorically similar terms: ‘laughter guaranteed,’ ‘an evening of laughter,’ ‘laugh ’til you cry,’ ‘Homeric laughter,’ ‘roaring laughter’ (the last in reference to a clip of Władysław Starewicz!). Their themes were all of the domesticmarriage variety: A Mirror for Lovers, My Fiancée Was a Good Wife, The Legend of the Lost Arrow, Le Mariage forcé, and Bob Cures Love Fever (about two dozen comedies were linked to the name of this hero; a similar situation with ‘Durashkin’-Fool, who toured Kyiv at the end of 1911). In third (or perhaps second) place, at least in terms of the number of films, it is worth placing Charles Prince (born Charles Petit-Demange Seigneur) in his character of Rigadin, who has received little scholarly attention in Ukraine. (Prince was known as ‘Whiffles’ in England, ‘Prenz’ in Russia, ‘Moritz’ in Germany, ‘Salustiano’ in Spain, and so on.) We thus need to turn to a French scholar for comment: ‘The scene-writers forced him to experience hundreds of transformations which – contrary to the adventures of Max – had nothing in common with each other. A catalogue of his roles is funnier than the films themselves which lack liveliness and high imagination.’40 Indeed, it is worth at least listing some of his clips which were shown in Kyiv: La Doctresse, Rigadin cambrioleur, Rigadin n’est pas sage (1910), Le Nez de Rigadin (1911), Rigadin ténor, Rigadin et la lettre anonyme, Rigadin et le chien de la baronne, La Garçonnière, Le Ménage de Rigadin, Rigadin domestique, Rigadin et la baguette magique, Rigadin aux Balkans, Rigadin manchot, Un nouvel exploit de Rigadin, Rigadin et le poudre d’amour (1912), Rigadin veut fair du cinema, Rigadin Napoléon, Rigadin père nourricier, Rigadin trahi par un baiser, Rigadin, président de la république, Rigadin et la fourmilière, Vénus enlevée par Rigadin (1913), Rigadin victime de l’amour (1914), and many others. Oddly, Zigoto (Zigoto et l’affaire de la patte de bretelles et du bouton de culotte, 1912) appeared on Kyiv screens only as a fragment of a series filmed by Durant in the absurdist style, and as another fragment, though in a similar style, with Onésime (Ernest Bourbon) (Onésime, l’amour vous appelle, 1912). From this, one may conclude that the comedy of burlesque was not hugely successful in Kyiv, neither in the theatre nor in film. In 1923 Kurbas had wished that this genre would disappear altogether, along with ‘painted stage trees.’41 Comedy was not the only genre which French artists took up; they also created fine examples of melodrama, such as Les deux orphélines, The Blind Banker (1910), Life for Love (1911), Bloody Chrysanthemum, Étapes de l’amour (1912), and Dance of Love, Dance of Death (1913); filmed classics such as The West (Albert Capellani, 1910); and, especially, the ‘detective-thriller.’ The truly remarkable Zigomar of Victorin Jasset (already mentioned above) played in Kyiv ‘during one hour’ in October 1911 and was shown again at the beginning of 1914. Examples of social drama include Le Circuit de l’alcool (1912) of the Pathé brothers, ‘a drama of current life which truly stunned its viewers … Its images left everyone without exception with unforgettable impressions.’42 Some of these films will be discussed in greater

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detail below. The rest are forgettable: their ‘one-night-stand’ status of artistic creativity did not leave much room for an expression of individual or national characteristics, something which cannot be said about comedy. There were fewer German films than French, though just before the war their numbers increased considerably. People in Kyiv had the opportunity to see melodrama with the young star Henny Porten (Der Feind im Land, Der Weg des Lebens, Das Opfer, 1913; Das Tal des Traumes, Ihre Hohzeit, Die Grosse Sünderin, 1914), who very quickly became the national symbol of that country: ‘the monument of German art ... a heroine – a good, honest, noble German woman with golden hair and blue eyes, suffering, and sentimental in the German spirit.’43 Of course, the screening of other films was also successful, although they were shown as separate episodes, as, for example, Der König with Albert Bassermann, an actor from Max Reinhardt’s theatre, admired by Kurbas; or Der Shylock von Krakau, directed by Carl Wilhelm, both from 1913. The ‘golden years’ of German film were the 1920s. (Kurbas noted the quick decline of German production, probably connecting it with the exhaustion of the expressionistic method: ‘In movie theatres, matters are much worse. In general, in Germany one may perceive a reaction against cinema,’ he noted in 1927.)44 Even then, for the actors of Kurbas’s theatre the acting style of Paul Wegener (perhaps best known for his role in The Golem, 1915) served as one of the signposts: Wegener was an artist who began his creative activity in the 1910s but became known in Ukraine only decades later. Denmark was a different story. Along with a few other Scandinavian countries, Denmark filled the niche of ‘mystery, strangeness, passion’ (for which Russia itself frequently turned to the West). Its cultural myth was an echo of the recent literary renaissance of Northern Europe, though the films from this region were not as often based on literary texts as those in France. In terms of sheer numbers, Danish films followed right after the French and Russian; at that time they even led the Italians, whose films were quite numerous (and whose artists helped large format succeed). Of signal importance to the early Danish school of filmmaking was Asta Nielsen, although she soon became connected with German film production. Thanks to her talent, she managed to retain her unique aesthetic identity and sensibility. For the radically oriented artists of the 1920s, she was the personification of bourgeois taste: ‘without intrigue, without love, without Asta Nielsen and Vera Malynovska,’ commented Oleksander Dovzhenko about the imagistic order of his Zvenyhora, a film made just before his internationally acclaimed Earth. Kurbas knew and loved Zvenyhora,45 which sharply contrasted two poetics – that of the melodramatic cinematography of the 1910s and his own, which was in part created through and represented by the principle of ‘contrasting oppositions.’ Such distanciation obviously did not exist in the pre-war period, when Nielsen adorned films such as Im Grossen Augenblick (1911), Der fremde Vogel (1912), and Der Tod in Sevilla (1913) – a work in which the actress considered that she had distinguished herself, if just because it was not filmed in a studio, as usual, but outdoors, in Spain. She dedicated a few lines to this film in her memoirs. Nielsen also appeared in Die Sünden der Väter, Das Mädchen ohne Vaterland, Die Arme Jenny (1912), The Devil’s Assistant, Die Macht des Goldes, and Die Filmprimadonna (1913). Nielsen,

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transcribed as Nilzen, was referred to as the ‘Salomé of cinema’ by one Lviv newspaper in 1912.46 Even at that time it was deemed important for the mass audience to mention the name of the usual director of her films, her then husband Urban Gad (often transcribed as Hood, whereas Asta was once referred to as Ida). So, for example, in the announcement for Heisses Blut (also known as Burning Blood, 1911), he was also introduced as ‘the author of the play Afgrunden (The Abyss, 1910), which was turned into a film and marked Nielsen’s debut (‘a model of the genre ... a true revolution in the actor’s art’).47 In a characteristic stroke of the time, the first of the abovementioned works played at Miianovsky’s movie theatre together with the musical concert tour of the eccentrics Pozer and Parkin, a fact which once again shows that the filmmaker, despite his successes, still had not achieved sovereignty within the system of commercial exhibition. The typical production of the ‘Nordisk’ company, which offered examples of national art, was stylistically somewhat different from the films noted above. (‘U. Gad and I chose the repertoire ourselves; we were quite successful in fighting the standardization which dominated film at that time,’ noted Nielsen).48 However, even at Nordisk, they depended on ‘burning passion’ which circulated in the limited, hermetic space of the action. The French historian Georges Sadoul was right, when he noted: This world was born out of folk tale–based novels and worldly dramas fashionable in Germany and other Scandinavian countries. With all its improbabilities, it had something in common with the higher company of Vienna and Berlin that was grouped around the Habsburgs and the Hohenzollerns. This rich aristocracy was coming apart: princes of blood were replaced by orchestra directors who were running after real princesses, and merchants spent all their money on actresses.49

Afterwards, Kurbas summed things up, perhaps reflecting on the Danish film repertoire of the 1910s, which provided more glaring examples of this genre: ‘There are facts that are created not by people but with people, connected more or less effectively with the dynamics of the mise-en-scène, the alteration of scenes, of landscapes. In essence – cine-drama.’50 It is impossible not to agree with him after looking through the repertoire list in Kyiv: The Blackmailer’s Trap, The Student’s Nightmare, The Ashes of Life, The Oath of Silence, The Power of Impudent Beauty, The Criminal Baroness, The End of the Swan-Song (1912), Old Passion Did Not Die, By Sorrowful Way, The Providential Retribution, The Winning Ticket, The Carnival of Horrors (1913), and others. We must mention two early Danish attempts to interpret Shakespeare on film, Ophelia in 1911 and Desdemona in 1912. As we know, Kurbas himself was deeply interested in Shakespeare and, in April 1919, began rehearsing Romeo and Juliet. Shortly thereafter, he staged Macbeth and returned to this play four times; the 1924 version was one of his best productions. Film versions of the classics made in France and England were also shown in Kyiv. These included King Lear (1910), Shylock (1911), and Hamlet (1914) with the renowned John Forbes-Robertson. The great attraction in all these films was the wonderful acting, especially that of

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Valdemar Plisander, renamed Harrison throughout movie theatres of the Russian empire. He appeared in Den Sorte Kansler, Ein Hofintrige (1912), I Killed but I Am Not Guilty, The Greatness of Soul, Guldmønten, Et Skud i mørket (1913), The Last Chord Is Struck, A Moment of Happiness … a Moment of Suffering (1913), and Fun without Love (1914). Together with Ebba Thomsen, he appeared in The Triumph of Inevitability, Love Sacrificed at the Altar of Art, Love and Crown, The Cynicism of Game, The Bloody Outcome, and The Sun of Love (1913). Also of note were Lily Beck (also known as Lili Beck and Lilli Beck; in Vampyren, 1913) and Betty Nansen (Moderen, 1914). At first glance, the melodramas of the ‘southern school’ (Italy) did not radically differ from the film productions of the ‘northern schools’: ‘a young and beautiful duchess who, because of fortune’s whimsy, becomes a circus actress,’ announced the Italian film Under the Impetus of Despair,51 which could have easily appeared on the Danish horizon, as could The Tigress (1911) or The Fugitive (1912). This tendency/direction was represented by films in which appeared the greatest star of the 1910s, Francesca Bertini: Cheap People, Life Passes by, L’Arrivista, Per la sua gioia (1913), Una Donna (1914), and others. The ‘niche of humour’ was taken up by Scandolini; his comedies appeared on Kyiv’s screens from time to time, such as Scandolini at His Mother-in-Law’s Name-Day Party (1911). The particular qualities of early Italian cinematography were retrospectivism, gigantomania, and visual abundance, for which the heroic national past served as foundation. Thus, for example, Happiness Returned (1910) offered scenes from ‘life in the Middle Ages,’ Rebellious Spirit (1913) was the biography of the ‘Italian Joan of Arc,’ and The Rape of the Sabine Women (1910) needs no other comment. The Fall of Troy (1910) was remarkable not only for 25 ‘changes’ but also for ‘lush costumes from La Scala’ and 1000 extras. Announcements for Spartacus (1914) claimed the appearance of 20,000 actors. While the numbers actually filmed may have been slightly fewer, the total was still impressive, as sources suggest: ‘There was never such a picture and it is doubtful if there ever will be another such in the future, because they won’t find the people to put on such a picture with such tremendous– mad luxury–abundance–sensuality–voluptuousness.’52 These words apply to Enrico Guazzoni’s Quo vadis?, a film which, on 25 April 1913, appeared on the screens of the ‘Renaissance’ and the ‘Corso’; it was reissued at the beginning of September that year. The exclusive rights to the showing of Arturo Ambrosio’s The Last Days of Pompeii (Gli ultimi giorni di Pompei, 1913) were negotiated in advance by the offices of I. Orlovsky (the film was later shown at the ‘Corso’ and the ‘New Theatre’). And, oddly, though it is a fact, screenings of two dramas of Gabriele d’Annunzio, La Figlia di Iorio (1911) and Crucifixion of the Venetian Woman (based on the motifs of La Nave, 1912), probably better reflected the creativity of this contradictory writer than Cabiria, which was advertised as this author’s creation, even though d’Annunzio limited himself to writing jut a few lines and inventing the names of the characters (the real author was Giovanni Pastrone). Jumping ahead for a moment, it is worth noting that this film, the greatest achievement of Italian filmmakers in the historical genre, arrived in Kyiv only after the February Revolution. However, it had previously made an imagist impression on the ‘Babylonian episode’ of D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance. We know that Kurbas knew about this film and perhaps made use of its technical discoveries as well as those of Cabiria when he

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5.8 Scene from Giovanni Pastrone’s Cabiria (1914)

prepared the design for a production on a similar theme, Lesia Ukrainka’s Babylonian Captivity, directed by Hnat Ihnatovych in 1923.53 By contrast, the films produced in the United States did not at first seem to reach beyond the boundaries of exoticism of representation, even though they were much in demand in Kyiv. At least this is the only way to explain the subtitle of The Heart of a Beast: ‘Clips from the life of the half-wild cowboys of America’ – and the three days dedicated to showings of ‘the American genre’ which took place in July 1912 at the ‘Corso,’ which offered themes swinging from The Horrors of War to The Breeding of Ostriches in California. The most important American genre of that period was the western. In this category we find Indians (1910), Drama in the Wilds of Alaska, A Cowboy’s Jealousy (1911), Revenge and Self-Immolation: From the Life of Cowboys, and Under Colorado Skies (1912). Comedy also reigned. Packson, already mentioned above, was soon replaced by his Russian double. Chaplin appeared in Kyiv movie theatres during the First World War, but Max Linder was preferred over both of these comedians. Among the early examples of American comedy we may also find the ‘duet’ of the eccentrics Murray and Konda (Misadventures of a New York Policeman: Comic Scenes from American Life, 1911, Adventures of a New Cook, 1912).

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5.9 Babylonian scene from D.W. Griffth’s Intolerance (1916)

A small number of films with a domestic or instructional purpose included Manufacture of Plates and Dishes in America (1912) and How the Printing Press Works in America (1913). These are, of course, works of the pre-Hollywood period of film (although one may also add to this list North against South by the Vitagraph studio, 1912, and, of course, the western, which would soon take up an important place in the newly created hierarchy of the system). Without a doubt, Kurbas’s precise characterization of the American commercial film as the creation of the ‘factory of dreams’ and as a ‘tool of entertainment’ (as he noted in his lectures on directing),54 was, for the most part, grounded in his impressions of the repertoire of the 1920s, in which the structure of the ‘happy ending’ dominated and which seemed inevitable in Uncle Sam’s Will or The Adventures of Mister Smith (1911); in any case, the lessons of most of the westerns of that time did not preclude the wisdom of ‘marrying one’s daughter to a millionaire’ (as Kurbas emphasized in his lecture). The peak of production, for Russia, came during the First World War (discussed below). The observations of the writer Mykola Bazhan are significant here: ‘There was obvious unwillingness in the studios where the old, pre-Revolutionary Aleksandr Khanzhonkov tradition reigned ... to give Les Kurbas the opportunity to initiate Ukrainian filmmaking’55 (as also suggested by Irena Makaryk in her essay in this volume ‘Dissecting Time’).

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5.10 Aleksandr Khanzhonkov

5.11 Scene from Władysław Starewicz’s Cameraman’s Revenge (1912)

We could question Bazhan’s opinion, but we should also underscore both Kurbas’s undoubted, recognizable connectedness to his age, and Khanzhonkov’s ability to profit from his well-deserved glory. (One of Khanzhonkov’s scenographers was Aleksandr Deich, who, already in 1916, had welcomed Kurbas as an actor.)56 Many of Khanzhkonkov’s clips were seen on the screens of Kyiv. Some had brash advertisements – as was the case with his The Defense of Sebastopol, shown in December 1911 in the Circus on Mykolaivsky Street (‘screened in Livadiia in the presence of His Imperial Highness, the Lord Emperor ... Music especially composed by H.A. Kozachenko. Prices from 20 kopecks to 20 rubles. Discounts for students’).57 This film already struck contemporaries with its anachronisms and infelicities (‘The heroes of the defence of Sebastopol wore contemporary shirts and gym clothes ... and did not really resemble Nakhimov and Kornilov’).58 Other negative associations with this filmmaker can be found in Kurbas’s later works. Kurbas’s attitude may sometimes be explained by the context of events, for example, when Khanzhonkov invited ‘the questionable [Vladimir] Maksimov’59 (a Russian hack actor) to the Ukrainian stage instead of hiring Ukrainian actors from the Berezil. Maksimov appeared in such reels as Kashira’s Old Times (1911), Lost Heart (1912), Comedy of Death, Account of Past Delights, What a Beautiful Death (1914), and The Keys of Happiness (1913). The Keys of Happiness, directed by Yakov Protazanov, could have been known to Kurbas; it was the filmed version of Anastasia Verbitskaia’s fashionable novel. In 1926 Kurbas compared Verbitskaia with D.H. Lawrence, though he favoured the latter: ‘There is, for example, a novel about workers and country folk, Sons and Lovers of Lawrence, something like Verbitskaia, but better.’60 We should also add that Maksimov often had a positive impression of Kurbas. He went to see the shows of the Young Theatre in 1918, and wrote reviews in the Teatralnyi den

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5.12 Scene from Yevgeny Bauer’s Song of Triumphant Love (1915; also known as Singed Wings)

(Theatrical Day), optimistically assessing the theatrical scene of those times: ‘Soon, very soon, the Ukrainian theatre will take its place among the premier theatres of the civilized world.’61 The Ukrainian spectator/reader of the 1910s was probably unaware of the many ‘Ukrainian aspects’ of The Keys of Happiness, which represented the nature and culture of Ukraine with undisguised sympathy and enthusiasm, even though they were unnecessary to the film version of the novel. Yet, truth be told, the artistic value of both the novel and the film is not very high.62 On the other hand, an indisputable addition to the art of the film were the animations of Ladislas Starewitch (born Władysław Starewicz) created by the studio of Khanzhonkov,63 which appeared in Kyiv in November 1912 (The Cameraman’s Revenge at the ‘Express’) and in February 1913 (The Grasshopper and the Ant at the ‘Corso’), and resulted in the reviewer’s mystification: ‘In this picture the actors have been replaced by beetles. Nothing like this has been seen before in the film world.’ This fabulist genre brought to the screen the much anthologized fable of Ivan Krylov. ‘This picture, played by beetles, at times induces a hearty laugh.’64 No less important were the first works of Yevgeny Bauer. In The 300th Anniversary of the House of the Romanovs, where he appeared in the role of a director’s assistant,

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5.13 Yevgeny Bauer

the emphasis was placed not only on an external logic but also on the artistic inspiration of ‘the works of Konstantin Makovsky, Viktor Vasnetsov, Ivan Blibin.’65 Among his works are Child of the Big City and Life in Death (1914). Bauer is connected with early attempts to create a single mood in a film. According to Valentin Turkin, ‘A divine melancholy reigned over the soul of Bauer and the best of his pictures were created in the twilight of this sad feeling.’66 Bauer was a much anticipated and desired presence in Kyiv, where he was to take up teaching film art at Kurbas’s Studio, but was prevented from doing so by his death in 1917.67 The films of the ‘Russian Gold Series’ (Russkaia zolotaia seriia) were also shown in pre-Revolutionary Kyiv, as, for example, Corpse No. 1346 (1912) and The Purchased Man (1913). These films featured the acting techniques of the leading actors of Russia: Moscow’s Korsh-Borisov and Krieger (If a Woman Wants Something, She Will Fool the Devil, 1914), the actors of the Alexander and Mariinsky theatres in St Petersburg (When the Heart Should Keep Silent, 1914), and especially those of the Moscow Art Theatre (The Rival of Zelim-Khan, 1914). Kurbas criticized attempts at recreating nature particularly harshly: ‘The Moscow Art Theatre has taken this to an absurd level: a complete imitation of nature, the choice of actors made in order to replicate the personality of characters in the play – a denial of acting on stage.’68 Of course, the reality of film was tempered by elements other than theatrical reality. The actors often went into film to make easy money and perhaps also to flesh out their professional experience – although the results were not always positive. The screens of Kyiv were filled not only with films with pretensions to artistic value (whether justified or not), but also with a great many reels – ‘shows’ – whose contents are exhausted by their titles: The Blue Shores of Italy, View of the Bosphorus and Constantinople, The Pyrenees, Monte Carlo, Norwegian Fjords, Grotto in Capri, Seville (1910), The Shores of Genoa’s Harbour, Near the Shores of Sorrento, In the Beauty of Hungary (Tatra Mountains), Blue Danube, Monaco in High Season, Castles of Bavaria, Jerusalem, Ancient Monuments of Italy (1911), Poetic Corners of Belgium, Picturesque Brittany, In the Valleys of Alberta, The Beauties of the Tirol, Corsica, New Athens, Mountain Views of the Alps, The Border between Italy and Switzerland, the Simpleton Tunnel, Toledo (1912), Castles on the Rhine, On the Sails of Christiania, New Zealand, In Abruzzo, Picturesque Catalonia, Tivoli and Its Fountains, and The River Clyde in Scotland (1913).69

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In numerical terms, French topics dominated once again, perhaps because the operators at Pathé and ‘Echo’ shot them. The films shown in Kyiv include Le Charme des fleurs (1910), La Porte de Toulouse (1910), The Harbour of Brest (1911), L’Automne en France du Sud, Le Grand et le Petit Trianon, Les Chutes des Vosges (1912), Les Beautés de Normandie, and Les rivières de la France (1913). Ukrainian topics were fewer in number, with the exception of films of annual church holidays, official chronicles, urban ‘exoticism,’ and flashes of ‘la dolce vita’ – accenting ‘life in the provincial capitals.’ These included The Anniversary Holidays of Poltava, The Effects of the Downpour in Kyiv on 2 July, Trotting Races in Kyiv, The Way of the Cross on St Volodymyr’s Day (1910); Baptism in the Dnipro 6 January, Excursion of the Teachers at the Stelmashenko Gymnasium, The Formation of Ice in 20 Degree Frost in Odesa (1911); The Funeral of Police-Victims of Their Service in Pushcha-Vodytsia, Kyiv, Fire on Prorizna Street, Great Flood on the Dnipro (1912); Kyiv and Its Environs from an Airplane, Arrival in Kyiv of the Pochaiv Mother of God from Zhytomyr on Its Way to Petersburg on the Occasion of the Icon’s 300th Anniversary, and Arrival of the Patriarch of Antioch in Kyiv, on His Way to Moscow (1913). There were also films whose major interest was conveying scientific information (The Swimming Beetle and Its Larva, Massage and Water Therapy, The Life of Microbes in the Organism, 1910; Research in Thin Air, Scientific Understanding of the Plague, The Unseen Rays of the Roentgen, Titmice, Eucharistic Gathering in Vienna, 1911; Geometry in Nature, 1912; Drunkenness and Its Consequences, The Anatomy of Plants, Food and Its Positive Values, and Breeding Trout, 1913). The advertising blurbs for some of these ‘displays’ reveal the aesthetics of the works: ‘pictures which caress the sight,’ ‘beautiful pictures from nature,’ ‘magical sights from nature.’ In his programmatic article ‘Aesthetics’ (1923), Les Kurbas warned: ‘Woe to those who give into “display” for passive consumption, for the love of beauty.’70 But the real ‘hits’ were films which displayed scenes of great hardship or disaster: The Last Flight of Wilbur Wright’s Airplane in the Presence of King Edward VII, The Great Fire at the Brussels Exhibition, The Cyclone in Southern Italy, 1910; The Loss of the Armoured ‘Texas’ at the Battle of Santiago-di-Cuba, and the Horrific Catastrophe at the Paris-Madrid Airshow, 1911. The pseudo-documentary The Titanic, or In the Face of Death was shown at the ‘Artes’ three and five months after the real event on 14 April 1912. Other reels impressed with their themes. Kyiv saw the following reels with competitions in sport: French Wrestling, Dextrous Acrobats, Gymnastics of Bertellier (1910); Sportsmen of Indo-China, Water Skiing in the Hawaiian Islands, World Championship of Wrestling at the Exhibition in Turin (1911); Ju-Jitsu, The Stockholm Olympic Games, Sport on the Dnipro: Water Football (1912); Athletics Competition in Rio de Janiero, Swedish Gymnastics, and Gymnastics Festival in the Kyiv-Pecherska Gymnasium and the Opening of a Sports Velodrome (1913). There were also ‘choreographic’ films such as Brazilian Matchish, Cambodian Dances (1910); New Dance: Taruel (1911); Vampire-Woman: With a Performance of the ‘Vampire’ Dance (1912); Frou-Frou: Dancers of the Royal Corps de Ballet (1913); Hiawatha: With the Participation of Hilda the Dancer, and The New Dance Turlana (1914). Films such as The Fashionable Tango, The Queen of Tango (1913), Everyone in Russia Dances the Tango, and Three Tangos (1914) might have informed Kurbas about the tango

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controversy of the pre-Revolutionary period71 and could explain his famous tango scene in Black Panther, White Bear. Later, he would revise his opinion: ‘The tango is peacefully decaying in museums.’72 Kyiv also saw many films on social and ethnic themes. Jewish themes were actively taken up by Ester Blekhman (1911), The Rabbi’s Daughter, The Jewess-Convert (1912), and Esfir: Drama from Jewish Daily Life (1913). (On this topic, also see Irena Makaryk’s ‘Dissecting Time,’ below.) The ‘woman’s question’ was also touched upon by filmmakers in 1913 – though not without a hint of mockery or dramatic effect: Packson, The Defender of Women’s Equality, Contemporary Women (at the Nordisk studio), and Brothers (‘this drama treats the question of the diseased situation of the contemporary family’).73 The footprints of the polemics of that day can be found in the film version of Anna Karenina, as well as in the countless melodramas on the theme of the dishonoured woman. For example, on 29 November 1913, Czesław Sabinsky’s Kateryna was shown in Kyiv at the ‘Express’ as well as at Schtremer’s theatre. Finally, an impressive number of films based on classical drama appeared. In the second decade of film’s existence filmmakers turned to a great variety of authors. Shakespeare has already been mentioned. There were also Russian films about classical antiquity, such as Elektra (1910), which remind us of Kurbas’s staged Oedipus Rex in 1918. More rare were films based on the Middle Ages or Renaissance, such as Jerusalem Delivered, Twenty-two Scenes from Dante’s Inferno, 1911, and Siegfried, 1912. Romantics such as Schiller (Intrigue and Love, 1911; The Robbers, 1913) were treated more frequently. ‘We are Schillerians,’ said Borys Tiahno, alluding to the community spirit of the Berezil).74 Other writers of the nineteenth century represented included Byron (Don Juan, 1913); Victor Hugo (Ruy Blais, 1911); Théophile Gauthier (Le Roman de la momie, 1911); Honoré de Balzac (La Peau de chagrin, 1910); Alphonse Daudet (Le Nabob, 1913); Charles Dickens (Oliver Twist, 1910); Alfred, Lord Tennyson (Lancelot and Elaine,1910); Adam Mickiewicz (Fall of Granada, 1910); Alfred de Musset (Lorenzaccio, 1911); and Stefan ĩeromski (A Story of Sin, 1911). Also frequently shown were contemporary popular writers, as for example Gaston Leroux (Baloo, 1913); C. de Montepain (Pain Peddler, 1912); P. du Teraille (Bloody Money, 1913); J. Clarency (Under the Guillotine’s Blade, 1912); and Octave Feuillet (Everyday Storms, 1913). Particularly popular were the authors of Fantômas, brought to the screen by Louis Feuillade. For example, on 26 August 1913 at the ‘New Theatre’ (Novy teatr) the second of a two-part series, Juve contre Fantômas, was preceded by this eloquent announcement: ‘340m of enrapturing subject matter and extraordinary production ... [with] continuous entry.’75 Writers of the European decadence were rarely shown; the few examples are Arthur Schnitzler (Flirtation, 1914), Oscar Wilde (Salome), and Hugo von Hoffmanstahl (The Strange Girl, 1913). Kurbas was interested in the last of these, judging by his impressions of Berlin, where, among the events of that season, he listed Reinhardt’s Miracle.76 Doubtless he knew Schnitzler more than just in passing (he also mentions him in his own translation of Victor Auburtin’s ‘Drama and Stage’). (Later in this volume, Anna Veselovska discusses the stage productions of Schnitzler and Wilde in Kyiv.) There were also screen versions of Gerhart Hauptmann’s Atlantis (1913); of works by Émile Zola and Guy de Maupassant (mentioned in Kurbas’s ‘Questions

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about the Analysis of the Play as a Theatrical Problem’)77 and Honour of the Officer Guard (1910); and Nana (1912), a not accidental reference to Goethe78 and to his Werther (1910). Film Repertoire, 1914–1916 Despite the reality of war, the film scene apparently did not sustain any real changes. Kurbas, along with many others of his generation, had premonitions of this cataclysm, later expressing these in his article ‘The Connection of Theatre to Contemporaneity’: ‘Each of us has memories about this [war]. Our youth passed by in a state of anticipation of it.’79 This sense of anticipation is confirmed by a whole slew of reels on military themes on the Kyiv screens during 1910–13, as for example The Belgian Army, Italy’s Artillery, Swedish Artillery, Descent of the Tank, English Manoeuvres, First Demonstration of Pictures Taken of the Russian Military Dirigible, A Day on a French Tank, Scenes from the Italo-Turkish War, Fresh Troops Seen Off to Tripoli, German Artillery Crosses a River, Cavalry Lessons in the Spanish Army, The Life of Soldiers, Around Skutari during Bombing, and The Last Battles of the Balkan War. Three months before the shots rang out in Sarajevo, Kyiv saw a film advertised as ‘mysterious Amazon: a war drama which illustrates the full horror of international espionage.’ Everything seemed expected. For example, films from countries of the Entente disappear from the screens (the exceptions were two reels in 1915 which glimmered with the German Henny Porten (Wreath of Thorns and Life for Life). The proportion of Russian films significantly increased at this time, while the number of French films decreased slightly (the comic films of Linder continued to be shown despite his service in the army). However, the general structure of significant genres did not change during the war (melodrama, comedy, detective-crime films) nor does their (not so high) prestige in society. Film continues not to be accepted as an art form. It only reaches that point in the next decade thanks to the works of Louis Deluque, whose short stories were also published in Ukraine, and were thought to be film-worthy.80 The next decade saw some truly new developments. The most important was the film-chronicle, a genre which was also significant for the period of the February Revolution. Among the reels which addressed contemporary concerns were The Siege and Seizing of Liège, The Battle near Charleroi, Wounded Soldiers in Moscow (‘nervous viewers are asked to look away because very serious operations on the wounds of the soldiers are shown’),81 Funeral of Staff Captain Nesterov in Kyiv, Russian Military Fleet – Balkan Squadron (‘the showing has been permitted and approved by the war censors’),82 Retreat of the Austrian Army in Galicia, Lviv after the Russian Army’s Occupation (‘all the filming was carried out in the battle places of Galicia),83 The Russian Army Crosses the River Sian, Rheims Cathedral Barbarously Ruined by the Germans, English Fleet in Battle Readiness, Battle in the Skies, Mobilization in Turkey (1914); Turkish Spies, Serbian Theatre of War, Algerian Regiment of Zouaves Arrives, Russian Galicia, In Eastern Prussia, English Cruiser in Battle, Great European and Russian-German War (1915), and others. ‘War pictures made good money and filmmakers rushed to make them. The war and the monarchy were much desired themes. As a result of the war, speculation

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began on the film-chronicle,’84 noted the scholar Simion Ginzburg, giving many clear examples of imitation-chronicles brought about by the inflexible attitude of the Russian imperial censor, which was even more inflexible than English or French censors. The boundary between creativity and documentation was blurred in these films, and the end product resembled something along the lines of a postmodern pastiche, created sometimes with patriotic undertones, and, at others, with grotesque, bitter irony or melodramatic pathos. All these different intonations were united by common themes: The Field of Mars: Wilhelm with His Staff, Bismarck, War of the People’s Heroes, Sister-Mourner: A Novel of Wartime, German Superiority: A Caricature, In the Bloody Light of War, Fire and Blood, or The Evil Vultures (‘thousands of soldiers take part in this picture! ... Full of difficult struggles, a drama of contemporary life which paints the picture of a terrible nightmare that turned into reality when the bestial Teutons occupied defenceless Russian cities’),85 The Great Deed of Oleksy Makukha, Telephonist, Anti-Christ: Wilhelm, in the Popular Imagination Drinks Blood, War Gives Birth to Heroes, The Black Book: The Miseries of Russians Who Remained in Germany, Polish Blood: A Nightmare from the History of the Barbaric Invasion of the 20th Century (‘the whole picture was filmed in the Polish castle in Poznan’),86 and Germans Are Not as Dreadful as Imagined (1915). As we see in later essays in this book (especially in Virlana Tkacz’s ‘Towards a New Vision of Theatre’), Kurbas builds one of his scenes from Jimmie Higgins in a deliberate contrast with such a poetics: the German army enters into a Belgian city, but Kurbas’s interpretation was quite restrained, without the unnecessary exploitation of effects and exaggeration that were the hallmarks of contemporary filmmakers. Particularly interesting is an examination of the Kyiv repertoire of 1916, the year in which Kurbas arrived there. This year was fateful not only for the director, but for all of cinema art, and for history. There was a growth in conservative opposition (the apogee reached its peak in 1922, giving birth to the Hayes Codex in the United States), which, in Ukraine, resulted in comments in newspapers such as this: ‘We will struggle against the filmmakers who are led by the greed of profit, who awaken base instincts in us.’87 In 1916 E. Maurin’s scholarly Kinematograf v prakticheskoi zhizni (The Cinema in Practical Life) appeared. This work lists all honourable uses of film, including court evidence, but it is also acknowledged as ‘graceful entertainment.’ As proof, Maurin provided a series of luxurious pictures, usually the interiors of ‘enemy’ German film theatres decorated with frescos, mirrors, curtains, silk tassels, and panneaux, in the ‘modern’ style.88 While these were more integral to theatrical venues, they may be seen here as evidence of filmmakers’ aesthetic appropriation of the fashionable environment in which the new artefact was being exhibited. The newer art longs for the aristocratic sheen, while the older (theatre art) aims to ‘democratize’ itself on the model of film. (More about film and Kurbas may be found in essays by Virlana Tkacz and Irena Makaryk in this volume.) During the war, the showings of Linder, Prince, and even Deed (Two Sportswomen) continued, although in morning showings only. There were also the comedies of the Pole Antoni Fertner (Lovelace, Draconian Contract, Antosha and the Black River; Bauer even added his directorial expertise to some of these). Charlie Chaplin’s star

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continued to rise, although the Kyiv press first referred to him as Linder’s epigone. Love and Dynamite from the Chaplin film studio, Keystone, was shown on 23 January 1915 at the ‘Corso,’ just a year after it first premiered in the USA (5 January 1914). This film (original title: His Musical Career), which Chaplin scholars believe is of central importance to the early period of his masterly creativity,89 was not the only one to reach Kyiv film theatres. His Wild Oats and Shanghai were shown in July 1916, and in October Burlesque on Carmen and The Bank. But the ‘Chaplin phenomenon’ was not achieved immediately; reflections on his art began in the 1920s and were assisted by Stepan Bondarchuk’s article ‘Charlie Chaplin,’ which appeared in Theatre Barricades, a journal edited by Kurbas (no.1, 1923). Perhaps the Chaplin phenomenon was also fuelled by Berezil’s promotion of ‘organized’ action, tempo, and film.90 Kyiv audiences continued to be exposed to ‘picturesque riff-raff’: Scene from Egypt, The Parks of Paris, The Isle of Java, Fountains of Italy, Niagara, and Lucerne. They also viewed the clichéd conventions of Danish melodrama (Family Tragedy, Night of Revenge, When the Heart Speaks, Life Is an Ocean, and Honourable Nephew). It is also worth mentioning Feuillade’s chef d’oeuvre, Les Vampires (serial, 1915), a hit in Kyiv at the end of 1916; in a six-month period nine films in this series were shown on the screens of Kyiv, including Les Fleurs du mal, Ghost, Threads of Death, Satan, King of Vice, and Bloody Marriage. The many roles of Ivan Mozzhukhin show the blossoming of his talent: Don’t Bother Her with Useless Questions, You Are Indifferent, While She Has Suffered Plenty, Khrizantemy (also known as Chrysanthemums, 1914), God’s Judgment, At the Pinnacle of Glory (Au sommet de sa gloire), Fiery Purple, For God’s Sake, Give Her Alms, Life Is Transient, Art is Eternal, Zhenshchina s kinzhalom (also known as Woman with a Dagger, 1916), Grekh (also known as Sin, 1916), At the Height of Fame, But Happiness Was So Close, and The Queen of Spades – his greatest work, although judged at the time as only a ‘film illustration’ of Pushkin’s story. Also, 1916 marked the first attempts at the so-called author’s film. In May the Kyivan screens showed Meyerhold’s Portrait of Dorian Gray at the ‘New World.’ Other excellent Russian filmed works were Starewicz’s Night Adventures, Bauer’s Tale of the Blue Sea, Vladimir Gardin’s Masquerade of Feelings, Savage Girl, and Privalov’s Millions. This was also the time of a fruitful connection between Kurbas and the Polish actor Juliusz Osterwa (as suggested by Anna Veselovska in this volume). According to Nina Bichuia, Kurbas and Osterwa ‘discussed their plan, which sounded realistic, of finding an old, forgotten piece of property or an old castle, or even … an empty tavern, renting it out and gathering together like-minded people, young actors, who would live and work together.’91 In the film advertisement for When the Beast Wakes Up (June 1917), Osterwa was described as ‘beloved by the Kyiv audiences.’ But perhaps the most important film of the time was D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance. Created in 1916, it did not appear in the Soviet rental system on Ukrainian screens until after 1920, when it was shown under the title The Evil of the World.92 Kurbas talked about this film with the Canadian journalist Matvy Shatulsky,93 praising it and its American director very highly. The film would influence Kurbas’s productions of Jimmie Higgins and Macbeth at the Berezil, as discussed by both Virlana Tkacz and Irena Makaryk later in this volume.

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5.14 Scene from Yakov Protozanov’s The Queen of Spades (1916)

The front cover of the March 1916 issue of the newspaper Kievlianin (The Kyivan) is perhaps the most emblematic of the age: the Battle of Verdun appears alongside an announcement about a film reel, Beauty Must Reign in the World, starring Vera Kholodna (Vera Kholodnaia). This perplexing duality is expressed by Jimmie Higgins, the title character in Kurbas’s production, who poignantly asks: On this day of destiny, this greatest crisis in history, How can anyone wish to go see the pictures? Calmly watch a movie idol Leaping into second-story windows Or being pulled from beneath flying express-trains?94

On the eve of the February Revolution this very question faced both the general audiences of Kyiv and artists such as Les Kurbas. These words are also a clear indication of the achievements of film, which had, in a short time, so impressed itself on the consciousness of Kyiv. Translated from the Ukrainian by Irena R. Makaryk

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NOTES 1 The editors would like to thank Elena Ilina and Larissa Zajac for their assistance in tracking down some of the translations of the international titles of the films originally provided in Ukrainian by the author of this article. This was no simple matter. The greater major of silent films have disappeared without record. The titles of others were variously, loosely, or even wildly, translated. Some actors changed their personas or even the spelling of their own names in different countries. The translator has attempted to cross-check all the titles by year and, when available, by cast list and plot summary. Where possible, original titles are provided; where not, English translations of the Ukrainian and Russian titles are given. (IRM). 2 Heorhii Z. Zhurov, Z mynuloho. Kino na Ukraini 1897–1917 (Kyiv: Akademiia Nauk URSR, 1959) 12. 3 Kurbas directed three films – Vendetta, Macdonald, and Arsenaltsi – and used film clips in his stage productions of Jimmie Higgins as well as in his production celebrating the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution. See Irena Makaryk’s essay ‘Dissecting Time’ in this volume. 4 Les’ Kurbas, Jimmie Higgins, act 1, scene 2, Berezil’: Les’ Kurbas iz tvorchoi spadshchyny, ed. M.H. Labins’kyi (Kyiv: Dnipro, 1988) 378. 5 A. Konchakovskii and D. Malakov, Kiev Mikhaila Bulgakova (Kyiv: Mystetstvo, 1990) 127. 6 M. Kotsiubyns’kyi, ‘Statti ta narysy. Vybrani lysty,’ in Tvory, 4 vols. (Kyiv: Dnipro, 1985) 4: 260. 7 Kyiv: Putivnyk po Kyievu. Suchasnyi i davnii Kyiv (Kyiv: UKRTURE, 1930) 148. 8 Iurii Smolych, ‘Nashi tainy,’ in Vybrani tvory, vol. 1 (Kyiv: Derzhavne vydavnytstvo khudozhnoi literatury, 1947) 16. 9 Kievlianin (Kyiv) 97 (1915) 1. As a rule, film advertisements appeared on the first page of newspapers and journals; only exceptions to this convention will be noted. 10 Kievlianin (Kyiv) 327 (1916). 11 Zh. Sadul’, Vseobshchaia istoriia kino, vol. 2 (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1958) 19. Trans. of Georges Sadoul, Histoire générale du cinéma (Paris: Denoël, [1948– ]). 12 Kievskaia mysl’ (Kyiv) 339 (1914). 13 Kievlianin (Kyiv) 348 (1911). 14 Kievlianin (Kyiv) 120 (1910). 15 Kievlianin (Kyiv) 347 (1914). 16 Mikhail Bulgakov, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 1 (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1989) 469. 17 Kievlianin (Kyiv) 94 (1910). 18 Kievlianin (Kyiv) 77 (1911). 19 A transliteration of the name, the original American name being unknown. Poslednie novosti (Kyiv) 328 (1911). 20 Teatral’noe obozrenie (Kyiv) (1912) 56. 21 Kievlianin (Kyiv) 154 (1915). 22 Poslednie novosti (Kyiv) 4550 (1917). 23 Kievskaia mysl’ (Kyiv) (1917) 267. 24 M. Zhuk, ‘Pys’mennyk,’ Dzvin 4 (1914) 322.

Film in Kyiv, 1910–1916 165 25 Les’ Kurbas, ‘Pro metod roboty aktora,’ in Berezil’: Les’ Kurbas iz tvorchoi spadshchyny, ed. M.H. Labins’kyi (Kyiv: Dnipro, 1988) 132. 26 Nadezhda Teffi, ‘V stereo-kino-skopo-bio-fono i proch-grafe,’ Demonicheskaia zhenshchina (Moscow: DOL, 1995) 21. 27 A. Poliatskii, ‘Puteshestvie po kinematografu,’ Kievskie vesti 4 (1910) 4. 28 M. Artsybashev, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 3 (Moscow: Terra-Terra, 1994) 110. 29 V. Skurativs’kyi, Ekranni mystetstva u sotsiokul’turnykh protsesakh XX stolittia: Heneza, Struktura, Funktsiia (Kyiv: Vydavnytstvo I. Fedorova, 1997) 101. 30 Ibid. 101. 31 Kievlianin (Kyiv) (1910) 31. 32 Sadul’, Vseobshchaia istoriia 77. 33 Les’ Kurbas, ‘Suspil’ne pryznachennia mystets’koho tvoru i etapy rozvytku suchasnkykh teatriv. Molodyi teatr,’ in Berezil’ 91. 34 I. Avdieva, ‘Kratkii mig prazdnika,’ in M.H. Labins’kyi and L. Taniuk, eds, Les’ Kurbas: Stat’i i vospominaniia o L. Kurbase. Literaturnoe nasledie (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1988) 91. 35 Kievlianin (Kyiv) 326 (1913) 4. 36 Kievlianin (Kyiv) 333 (1913). 37 O. Sydor-Hybelynda, ‘Shalenyi Maks: Na rikakh ievropeis’kykh,’ Kino-Kolo 21 (Kyiv 2004). 38 Les’ Kurbas, ‘Na hrani,’ in Berezil’ 222. 39 S. Ginzburg, Kinematografiia dorevoliutsionnoi Rossii (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1963) 54. 40 Sadul’, Vseobshchaia istoriia 159. 41 Les’ Kurbas, ‘Krakh akademichnykh teatriv,’ in Berezil’ 238. 42 Kievlianin (Kyiv) 181 (1911). 43 Aktiory nemetskogo kino: 120 portretov (Leningrad: Akademiia, 1926) 234. 44 Les’ Kurbas, ‘Pro zakordonne teatral’ne zhyttia,’ in Berezil’ 288. 45 Zvenyhora: Zbirnyk (Kyiv: VUFKU, 1928) 43. 46 Cited in Liudmyla Pukha, Kinematograf i Les’ Kurbas (Cherkasy: Siiach, 1999) 19. 47 Kino Evropy: Rezhissiorskaia entsiklopediia (Moscow: Materik, 2002) 46. 48 A. Nil’sen, Bezmolvnaia muza (Leningrad: Iskusstvo, 1971) 130. 49 Sadul’, Vseobshchaia istoriia 235. 50 Les’ Kurbas, Director’s Diary, Kharkiv, 3 November 1927, in Berezil’ 47. 51 Kievlianin (Kyiv) 214 (1913). 52 Kievlianin (Kyiv) 84 (1913). 53 ‘Maketna maisternia “Berezil,”’ in Valerian Revutsky, ed., Les’ Kurbas: U teatral’nii diial’nosti, v otsinkakh suchasnykiv-dokumenty, comp. Osyp Zinkewych (Baltimore and Toronto: Smoloskyp, 1989) 485. 54 See especially ‘Pro suchasne mystetstvo i zavdannia teatru,’ from 4 February 1926. In Les’ Kurbas, Berezil’ 83, 84. 55 Dovzhenko v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1982) 60. 56 Pukha 41. 57 Kievlianin (Kyiv) 339 (1911). 58 Velikii Kinemo: Katalog sokhranivshikhsia igrovykh fil’mov Rossii. 1908–1919 (Moscow: NLO, 2002) 95, 93. 59 Les’ Kurbas, ‘S’ohodni ukrains’koho teatru i “Berezil,”’ in Berezil’ 264. 60 Kurbas, ‘Suspi’lne pryznachennia,’ in Berezil’ 89.

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61 Pukha 58–9. 62 See N. Zorkaia, Na rubezhe stoletii: U istokov massovogo iskusstva Rossii, 1900–1910 gg. (Moscow: Nauka, 1976). 63 Incidentally, Starewitch wrote the screenplay for Hohol’s (Gogol) ‘Portrait’ at the request of the Skobelivsky committee. In that same year, the Lviv subsection of that committee proposed to Kurbas that he head up the Ternopil Theatrical Evenings. See Pukha 40, 36. 64 Kievlianin (Kyiv) 298. 65 Kievlianin (Kyiv) 50. 66 N. Zorkaia, ‘Svetopis’ Evgeniia Bauera,’ Iskusstvo Kino 10 (1997) 92. 67 R. Rosliak, ‘Studiia ekrannoho mystetstva,’ in Mystetstvoznavstvo Ukrainy, 2nd ed. (Kyiv: Kyi, 2001) 271. 68 Les’ Kurbas, ‘Psykholohizm na stseni,’ in Berezil’ 235. 69 The English titles provided are translations; it has proved impossible to locate the original titles of these reels. 70 Les’ Kurbas, ‘Estetstvo,’ in Berezil’ 234. 71 For more details on this issue see O. Sydor-Hybelynda, ‘Marinetti i tanok,’ in Davyd Davydovych Burliuk: Tezy naukovoi konferentsii (Kyiv: Natsional’nyi khudozhnii muzei, 1998) 46–8. 72 Les’ Kurbas, Zhovtnevyi ohliad, act 2, overture, in Berezil’ 469. 73 Kievlianin (Kyiv) 304 (1913). 74 Cited in Natalia Kuziakina, ‘Vospitat’ uchenika,’ Teatr 9 (1987) 79. 75 Kievlianin (Kyiv) 234 (1913). 76 Les’ Kurbas, ‘Pro zakordonne teatral’ne zhyttia,’ in Revutsky, ed., Les’ Kurbas 188. 77 Les’ Kurbas, ‘Pytannia analizu p’iesy iak tetral’noi problemy,’ in Berezil’ 94. 78 Les’ Kurbas, Zasidannia vid 14.04.1925, ibid. 177. 79 Les’ Kurbas, ‘Pro zviazok teatru z suchasnistiu,’ in Berezil’ 122. 80 Blyskucha kinokar’iera: Iliustrovanyi zbirnyk kino-opovidan’ (Kyiv: Ukrteakinovydavnytstvo, 1930) 74. 81 Kievlianin (Kyiv) 249. 82 Kievlianin (Kyiv) 200. 83 Kievlianin (Kyiv) 273. 84 Ginzburg 178, 180. 85 Kievlianin (Kyiv) 301 (1914); all reels from 1914. 86 Kievskii teatral’nyi kur’er (Kyiv) (March 1915). 87 Kievlianin (Kyiv) 96. 88 E. Maurin, Kinematograf v prakticheskoi zhizni (Petrgrad: Izdatel’stvo Inzhenera N. Kuznetsova, 1916) 16, 17, 37ff. 89 G.A. Avenarius, Charl’z Spenser Chaplin (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Akademii Nauk SSSR, 1960) 74, 247. 90 Les’ Kurbas, ‘Estetstvo,’ in Berezil’ 230. 91 Nina Bichuia, ‘Sproba peretvorennia 2: Les’ Kurbas,’ in Revutsky, ed., Les’ Kurbas 886. 92 L. Trauberg, David Uork Griffit (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1981) 112. 93 VirlanaTkacz, ‘Les Kurbas’s Use of Film Language in his Stage Productions of Jimmie Higgins and Macbeth,’ Canadian Slavonic Papers 32:1 (March 1990) 61. 94 Les’ Kurbas, Jimmie Higgins, act 1, scene 2, in Berezil’ 378.

PART TWO Kyiv the Epicentre

KIEV/KYIV/KɂÏB/KɂEB/KIJÓW/ʥʥʲʩ ʷ

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Beauty is a vivid rhythm. At different times and in different circumstances – different rhythms. Beauty is the relationship that exists in an organic whole – in a group of bodies (rhythms in rhythm), in a line (in rhythm); beauty links contrasts by mutual dependence (colours in a painting). Les Kurbas, Director’s Diary, Trostianets (Smorodyne) in the Kharkiv region, 10 May 1921

Translated from the Ukrainian by Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipps

6 In the Epicentre of Abstraction: Kyiv during the Time of Kurbas dmytro horbachov

From the Translators: The following text is an impressionistic account of the Kyiv avant-garde of the 1910s–1920s. It is based on a lifetime of research devoted to the subject, begun by the author in the 1970s when the topic was taboo and suspect, for which he suffered repercussions. Undaunted by the pressures of ideological politics, Dmytro Horbachov persisted in seeking out and interviewing witnesses to and participants in the events of art in Ukraine in the period between the wars, and has thereby provided a plethora of reminiscences, anecdotal references, and quotations, as well as access to personal correspondence. The author has chosen to present his material in the spirit of those contacts in order to recreate the intensity of artists’ intentions and to offer a perspective that reflects the immediacy of their response to their changing world. By highlighting five key aspects of philosophical thought and practice by avant-garde artists, Horbachov offers a rich mosaic of activity and thought that reveals the process of absorption of the abstract principle in the artistic life of Kyiv. The original submission has been edited to maintain coherence in the narrative.

I. Alexandra Exter The abstract non-objective painting that came into being in Europe during the 1910s could hardly be apprehended by everyone. Even Picasso and Matisse did not dare to abandon representational art completely. Vasily Kandinsky from Odesa and Kazimir Malevich from Kyiv were among the first to do so. In the case of Malevich, he aligned abstract painting with Ukraine’s applied art. Using the geometric abstractionist sketches that he and his followers, the Suprematists, produced, Ukrainian peasant women of Verbivka (Kyiv region) wove rugs, embroidered scarves and pillows and sold them in Kyiv, Poltava, Moscow, and Berlin. The indefatigable organizer of these art activities was Alexandra Exter, who in 1916–1918 created a series of Cubist-Suprematist abstract pictures that art historians later titled ‘Colour Rhythms.’ (See colour plates 4, 21.) As described by an eyewitness: ‘I remember her working all day long during frequent bombings of Kyiv, to the accompaniment of hissing and roaring artillery blasts. The artist would shudder; what was going on outside worried her. However, her self-imposed virile discipline overpowered the personal emotions of the day.’1

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6.1 Alexandra Exter, ca. 1912 (NAMU; with the permission of Dmytro Horbachov)

There were three factors that motivated Exter’s turn towards abstraction: (1) her friendship with Picasso, Braque, and Léger in Paris, which allowed her to understand the function of rhythm as a link between simple geometric forms; (2) her collaboration with the Ukrainian-born theatre director Aleksandr Tairov, who treated stage design as a ‘rhythmic skeleton of acting’ (Exter’s breakthrough into abstractionist art took place in 1916, after the performance of Tairov’s Famira Kifared (Thamira Khytharedes) at the Kamerny Theatre; she energized the entire stage space through the rhythmic interweaving of streams of light); and (3) her promotion of folk arts by co-founding a society of applied arts and industry in Kyiv in collaboration with folk artists in order to foster a program for revitalizing Ukraine’s handicraft traditions. What appealed most to Exter was that the art of the peasantry, like ancient decorative art, was symbolic. It had no subject and only referred abstractly to the elements of nature – water, air, earth – and turned one towards a cosmic mood. At the exhibition of the peasant artist Hanna Sobachko, Exter’s close collaborator, (held in Kyiv on 31 March 1918), Exter declared: In folk decorative art we observe the evolution of composition [starting with the] primitive rhythms in the kilim [woven carpet] and clay shards to a dynamic rhythm [captured by] painted Easter eggs. Regarding the laws of composition and the colour scheme in folk art, one might point out that in old icons primary colours reach their maximum tension while the composition still possesses an inner rhythm and balance. Contemporary Slavic folk art also manifests [this] colour purity and intensity. One only has to look at the works of Hanna Sobachko, a peasant from the Skobtsi village of the Poltava region, who, from the start, stood out among other female masters of folk art, thanks to her colour scheme and composition. From the early days of her career she demonstrated this creative potential. In her later development, she followed the same evolutionary path, [starting with] the use of primitive colouring [and moving on towards] form in an ever more complex composition. As she progressed, her compositions became more and more dynamic, and her hues richer and more intense … It is interesting that while in some works she tries to isolate colour, in others [she] emphasizes texture, which proves how well she understands [the workings of] contemporary art. Nevertheless, her creative works are still considered to be folk art.2

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Inviting Kazimir Malevich to work with peasant women artists of Verbivka, Exter was already aware of [the sources of] his Suprematist inspiration found in the [minimalist] decorative painting on peasant houses: ‘I watched in awe as peasant women painted designs on the walls and helped them to paint ornaments on the hearth.’ Geometric forms painted on a white wall or hearth would change in accordance with the [inherent] laws of rhythm. Such ornaments symbolized universal flowering; they captured the good spirits of fiery cosmic matter (as in the words of Symbolist poet Pavlo Tychyna: ‘Fire and motion. Fire and motion’).3 Malevich wrote that ‘Suprematist painting depicts white space rather than a blue one. The reason is clear: the colour blue does not render the sense of infinity.’ This view of the infinite and the universal is natural for a person with memories of a stuccoed and whitewashed humble Ukrainian peasant house. Exter’s Pedagogical System Exter rejected the numbing impact of academic training at the Kyiv Art School and that at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris, which she attended from 1908. As reported by Kyiv art historian E. Kuzmin, these schools were universally banal: ‘First clay ornaments, later clay noses and ears, [then] clay heads, clay Apollos, and [finally] still life [nature morte].’ By contrast, Exter’s students studied abstraction at her Kyiv Studio. (Those who also wanted [exposure to] more traditional approaches would [be encouraged to] supplement their studies at other studios where they would learn how to draw from live models.) Starting in 1918, Exter’s Studio, located on Fundukleivska Street, was conducted at two separate levels – for children and for adults. In both, she taught classes on rhythm as the main driving force of art, [with a focus on] non-representationalism, colour, and texture. 1. On Rhythm: Exter instructed her students about the interaction of rising and falling waves, the interchange between weak and pronounced rhythms, and the accentuated overlapping of their patterns. She taught how to throw off rhythm, that is, how to interrupt it, and how to combine diverse rhythms. The viewer’s gaze, guided by the artist’s innate sense of rhythm and the pace at which it is revealed to the viewer, could then wander along labyrinths of coloured planes, climbing out or falling into depths and intervals of space. The notion of an ‘interval’ or pause, a kind of ‘white sound’ was considered to be an essential element of rhythmic structure as explored pedagogically in Kyiv by Exter’s closest ally, Oleksander Bohomazov. He formulated this principle in his 1914 treatise ‘Painting and Elements.’4 2. On Non-objectivity: At the Exter studio various shapes of coloured paper cutouts were arranged into colourful rhythmic compositions so that children could learn about abstract, non-objective art. Art historian Yakov Tugendkhold observed how four- to eight-year-old children responded to a fairy-tale reading not by drawing illustrations, but rather by creating colourful shapes in rhythmic forms. The adults, in turn, learned about composition by considering three different aspects: (a) surface (using Matisse as a model, as well as what Exter called ‘the primitive rhythm of kilims and painted pottery’); (b) space (the example of Cézanne and Picasso and ‘the dynamic rhythm of the Ukrainian Easter egg’); and (c) deformation

6.2. Alexandra Exter. Bridge. Sèvre, 1912 (NAMU; with the permission of Dmytro Horbachov)

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(the harmony and dissonance of lines and colours; the intersection of compositional axes; and the forces that align to create energy and tension, or serve to diffuse it).5 The adults were instructed to draw line sketches of the works of old masters, especially Exter’s favourite, the French academic painter and classicist Nicolas Poussin. The austere ‘Doric’ intonation of Poussin’s paintings, inspired by the somber and vigilant Olympic religion of the ancient Greeks, who were always ready to confront their enemies, is reflected in the psychological opposition expressed in Poussin’s compositions by means of a rigid vertical-horizontal grid of axes that is offset by Baroque diagonality. This characteristic skeletal construction is seen as the abstract element of deformation. Bohomazov [explained this principle by telling] a story about a child who was painting horses with heads bent down grazing in the meadow. A green spot of grass was painted next to one horse’s mouth which, from the child’s perspective, suggested that the horse was feeding energetically, while the others were not so active. Bohomazov offers a similar example of deformation from his own experience: ‘A man is pushing a cart along the streets of Kyiv. The cart’s long straight handles are so full of energy that the houses (at least the way the artist saw them) tilt in the opposite direction to maintain balance.’ Such stories were meant to prove that the energy of impact on the viewer is a factor that does not depend on physical dimensions in the visible world. Or, as Kurbas used to say, ‘a man doesn’t fit between a hat and shoes,’ that is, does not simply fill the space. Exter criticized those artists who had a predilection for naturalism as lacking in creativity: ‘They are unable to look at nature in a simple way, they lack immediacy.’6 Instead, in contrast to the ‘studied’ and blind art of naturalism, naive art (i.e., icons and colourful combinations of oriental ornament) is full of freshness and simplicity, but it, too, requires fresh blood, that is, impressions provided by the intensity and richness of Western painting. 3. On Colour: For Exter, colour intensity or ‘colour sound’ (or ‘the colour of sound’ as described by her favourite poet, the Symbolist Arthur Rimbaud) ‘characterizes the art of young Slavic nations.’ Just as the Renaissance discovered perspective, so the avant-garde made colour the gauge of emotional tension, or as Bohomazov wrote, ‘the content of form.’ Avant-garde artists rejected the colour choices of their immediate predecessors, the Wanderers, who lamented the boredom and bleak life of Russians, as well as the subdued colour effects of those Symbolists who celebrated deterioration and the decay of graveyards. The most highly respected among abstractionism’s immediate predecessors were the Impressionists, thanks to the richness of their palette. Exter created clashes of large colour zones and forced colours to ‘leap over’ each other striving for supremacy. She either brought them to a white boil or hurled them into darkness. For a more intensive saturation of colour, she recommended using layers of foundation colours. 4. On Texture. The theory and practice of [painting] canvasses that ‘roll like hills, [and] sway [through] their rough, uneven surface’ (Velimir Khlebnikov) was developed by her friend David Burliuk. Exter taught that texture affects the dissolution or condensation of pigment and, consequently, the form’s weight.

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Exter and the Theatre In Exter’s studio, stage design was designated as a full-fledged course of studies – probably, for the first time in history. [The studio explored] the newest in stage design styles, specifically Cubo-Futurist and Constructivist orientations. Despite its short-lived existence (just several months in 1918) – [the studio in Kyiv produced] an entire school that revitalized the stage design of many countries. It included the following designers: Oleksander Khvostenko-Khvostov, Simon Lissim, Vadym Meller, Anatol Petrytsky, Isaak Rabinovich, and Aleksandr Vesnin, as well as Ignaty Nivinsky, Pavel Chelichev, Nisson Shifrin, and Aleksandr Tyshler. As one of the most radical reformers of twentieth-century [stage design], Exter relied on the experiments of Gordon Craig (in architectural scenery), Adolphe Appia (in lighting), and Leon Bakst (in costumes), which she translated into the idiom of three-dimensional abstraction. Her practices and principles were popularized by her followers in Europe and America and were relayed in a lecture circulated by theatre designer Philippe Hosiasson [Filipp Gosiason].7 [In her lectures, Exter isolated four important aspects of designing for the theatre, specifically space, colour, light, and breadth of information]. About Space: In addition to the plane, the stage surface or stage cube must be utilized as a field for action. The floor and upper reaches of the stage cube are to be connected by architectural three-dimensional scenery or skeletal constructions. Then the space can begin to pulsate, alternately opening or narrowing. About Colour: The visual effect of the production is achieved by coordinating the gestural play of the actor, who brings a bright and colourful presence to the stage, with the movement of painted scenery. The carnivalesque and colourful spectacle that appears on the stage resembles a Ukrainian wedding ritual as described by artist Sonia Delaunay [in a memoir of her childhood spent in Ukraine]: ‘red and green clothes, densely decorated with colourful ribbons, swirling about in an unending whirlwind.’ Exter’s sketches for the production of Famira Kifared embody the movements of a universal dance. (See colour plate 9.) The contemporary form and decorative quality of her drawings [visualize] an ancient Greek bacchanalia: ‘To recreate artistically on stage a certain historical period, one should only capture the core plastic idea of its style. Thus, for instance, having captured the verticality of Gothic, one can give this style a new, unexpected meaning in costumes and stylistic constructions. Ornaments should be transferred to the stage in fragments and significantly exaggerated.’ About Light: In her talk ‘On Creating a Laboratory for Stage Performances,’ which Exter delivered at the All-Ukrainian Congress of Cultural Activists, organized by the artist at the Kyiv Conservatory (24–29 June 1918), Exter formulated an entirely new conception about the arrangement of light for a show: ‘The artist must regard the electrical technician who has mastered the magic of light as his closest ally. It is necessary to coordinate the art of the actor, director, artist, and electrician, to make this art a truly collectivist [endeavour]. Then theatre in general, and Ukraine’s theatre in particular, will achieve its greatness.’8 Exter’s response to a newspaper reporter on the directions of a Ukrainian artistic renaissance was energetic and hopeful: ‘[That it have] as much creative freedom

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and as little of provincialism as possible.’9 Before Exter [came on the scene], stage lighting was considered a purely technical matter. Exter and her disciples turned light modulations and light streams into a component of the performance’s rhythmic structure. About Breadth of Information (Pedagogy): [Exter’s] stage design classes were structured in the form of a dialogue between the master and her students (the socalled interactive approach), as well as a debate between innovators and traditionalists. [For example, at Exter’s Studio], the choreographer Elsa Krüger lectured on the theatre director Konstantin Stanislavsky, whose naturalist aesthetics practised at the Moscow Art Theatre could not have been further from the avant-garde; yet Stanislavsky’s system of actors’ psychological training was studied very thoroughly in Exter’s studio. Exter’s pedagogy based on abstractionism lasted for two years [and in two locations], in Kyiv during 1918 and in Odesa in 1919 (where it shaped new directions for stage designers M. Andriienko-Nechytailo and B. Kosarev). II. Oleksander Bohomazov At the exhibition of the All-Ukrainian Congress of Plastic Artists (Kyiv, June 1918) the most radical paintings were those of Oleksander Bohomazov. (See colour plates 2, 3.) Bohomazov’s painting ‘Steam Train’ shown at the exhibition was perceived as [the embodiment of] rhythm, composed of triangles and ovals. [Rather than a prosaic depiction of a train arriving in the station, his appears as] a projectile that discharges a fiery blast into the violet darkness. The crowd at the station is a multicoloured kaleidoscope; the train itself is a metallic monolith that can barely contain [its content of] fiery lava. It consists of sharp planes of an acutely framed window – the machine’s ever-watchful eye. Kinetic energy permeates [the space of] Bohomazov’s pictorial world. He saw motion even in static objects. Outdoor life presented itself like a dynamic coordinated dance, with ever-changing rhythms. As objects intersect, people, buildings, trees, [and] animals change before our very eyes: they become elongated, then rounded, then flattened. Cézanne was right, as were the Futurists when they altered the proportion of objects and shaped them geometrically. Otherwise, the rhythmic, kinetic values of these objects would be lost on the viewer. As Bohomazov said, ‘Look at the boxes of our brick buildings and you will sense a powerful upward motion of the mass. Look carefully at an old one-storey house; watch it clinging to the ground, trying to spread out in all directions. See how powerfully and sharply the corner of an iron roof pierces the serene mass of green trees.’10 The artist’s goal is to recreate this impression of vigorous life and bring it into artistic unity through the elements of art. Bohomazov’s 1916 abstract painting ‘Souvenirs of the Caucasus’ presents a dense asteroid-like composition compressed in a tight rosebud spiral in which vertical and diagonal lines, concave and convex surfaces, crystal and soft forms are all involved in a power struggle. A cluster of yellow light streams from a dark abyss. Ochre, pink, and autumn-coloured surfaces yield to a yellow-orange blot with a rugged ice-coloured sugar-cone above it. The painting seems abstractly decorative

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6.3 Oleksander Bohomasov, Fire in Kyiv, 1916. Charcoal on paper (SMUFA; with the permission of Dmytro Horbachov)

and only approximately resembles a landscape of mountain geology with its swaths of terraces captured by individual colours. Complex rhythms, a variety of [musical] dynamics (crescendo, glissando, scherzo), [and a] virtuoso rhyming of triangles and ovals [conveys the energy of the landscape.] One could compare this composition to a precise architectural work where subtle psychological rumination is turned into a powerful [material] construction built according to the laws of motion, linkages, and fissures. Bohomazov perceives the impact of universal forces [and] recognizes the symbolic presence of vital energy everywhere [in and around Kyiv]: in its streets and hills, churches and parks, among crowds [gathered] at major crossroads in the centre and in individual passers-by on the outskirts. In his 9 June 1918 talk entitled ‘Major Tasks for the Development of Painting in Ukraine,’ which he delivered at the All-Ukrainian Congress of Artists, Bohomazov stated: Kyiv in its plastic spaces is full of a beautiful and versatile dynamism. Here streets stretch to the sky, forms are full of tension, lines are energetic; they fall, break, sing, and play. The general pace of life emphasizes this dynamism and legitimizes it even more; it spills around until it subsides on the quiet expanses of the Dnipro River’s left bank. If one thinks about it or senses intuitively the inexhaustible quantity of lines, colours, and shapes in Ukraine, one will be able to see how full of vitality, joyful cheerfulness, they are; how stark the contrast is between them and what one finds, say, in the North.

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There, the three-dimensional shapes exist as if in semi-hibernation; there is less dynamism; one senses a subdued struggle, a frozen suffering, and meekness; while here [in Ukraine], in our bright sunlight, dynamism shows itself fully: the struggle reaches the heights of passionate tragedy, triumphant laughter, and a quiet poetic wistfulness. The line is much finer, sonorous, serious, and light-hearted. Here the shape is really alive, full-bodied, whereas in the North it resembles a flat ornament. Here the paint is like a decisive musical chord, and it brings to life a corresponding harmony; while over there it resembles a timid soft whisper. In the North the line dynamics are more horizontal, while in Ukraine they are multi-dimensional, intersected by vertical lines (poplar trees, mountains, etc.). All of this has a more powerful effect on the viewer; it strikes one and prevents one from concentrating easily; it distracts one’s attention by its multifaceted impulse and, at the same time, creates an unimaginable beauty. No wonder a Ukrainian loves to surrender to the sun’s caresses and to a quiet contemplation of beauty. He surrenders to these dynamic forces and drifts with them in his dreams. I would say that in Ukraine there is so much beauty that an artist has to counteract the distracting impact of the environment’s dynamic power.11

Bohomazov was musically gifted (he played the cello, violin, and flute) and thus saw the world in its infinitely diverse rhythms, in their major and minor (which he called ‘tragic’ or ‘joyful’) energies. Any object, phenomenon, or event was seen as having its own dynamic tension, its own quantity and quality of motion, its unique nature; and he chose [to focus on] the most active, typical, and dynamic features. ‘One should leave only one line of an object – that is where the concentration of its energy lies,’ he would say. The terseness of his drawings [and] the [laconic] expressiveness of a figure passing by is achieved sometimes by the movement of [only] two or three lines, similar to a character in Chinese calligraphy. An object is recognized by its most active features: its [sharp] angles and pronounced curves. It is precisely the angular and oval shapes that interact and create a coordinated rhythm within his drawings. The artist eliminates passive spots, leaving an ‘interval’ of space, that is, that ‘white noise’ [already mentioned in the context of Exter]. Bohomazov was fond of the artistic experience of the ‘collective and timeless personality’ that created folk art. His own painting is a kind of ornament in the plane of the picture, a rhythmic code of psychological activity. But he wasn’t in love with the archaic. He valued the unique nature of every moment of being [and] projected the momentary experience into the cosmic plane, correlating individual existence with the energy of perpetual motion. Bohomazov’s art, as well as his theory, can be called ‘an impressionism of the eternal’ (to use Boris Pasternak’s phrase). His treatise ‘Painting and Elements’12 is an explanation of the unique nature of life’s phenomena. Bohomazov’s spiral, the symbol of the turbulent Universe, becomes a sign of the dissimilarity between [observed] subjects in life. New art, according to Bohomazov, is a return to the primacy of the impression, to a childhood that senses a great connectedness within the universe (and is equal to what, in Bohomazov’s terminology, is called ‘quantitative rhythm’). At the same time, it is also an analysis of the characteristics of the observed object (that echoes within the picture by virtue of its ‘qualitative rhythm’).

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Bohomazov’s is a system of artistic universals, a psychology of art, perception, [a process] of ‘thinking with our eyes’ that is considered stage-by-stage, first, by apprehending it [the pictorial image] intuitively as a ‘rhythmic object’ (based on a summary analysis of its characteristics and qualities), [and ending with] a purposeful imitation of our emotion projected onto the painting. Bohomazov’s theory marries Bergson’s intuitivism and Hegel’s dialectics. It also deals with the way life’s paces and rhythms are translated by a creative individual into the idiom of painterly categories. Similarly to the way that the calm field of the psyche is filled with a rhythm of lines and shapes [derived from] the observed object, the calm plane of the picture is awakened by restless lines and painterly shapes [and] by the charge of a dynamic tension. Rhythm is psychologically coloured, stirring either the Dionysian (minor or major) or the harmonious mood of the Apollonian in one’s being. Harmony and serenity were never part of twentiethcentury avant-garde art: At first, the Picture Plane represents an imitation of a serene, healthy sphere, a vast Interval that an Artistic Individual, through conscious effort, will turn into an arena where art elements interact. When we move to surrounding nature, we find analogous states: Isn’t the space in which objects are located the same serene, healthy sphere in which all objects enter, function, and live? Doesn’t their presence dissect this space into fragments [and] change its state in contrast to the space? Doesn’t a mighty tree push out a weak tree with its branches? Isn’t it a struggle to have power over space, and doesn’t that bear a strong similarity to the realm of our perceptions? Thus, the creation of a Painting is based on nature’s real foundations, and an Artistic Individual does not deviate from them.13

Having never visited Paris, Bohomazov learned about Parisian news first-hand from his friends Exter and Burliuk. He saw original Cubist and Futurist art at the exhibitions and in collections of Kyiv and Moscow. In addition, his frequent trips to patriarchal villages of Ukraine and the Caucasus brought him closer to colourful Ukrainian, Armenian, and Azerbajdzhani folk rituals. The avant-garde artist [was also inspired by] medieval iconography [with its] festival of colour and surface lines. St Sophia Cathedral – a three-dimensional structure based on the alternation of angles and ovals that had a symbolic and sacred meaning in ancient times – inspired Bohomazov to write: ‘The soul forgets about the prosaic and contemplates the divine; thoughts turn inwards and earthly man becomes tiny and pitiful.’14 Even in his early years Bohomazov realized the unreliability of intellect for poetic activity: filled with earthly interest in profit, the mind is a barrier on the path ‘to the mystery of soul. On this road it is necessary to remove the barricades that separate spirit and cosmos and to find lost unity and harmony – [which is] the goal of art today. Ancient artists were able to achieve it, but only because their psyche was more primitive and less demanding than ours.’ In 1918 Bohomazov collected pictures made by children and exhibited them alongside his own works, trying to preserve in himself the immediacy and freshness of a child’s perception. He linked one’s inability to perceive the pure energy

6.4 St Sophia Cathedral (photo: Margaret Morton © 2005)

In the Epicentre of Abstraction 181

of the beautiful with the loss of unaffected qualities and the overload of pragmatic ideas on one’s psyche: ‘Intellect without feeling will never comprehend what is beautiful, for the logic of the beautiful differs from that of intellect, and its criteria cannot be measured by intellect.’ Bohomazov’s abstract art triggered friendly mockery [in the Kyiv press]. Yakiv Yadov [‘Jacob Poison’ (pseud.)], who reported on Kyiv’s cabaret life, wrote the following: ‘Here is a circular Cubist, Mr Bohomazov, for you. We see only catheti and hypotenuses.’ The person who saw Bohomazov’s greatness was his wife, Wanda [Monastyrska]: ‘I want so much to say that you are not a mere mortal in art; that your works are awe-inspiring and deeply beautiful; that they possess a passionate power of lines; that they have the movement of all the particles of the world; that they are as enigmatic as is the power of everything essential in the corporeal world and in the world seen only by our mind and soul.’15 Thanks to Exter and Bohomazov, the number of Cubo-Futurists and other abstractionists in Kyiv increased in number to around twenty artists during the years 1918–19. They decorated Kyiv streets and squares with abstract panels. [As described by Klyment Redko in his diary entry for] 5 March 1919: ‘The avant-garde artists take Khreshchatyk, Kyiv’s central thoroughfare, hostage. Original colourful banners, painted by a group of artists led by [Alexandra] Exter and [Vadym] Meller, hang in parallel rows across the street. [This is the] aesthetic of abstract forms: the elements of Cubism without the machine and the dynamics of Futurism.’16 III. Hesychasm Given that many of the theorists [and practitioners] of abstraction, such as Archipenko, Kandinsky, Malevich, and Tatlin, came out of Eastern Orthodoxy, Hesychasm is yet another spiritual source for abstract art. Such non-objective painters as Bohomazov, Burliuk, Meller, Petrytsky, and Yermilov also took their art into the boundless expanses of spirituality, free from earthly perceptions. This tradition was linked to the influence of the Orthodox monks and, primarily, the monastic branch of Hesychasm widespread in Kyiv from the Middle Ages to the modern age. According to the tenets of this Byzantine-Orthodox philosophy, one can enter into the zone of divine energy only through self-immersion in the depths of one’s own heart. ‘There, at the bottom of my heart, love has woven a wonderful fairy-tale,’ wrote Pavlo Tychyna, a poet with a theological education. The poetry of medieval Byzantium described the stages of the dematerializing human imagination thus: Ɂɚɡɢɪɚɸɱɢɭɫɟɛɟ ɍɫɨɛɿɠɡɧɚɯɨɞɢɲɫɜɿɬɥɨ ȱɰɟɣɫɜɿɬɨɱɡɚɩɚɥɢɜɲɢ Ƚɟɬɶɠɟɧɟɛɿɫɿɜɶɤɟɩɥɟɦɹ ɍɦɫɬɚɽɩɨɜɨɥɿɜɿɥɶɧɢɣ Ɉɞɭɫɿɯɡɟɦɧɢɯɜɪɚɠɿɧɶ ɍɛɢɪɚɸɱɢɫɶɜɭɛɨɪɢ ɍɦɨɝɥɹɞɧɨɫɬɟɣɡɚɦɟɠɧɢɯ17

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(Looking into oneself One finds a light And this beacon, once lit up Scares off demonic forces The mind begins slowly to free itself From all earthly impressions Dressing itself in the habit Of an imagined world beyond.)

Realism, as an exact recreation of the physical dimensions [of the world] – nature, objectivity, perspective – appeared in the art of Catholic Europe under the influence and system of scholastic theology. For some time the Orthodox East used to dismiss this scholastic, scientificallyrational picture of the world because of the belief that one must leave this world in order to perceive God. Instead, one needs to drastically limit the impact of the physical and social environment and immerse oneself in ‘the caves of the heart’ (as Skovoroda phrased it).18 One needs to envelop the sinful world with a shining divine light to overcome the sinful world’s cold solidity with warmth and win it over with emotional exaltation. The icon with its symbolism and conventions, with its radiant pulsation, and with its mystical (reverse) perspective corresponds best to this imagination of the internal. The following statement made by the avant-gardist Archipenko is resonant with the principles of Hesychasm: ‘Cosmic energy flows in our cells. Man draws energy, and develops its creativity to the utmost, when spirit and matter become one.’ The Hesychasts’ self-reflection allowed them to turn their mind away from things earthly, corporeal, and ephemeral. According to Archipenko, the artist’s self-reflection ‘raises the person to the Divine Kingdom and allows one to realize the cyclic motion of the Universe.’ [Indeed, as the contours of] Archipenko’s sculptures dissolve, they lose their material substance. (See colour plate 7.) Depending on the movement of the sun’s light, the crevices and their surfaces become filled, alternately, with light or shadow. The implied hollow shape, or compositional interval that is created, is like a pause that adds a new dimension to his carved pieces. Archipenko realized that, ‘in sculpture, the dematerialization of the shapes always remains the most complex problem. To create matter in its concreteness and, at the same time, to transcend its borders into the abstract and spiritual life, seems a miracle, magic.’ Clearly, man is incapable of creating new laws; one can only discover them in oneself. The ideas that are born inside one exist in the Universe all the time: on the earth, in the water, and in the air. ‘We borrow them from their universal storage, and later return them,’ says Archipenko. An artist’s creative potential and evolution depend, first of all, on his ability to see in himself traits that enable the materialization of creative impulses. Archipenko was interested in life’s mysterious elements. The French poet Blaise Cendrars sensed the primeval, archetypal quality of his work in a poem entitled ‘La tête’ (Head):

In the Epicentre of Abstraction 183 à Alexandre Archipenko La tête La guillotine est le chef-d’oeuvre de l’art plastique Son déclic Crée le mouvement perpétuel Tout le monde connaît l’oeuf de Christophe Colomb Qui était un oeuf plat, un œuf fixe, l’oeuf d’un inventeur La sculpture d’Archipenko est le 1er oeuf ovoïdal Maintenu en équilibre intense Comme une toupie immobile Sur sa pointe animée Vitesse Il se dépouille Des ondes multicolores Des zones de couleurs Et tourne dans la profondeur Nu. Neuf. Total. – Blaise Cendrars, Nice 191819 The Head The guillotine is the masterpiece of the plastic arts Its click Creates perpetual motion Everyone knows the egg of Christopher Columbus Which was a flat egg, a fixed egg, the egg of an inventor The sculpture of Archipenko is the first ovoid egg Maintained in intense equilibrium Like a motionless top On its spinning point Speed It strips itself Of its man-colored waves Of its zones of color And turns in depth Naked. New. Total.

[Archipenko’s] 1913 ‘Pierrot-Carousel’ that Exter saw in Paris is constructed according to the laws of kinetic balance; it sparkles with every colour of the spectrum: cerulean, fiery, grass-green. All the axes of this irrepressible figure, composed

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of the primary building elements – balls, cones, diamonds – turn and tilt like a spin-toy. Archipenko’s concaves are like traces of somebody’s hard and gentle touches from a larger world where spirit and matter are one. When the imagination reaches for the cosmos it can cause fear and panic before a vast expanse of cold and darkness. Seventeenth-century French philosopher [Blaise] Pascal put it this way: ‘Sometimes I become terrified, like a person who had been taken to a deserted island during his sleep and who woke up not knowing where he is.’20 As we know, Malevich sought salvation in peasant art, where one finds consolation from the daunting cosmos. His paintings, with precisely drawn ornamental stencils against a white background, truly breathe the spirit of a folk cosmogony. The stable order of peasant ornaments and the ‘Tree of Life’ motif are dramatized and unbalanced in the spirit of the tumultuous twentieth century. Malevich’s Suprematism bears a close analogy not only to the geometric paintings [on houses] in [Ukraine’s region of] Podillia, but also to [their] painted eggs bearing astral symbols, and to the patterns of the plakhta-skirt, where the elements (fire, earth, water) are encoded [in geometrically woven patterns]. (See colour plate 8.) The Kyivan Malevich was a pioneer of abstract art; he created compositions in which simple geometric forms swirl [about] in a coordinated rhythm ruled by the cosmic-planetary order: the ‘[the artist]-ego’ holds the wisdom of the Universe; art contains the universal energy with its boundless purpose. The artist is the brush of a universal picture … I am the conductor of forces, of the universal harmony of creative laws that rules everything.’21 Malevich observed the transfer of colourful dynamism from the countryside to ‘colour-phobic cities’: ‘Let us consider the capital as the receptor of the colourful dynamism generated in the villages – those small centres of life on the periphery [that passes] through districts and regional towns. In every centre this ray of colour meets with a ray of darkness.’22 He predicted that, in urban art, ‘active combinations of black and white will take an honourable place. Nevertheless, the majority of urban dwellers came to the cities from the countryside and, from time to time, they would have flashes of memory about the colourful world of the countryside. Then these urban dwellers [would] colour their streets to recreate that free world of natural elements …’23 Malevich’s universe was a coloured one. IV. Abstract Poetry – Poetry-painting The avant-garde received a strong impulse for abstraction and for a symbolic treatment of concrete phenomena [in nature] from the Baroque [period]. The Baroque [aesthetic in Ukrainian art] presented earthly chaos as an anomaly, an alogism, a shift in logic. This shift in form, its inversion or transferral, makes some of the poems of Ivan Kotliarevsky come across as abstract ‘beyondsense’24 poetic experiments: Ȼɨɪɳɿɜɹɤɡɬɪɢɧɟɩɨɞɟɧɶɤɭɽɲ ɇɚɦɨɬɨɪɨɲɧɿɡɚɫɟɪɞɱɢɬɶ ȱɡɚɪɚɡɬɹɝɥɨɦɡɚɤɢɲɤɭɽɲ ȱɜɛɭɪɤɨɬɿɡɚɤɟɧɞɸɲɢɬɶ.25

In the Epicentre of Abstraction 185 (After three borschts without day It hearts heavy on the weight Suddenly stretches are intestined And the growl bellies.)

A similar dissection of words and juggling of verbal fragments can be found in the 1914 ‘Self-Portrait’ by Kyiv poet Mykhail Semenko: ɏɚɣɥɶɫɟɦɟɧɤɨɦɢ ɂɯɚɣɥɶɤɨɯɚɣɥɶɚɥɶɫɟɤɨɦɢɯ ɋɟɦɟɧɤɨɦɢɯɦɢɯɚɣɥɶɫɟɦɟɧɤɨ Ɉɫɟɦɟɧɤɨɦɢɯɚɣɥɶ Ɉɦɢɯɚɣɥɶɫɟɦɟɧɤɨ!

(Khail’ seme nkomy Ykhail’ kokhail’26 al’se komykh Semenko mykh mykhail’se menko O semenko mykhail’! O mykhail’ semenko!) Phonetically, the poet’s name [Mykhail’ Semenko] resonates with [a variety of multilingual pronunciations], e.g., Arabic (ikhail), German (Heil), or African (nkoma). ‘Kokhail’ is a coined word [in the manner of] the [premier] UkrainianRussian Futurist poet Velimir Khlebnikov (cf. tikhoslavl’, ulitavl’, nikogdavl’). With the Futurists, phonetic expression is [as] self-sufficient as it is in archaic incantations preserved in folklore. The Kyiv poet Vasilisk Gnedov (also known as Hnidov), the author of the ‘first Ego-Futurist song in Ukrainian,’27 was the author of a ‘beyondsense’ poem based on Ukrainian phonetics. Ʉɨɥɢɡɚɝɢɱɛɭɞɢɧɰɿɤɚɜɱɟ Ɍɚɪɚɫɒɟɜɱɟɧɤɨɛɭɞɹɱɟɫɤɚɜɱɟ

(When by clum willst interestinger Taras Sherchenko wakingly squealing) What follows is an example of the phonetic-visual abstract poetry of Andry Chuzhy, Mykhail Semenko’s disciple: x(Marx x(ɒɚɪɚɞɚ x(Ɍɚɬɥɿɧɭ Mar x(ɧɟɜɿɞɨɦɿɫɬɶ) ɫɤɚɡ ɤɚɡɚɜ ɚɜɚɜɚɜɚɜɚɜ

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ɽ (inpleno) ɞɧɚ ɚɣɚɣɚɣɚɣɚɣ ɫɫɫɫɫ ɹ ɩɟɪ ɟɪ ɟɪɟɩ ɟɩɥɿ ɟɩɥɿɬ ɟɥɿɬ ɟɥɿɬɚ ɟLɬɚ ɬɚɬɚɬɚɬɚ ɚɣɚɣɚɣɚɣɚɣ ɫɫɫɫɫ ə ɝɪɪɪ Ɉ ɨɧɨ" ɧɨ ɧɨɦ Ɉ ɦɦɦɦɦ ɁɁɁɁɁɁɁɁɁɁ ɪɨɫ ɨɫ ɫɫɫɫ ɬɚɬɚɬɚɬɚ ɫɬɚ ɫɬɚɣ ɚɣɚɣɚɣɚɣɚɣ ɊɊɊɊɊ ȱ ȯ Ɇɦɦɦɦ ɧɚ ɥɿɬ ɥɿɬɚ ɿɬɚ ɬɚɬɚɬɚ ɚɣɚɣɚɣɚɣɚɣ ɝɪɪɪɪ ɪɨɦ Ɉ ɦɦɦ ɨɦ

In the Epicentre of Abstraction 187 ɈɆɈɆ ɨɨɨ Ɇ ɪɨɡ ɡɥɢɜ ɡɥɢɜ ɡɚɣɚɣɚɣɚɣɚɣ ɡɫɫɫɫ ɡə ȼ ȼɫɫɫɫɫ ɟ ȼɫɟɛɭɞ ɛɭɞ ɟɟɟɟɟ ɟɬ ɜɨɽ ɜ ɽ { ɩɪɨ ɩɪɨɥɶ ɩɈɥɟ ɩɥɟɬ ɟɬ ɬɚɬɚɬɚɬɚɬɚ ɪɪɪɪɪ ȯ ɞɧɚ ɞɧɚɣɚɣɚɣɚɣɚɣ ɫɫɫɫɫ ə!

 

[TRANSLATION:] (Marx Sharada [Charade] Tatlinu [For Tatlin] Mar x (unknown) skaz [tale] kazav [said] avavavavav ie (inpleno) [is inpleno – Lat.] dna aiaiaiaiai sssss ssssssia [iednaisia = unite!] per

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peer peerep peerepli! [Command: Fire!] peereplit [woven fence or raft] peereplilit [flight] peereplilita [years] peerepli ita peerepli ita ta ta ta [ratata] peerepli ita ta aiaiaiaiai sssss Ia [intertwine yourself!] hrrr O! ono? [it – Rus.] ono [but – Rus.] onom o O! Mmmmm [like a grapevine] ZZZZZZZZZZ ZZZZZZZZZros ZZZZZZZZZros ZZZZZZZZZrossss ZZZZZZZZZrossstatatata ZZZZZZZZZro sta ZZZZZZZZZro stai, ZZZZZZZZZr aiaiaiaiai [grow!] RRRRR I IE Mmmmm [in a swarm] na lit lita lIta lItatata lI aiaiaiaiai [attack!] hrrrr hrrrrom hrrr O! hrrrmmm hrrrmom hrrrm OMOM ooo M [like a thunderstorm] roz rozlyv

In the Epicentre of Abstraction 189 rozlyv aiaiaiaiai ssss Ia [reverberate!] V sssss e! Vsebud bud eeeee et voie v ie {

pro prol’ [a role] prOle let et! tatatatata rrrrr: [proletarian] :Ie :Iedna :Iednaiaiaiaiai :Iednaiaiaiaiaisssss :IednaiaiaiaiaisssssIa! [unite!] )28

What an abundance of phono-visual devices is created here by Andry Chuzhy – an entire orchestral score of interjections, rhythms, stops, accelerations, intonations, diversions. In the Baroque period, experimentation with unorthodox poetic principles was based on the conviction that the back roads of the conscious [mind] can lead us to an apprehension of higher esoteric truths and the mystery of being. In the Baroque poetry of the period of Hetman Mazepa, [Ivan] Velychkivsky,29 who was so admired by the Kyiv Futurists, created visual maze-poems that ‘lead us’ to the Virgin Mary and Christ. It is as if Jesus appears in Mary’s womb like a child in its mother’s belly. Such is the work’s concept.30 Ɇ Ⱥ Ɋ ȱ ə ȱ Ɋ ɚ Ɇ

ɫ Ɇ ɚ ɪ ȱ ɪ ɚ Ɇ ɫ

ɭ ɫ Ɇ ɚ ɪ ɚ Ɇ ɫ ɭ

ɫ ɭ ɫ Ɇ ɚ Ɇ ɫ ɭ ɫ

ȱ ɫ ɭ ɫ Ɇ ɫ ɭ ɫ ȱ

ɫ ɭ ɫ Ɇ ɚ Ɇ ɫ ɭ ɫ

ɭ ɫ Ɇ ɚ ɪ ɚ Ɇ ɫ ɭ

ɫ Ɇ ɚ ɪ ɿ ɪ ɚ Ɇ ɫ

Ɇ ɚ Ɋ ȱ ɹ ɿ ɪ ɚ Ɇ

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(M (A (R (I (A (I (R (a (M

s M a r I r a M s

u s M a r a M s u

s u s M a M s u s

I s u s M s u s I

s u s M a M s u s

u s M a r a M s u

s M a r i r a M s

M a) R) I) a) i) r) a) M)

In the twentieth century, Semenko, using irony in his poezo-painting, addresses the boredom of the mundane and quotidien. In the middle of a Dadaist montage of children’s interjections and sounds of flatulence there is also room for puns (Mr, that is Pan-Futurist is a Panfuturist, that is, not an Egofuturist), poetic shifts (Iro chka–quois), and rhyme (kaka–haha). ə  ɇ ȿ  Ɇ Ⱥ Ɍ ɂ Ɇ Ɉ

ȱ

ə

Ɋ

ɋ

Ɉ

ɉ

ɑ

ɂ

Ʉ

Ɍ

Ⱥ

ɖ 

Ⱥ  ɹ  ɨ ɞ ɝ ɚ ɧ ɹ ɸ  ɦ ɭ ɯ ɚ  ± ɄȺɚ±ɄȺɚ±ɄȺ ɫ ɥ ɭ ɯ ɚ ɽ  ɛ ɚ ɬ ɶ ɤɨ ɜ ɟ ɥ ɢ ɤ ɢ ɣ  ɠ ɭ ɥ ɢ ɤ  ɿ  ɩ ɚ ɧ Ɏ 

    ɍ 

 Ɍ

ɍ

Ɋ 

    ɂ

    ɋ

    Ɍ

ɚ±ɄȺɚ±ɄȺɚ± ɄȺ ȱɊɈɑɄȺ ȱɊɈɄȿɁ

ɄȺɄȺ

ɏȺ±ɏȺ

In the Epicentre of Abstraction 191 [TRANSLATION:] I AM NOT MOTHER M Y

I

Y

R

S

Y

O

L

Y

C

E

Y

H

E

Y

K

P

Y

A

S

I shoo away the flies a–KA

a–KA

a–KA

father listens a great crook and master F

U a–KA

IROCHKA [Little Irene] IROQUOIS

T

U

R

a–KA

I S

T

a–KA

KAKA

HA – HA

Notwithstanding the lack of seriousness, there are semantic and phonetic choices of generalization and juxtaposition of the kind found in Velychkivsky’s work, where the high and the low, Jesus and Adam, are combined and separated visually: Ⱥɞɚɦ  ɟɫɬɭɩ   ɩɪ ɧɢɤ ȱɫɭɫɚɜɟɞ

(Adam,ansgressing   tr      one (Jesus,  uthful ) Morphological hinges indicate interconnectivity and overlapping, which can also be found in the poetry the Baroque-Futurist ‘whirlwind’ poet [Pavlo] Tychyna wrote:

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ȼɿɬɟɪɜɿɬɟɪɜɿ Ɍɟɪɡɚɽɞɭɛɚɤɥɟ ɧɚɯɦɭɪɢɯɯɦɚɪɚɯɫɨɧ ɰɟɡɧɨɜɨɫɿɧɧɿɣɜɿ (Wind, wind whi [whi]ps the oak tree, ma [ma]ple on melancholy clouds sleep [su]n again autumn wi)

An unreal concreteness emerges from the Dadaist poem by Semenko entitled ‘Week.’31 Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday

As absurd as this page is, it is typically Dadaist and has its own logic. Semenko was proud of the fact that his poem has equivalents in every language. In fact, when the following year’s calendar was published in England, Semenko announced that it was [just] another translation of his poem. [There is a connection between the method of Baroque poetics and Ukrainian folk songs and sayings.] The impact of the Baroque was felt by Kyiv abstract artists through folklore in its verbal and visual forms. Take, for instance, this refrain: ȼɿɬɶɜɿɬɶɜɿɬɶ Ɍɶɨɯɬɶɨɯɬɶɨɯ Ⱥɣɚɣɚɣɨɯɨɯɨɯ Ɍɚɦɫɨɥɨɜɟɣɤɨɳɟɛɟɬɚɜ (Tweet-tweet-tweet Chirp-chirp-chirp Ai-ai-ai, okh-okh-okh A nightingale was singing there)

Or, elsewhere: ɣɟɪɰɟɦɩɟɪɰɟɦɩɟɪɟɪ¶ɽɪ ɐɟɦ ɐɨɤɰɨɦɦɨɤɰɨɦ Ɇɥɢɧɨɱɨɤ [TRANSLITERATION:] (Iertsem, pertsem-perer’iertsem Tsok-tsom-mok-tsom Mlynochok [little mill])

In the Epicentre of Abstraction 193

It is a short step from this to Burliuk, Gnidov, Kruchenykh, and Semenko. (A detailed examination of the poetry of Semenko may be found in Oleh Ilnytzkyj’s essay in this volume.) V. Kyiv’s Kultur-Lige (Culture League) and Issues of Abstraction Alexandra Exter and Oleksander Bohomazov had a considerable influence on Kyiv’s Jewish artistic youth who banded together in the ‘Kultur-Lige’ art section. The group included Mark Epstein, El Lissitzky (see colour plate 20), Solomon Nikritin (colour plate 15), Isaak Rabinovich, Aleksandr Tyshler, Issachar Ber Ryback (colour plate 5), Nisson Shifrin, and Isaak Pailes. All of them later became acclaimed masters in other countries. They all considered abstract plastic conception to be the main indicator of art, and proclaimed a decisive ‘no’ to ‘literariness’ and narrativity if not [first] filtered through the contemporary art process. In light of the religious ban against painting concrete scenes on synagogue walls, these artists considered their abstraction to be the manifestation of Jewishness in art. In 1919, the Kyiv Yiddish miscellany Oyfgang (Dawn) published an article by Boris Aronson and Isaachar Ber Ryback entitled ‘The Directions of Jewish Art,’ stating: Pure abstract form is precisely what embodies the national element – a painterly abstract experience that comes to be revealed through material specifically perceived. Thanks only to the principle of abstract art can one achieve the expression of one’s national self-identity. The form is an essential element, while the content is evil. The picture’s composition is more important than its message, and the variety of colours is more valuable than the realistic representation of objects.32

For El Lissitzky, the most prominent artist of the Kultur-Lige, Kyiv became his school of abstract art in the form of Exter’s Cubo-Futurism during 1918–19. Later, in Vitebsk, Moscow, and Germany, he would create masterpieces of Suprematism, the minimalist, draughtsman’s version of non-objective art, but Kyiv was the starting point of this artistic evolution. Lissitsky’s [artwork] was multicultural: French (Picasso’s influence), Ukrainian (from Exter), and Jewish (newspaper vignettes in Yiddish). His Kyiv illustrations of Ukrainian, Jewish, and Belorussian fairy-tales also indicate the multidirectional nature of Lissitsky’s cultural background. Similarly to other artists, his national self-identity manifested itself in a rather spontaneous, intuitive, subconscious way. It is significant that, under Hetman Skoropadsky,33 the catalogues of the Kultur-Lige were printed simultaneously in Ukraine’s three official languages: Ukrainian, Russian, and Yiddish. A number of the Kultur-Lige artists became stage designers. Some, such as Boris Aronson, moved to the United States. Aronson became world famous as a set designer on Broadway and at the Metropolitan Opera. Others, such as Nisson Shifrin, worked at the Berezil, the theatre headed by Les Kurbas that was to find itself at the epicentre of new art in Kyiv. Translated by Olia Prokopenko with Myroslava M. Mudrak

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NOTES 1 Ia. Tugenkhol’d, Alexandra Exter: Farbenrhytmen (St Petersburg: Palace Editions, 2001) 144. 2 Teatral’naia zhizn’ [Theatre Life] (Kyiv) 9 (1918) 18. 3 Pavlo Tychyna, ‘Blahoslovenni: materiia i prostorin’,’ V kosmichonomu orkestri, part 1, 1921. 4 Bohomazov’s Zhyvopys i elementy [Painting and Elements] was completed in August 1914 and remains in manuscript form in its entirety at the Kyiv State Archive / Museum of Literature and Art of Ukraine (TsDAMLMU). Large sections of Bohomazov’s essay were compiled and translated by Bohomazov’s granddaughter, Tetiana Popova, and great-grandson, Sashko Popov, and only finally published in 1996 in Kyiv with the support of the International Renaissance Foundation. Previous translations of Bohomazov’s essay appeared in French, in the exhibition catalogue Alexandre Bogomazov (Toulouse: Musée d’Art Moderne, Réfectoire des Jacobins, 21 June–29 August 1991). 5 Iakov Tugenkhol’d, Aleksandra Ekster kak zhivopisets i khudozhnik stseny (Berlin: Zaria, 1922). 6 A. Ekster, ‘Vystavka kievskikh khudozhnikov’ [Exhibition of Kyiv Artists], Kievskaia nedelia [Kyiv Week], 1912. Scientific Library of the Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences, Kyiv, no. ZhE 1194. 7 Gosiason (1898–1978), a Ukrainian-born French painter, stage, and graphic art designer. While in Odesa, he noted down Ekster’s thoughts about theatre: ‘Khudozhnik v teatre: Iz besed s Aleksandroi Ekster [The Artist in the Theatre],’ Odesskii listok [Odessa Newsletter] 130 (19 September 1919) 4. 8 ‘Vseukrains’kyi z’izd predstavnykiv khudozhnikh orhanizatsii [The All-Ukrainian Congress of the Representatives of Art Societies],’ Vidrodzhennia [Kyiv] 74 (28 June 1918) 6. 9 ‘Ankety sered uchasnykiv z’izdu [Congress Delegates’ Questionnaires],’ Vidrodzhennia [Kyiv] 75 (30 June 1918) 7. 10 O. Bohomazov, ‘Zhyvopys i elementy,’ Kyiv, 1914; 1996, p. 64 (see note 4). 11 Oleksander Bohomazov, ‘Osnovni zavdannia rozvytku mystetstva maliarstva na Ukraini.’ Ms., Bohomazov Archive, Kyiv State Archive / Museum of Literature and Art of Ukraine (TsDAMLMU). 12 See note 4 above. 13 Bohomazov, ‘Zhyvopys i elementy.’ 14 Ibid. 15 The intimate correspondence between Oleksander Bohomazov and his wife, Wanda Monatstyrs’ka-Bohomazov is preserved in the Bohomazov Archive of TsDAMLMU, Kyiv. 16 Klyment Red’ko, ‘Mystetstvo i hromadians’ka viina,’ Ukraina 13 (1988) 12. 17 Pavlo Tychyna, ‘Des’ na dni moho sertsia,’ Osnova 2 (Odesa) 1915 (Sept.) 85; eleventhcentury poet Simeon Novyibohovlov. 18 Hryhoryi Skovoroda (1722–94), poet, philosopher, and composer. ‘Throw away Copernicus’s spheres and look into the caves of the heart,’ is one of his well-known aphoristic phrases.

In the Epicentre of Abstraction 195 19 Blaise Cendrars, ‘La tête,’ in The Cubist Poets in Paris, ed. C.L. Breunig (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1995), 102–3. 20 Blaise Pascal, Pensées, section 11, ‘The Prophecies,’ 693. Electronic book: http://www .leaderu.com/cyber/books/pensees/pensees-SECTION-11.html. 21 For the context of this quote, which is probably derived from Malevich’s essay ‘God Is Not Cast Down,’ see Kazimir Malevich, ‘Bog ne skinut. Iskusstvo. Tserkov’. Fabrika,’ in Kazimir Malevich: Sobranie sochinenii v piati tomakh, vol. 1 (Moscow: ‘Gileia,’ 1995). 22 Translators’ note: Malevich’s theories about art are summarized in a series of thirteen articles published in Ukrainian during the years 1928–1930 by the Kharkiv avantgarde journal Nova generatsiia (New Generation). Together, they constitute the body of Malevich’s pedagogy and provide a penetrating look into the systematic and comprehensive nature of his thinking. It is also important to note that the publication of his aesthetic theses coincided with his years of teaching at the Kyiv Art Institute (1928–30). 23 K. Malevich, ‘Nove mystetstvo i mystetstvo obrazotvorche [New Art and the Visual Arts],’ Nova generatsiia 9 (1928) 117–86. 24 ‘Beyondsense’ (i.e., ‘beyond-the-senses,’ also known as ‘trans-sense’) is an approximate translation of the neologism ‘Zaum’ (literally, ‘beyond the mind’) – a word coined by the Russian Futurists to describe a new and universal trans-rational language created from syllabic utterances and sounds to express contemporaneity with the utmost immediacy while invoking a primeval Slavic tongue. 25 Translator’s note: The translation captures the poetic play of the words used by the poet. However, the general sense of the poem is as follows: After three days without borscht It weighs heavily on the heart And immediately the intestines are stretched And the belly growls. 26 Translator’s note: The word ‘kokhai’ is rendered as a command: ‘You! Love!’ 27 Vasilisk Hnidov (Gnedov) (1890–1978) was a Futurist, and the reference is to ‘Ohnianna svyta’ (in Russian transliteration ‘Ognianna svita’), published in the Egofuturist collection Nebokopy (St Petersburg, 1913). 28 Andryi Chuzhyi, ‘Marx,’ Nova generatsia no. 4 (1928) 249. 29 Ivan Velychkivs’kyi [Velychkovs’kyi] (d. 1726) was Archdeacon of Poltava during Mazepa’s time and was known largely as a master of the Baroque poetic form. This genre of verse was scholastic in nature, incorporating Latin as well as the Cyrillic alphabet, and, as an early form of concrete poetry, utilized palindromes, acrostics, chiasms, and other creative devices inspired by mathematics and science to create a visual layout that was active, playful, and varied, while retaining a spiritually didactic content. 30 Translator’s note: ‘Isus i Mariia’ means ‘Jesus and Mary.’ 31 Katafalk iskusstv [Catafalque of Arts] (Kyiv) 1922. 32 Tradition and Revolution: The Jewish Renaissance in Russian Avant-garde Art, 1912–1928, ed. Ruth Apter-Gabriel (Jerusalem: Israel Museum, 1987) 229. 33 Pavlo Skoropads’kyi (1873–1945) was a conservative leader ousted from power in 1918 during Ukraine’s struggle for independence following the Russian Revolution. He was the last Hetman of Ukraine.

To the Isles Electric! (An Intermedia) The heroes set out Evohe!! Not Admeteses, Herculeses, nor Theseuses, Not a handful No! Ivans and Hrytskos and Sydors, regular folks, but nonetheless Argonauts! Not in quest of the golden fleece of Colchis, but of new worlds, new lands New acquisitions! To carve out our fate not in faraway lands, but right here, under our very noses, in our ancient native land. But our thoughts will embrace whole universes, make the achievements of all the ages our own The seas are stormy Enemies on many islands surround us on the way … To the amber islands to the Isles Electric … Hey you, Orpheuses Boyans Skalds Bards … … It’s spring! … Aeschyluses, Sophocleses, Eumeneses, Pisanders, Flaccuses, and Pindars And anyone else out there Create new Pythian hymns About how the new Argonauts travelled to the amber islands to the Isles Electric!! Volodymyr Koriak1

Excerpt translated from the Ukrainian by Irena R. Makaryk 1 V. Koriak (Vol’ko Davydovych Bliumshteyn), Mystetstvo no. 1 (May 1919) 1.

7 The Yiddish Kultur-Lige gennady estraikh

Autonomy In January 1918, when the Central Rada had officially declared national-personal (or extra-territorial) autonomy to Ukraine’s Jews, the new independent country began to look like a promising place for the realization of political and cultural programs of Jewish socialist and liberal parties. At the same time, the majority of Jewish politicians, notably the Bundists, were hostile to their Ukrainian counterparts’ drive to become a sovereign country and believed that a federal structure of Russia would create a much better environment for its national minorities.1 Significantly, the local Jewish population, particularly its Russian-educated constituent, usually defined themselves as Jews of Russia rather than of Ukraine. Even the Yiddish poet David Hofshtein, who loved Ukrainian language and literature and had made his own literary attempts in Ukrainian, poeticized the rural area not far from Kyiv in 1912 as the ‘Russian fields.’2 ‘A specifically Ukrainian Jewish identity had failed to develop in Ukraine, even though the history of Jews in the region stretches back two millennia and the population reached two million at the beginning of this [twentieth] century.’3 Such an identity began to emerge predominantly after 1917, during the short-lived independence of Ukraine and her later quasistate existence in the Soviet Union. For all that, many enthusiasts of Yiddish culture welcomed the introduction of Jewish autonomy in Ukraine. Khaim-Dov Hurvits, editor of the Petrograd Yiddish Togblat (Daily Newspaper), argued in 1918 that national-personal autonomy was ‘the only possible way to avoid the contradiction between class conscience and national feeling.’4 Moshe Silberfarb, the first minister of Jewish affairs in the Ukrainian government, maintained that the proclamation of autonomy was paralleled in importance by the decrees of the Great French Revolution. In France, the rights of the person had been declared; in Ukraine, the government supported the rights of the nation.5 Although many of the activists believed that Ukrainian political leadership was professing fealty to autonomy only to obligate the Jews to support the young government, they were ready to be part of such a marriage of convenience, because they regarded it as an important step towards establishing organizational structures with the authority and international standing to advance other, notably territorial, interests of the Jews.6

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In 1918, Jacob Leshchinsky, a Jewish social scientist, published a pamphlet entitled Our National Demands, laying out his vision of post-imperial Russia’s federal composition.7 His blueprint pictures a society whose citizens are entitled to become members of the Jewish (and for that matter any other national) communal structure, which has representation in all decision-making and executive institutions of the state. Reflecting the belief that religious sentiments would atrophy in a modern egalitarian world, the envisioned community is secular (albeit it also takes care of its religious minority) and is governed by a democratically elected national parliament. It controls predominantly the cultural domain of national life – the educational network, publishing, libraries, theatres, and museums – which secures the preservation and further development of the nation. (A literary Utopia, based on such a pattern of Ukrainian-Jewish society, came out in Kharkiv around the same time.)8 Also in 1918, in Kyiv, Ben-Adir (Abraham Rosin), a central figure in Jewish socialist circles, described – in his brochure Our Language Problem – a world brotherhood of nations, including Jews as a national collective with a highly developed Yiddish culture.9 A similar blueprint is found in Nokhum Shtif’s 1919 treatise Jews and Yiddish.10 The main players in the Ukrainian Jewish political gamble, which combined an unprecedented level of Jewish representation in the government with an unprecedented scale of anti-Jewish violence (over 1500 pogroms had afflicted about 1300 communities in Ukraine),11 were four parties: the United Jewish Socialist Labour Party (or Fareynikte), the Bund, the People’s Party (Folkspartey), and the Labour Zionist Party (Poalei Zion). In fact, personal autonomy was more appealing to the Fareynikte’s and the (less influential) Folkspartey’s nationalist Diasporicthinking members than to internationalist Bundists who feared Ukrainian separatism, or to Labour Zionists who regarded autonomist projects as temporary stages on the way to building a Jewish state in Palestine. The Fareynikte launched a few Yiddish newspapers in Ukraine, including the Kyiv daily Naye tsayt (New Time, September 1917–May 1919). In September 1917 the newspaper urged its readers to claim Yiddish as their mother-tongue during the forthcoming census of the Kyiv population. Indeed, the vast majority of the over 87,000 Kyivan Jewish respondents were Yiddish claimants.12 The Yiddishist cadre of Kyiv represented a close-knit group of activists, whose pan-Yiddishist aspirations and loyalty to each other were, as people from other cliques of Yiddish aficionados underscored, often stronger than their party allegiance.13 Some of them began to cooperate before the First World War, notably as a circle around the pioneering Yiddish secular school in Demiivka, a Kyiv suburb with a large Jewish population. When the school was founded in 1911, there were no other Yiddish non-religious educational institutions in Europe, and it would become the model for many of those that followed. The school’s teachers also held illegal gatherings (mainly readings of new works and discussions on various topics) for Yiddish activists. Yeshue Liubomirsky, one of the teachers and later a Soviet theatre critic, remembered a party with David Bergelson, then already a writer with published works, and the young actor Mikhail (Moshe-Aaron) Rafalsky, later the leading Yiddish theatre director in Soviet Belorussia.14 A friend of Sholem Aleichem’s children, Rafalsky dabbled in Yiddish literature and perhaps was involved in the ambitious

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(aborted) plan to create in Kyiv a touring theatre, which was to be a model for Yiddish troupes all over the world.15 Thanks to him, Nokhum Oyslender, later the first professor of Yiddish literature in the Soviet Union, began to learn Yiddish and joined the Kyiv group of Yiddish enthusiasts whose leader, Osher Shvartsman, would be canonized as the founding Soviet Yiddish poet. Influenced by his neighbours’ son-in-law, the Hebrew and Yiddish poet Khaim Nakhman Bialik, and the Russian Symbolist Aleksandr Blok, Shvartsman initially wrote in Hebrew, Russian, and Ukrainian, but in 1908 he switched to Yiddish. His cousin, David Hofshtein also wrote poetry, initially mostly in Hebrew, Russian, and Ukrainian. Hofshtein’s friend, Aron Kushnirov, another novice poet, then earned his crust as a sales assistant in a grocer’s shop. Like-minded Yiddish literati included young men from affluent neighbourhoods, populated by the entrepreneurial class. One of them, Yekhezkel Dobrushin, a former Sorbonne student, combined journalism and creative writing (stories and poems) with literary criticism. Among the well-heeled enthusiasts of Yiddish letters were also two young men, Nakhman Meisel, a budding literary critic, and his friend David Bergelson. Thanks to some assets left to him by his father, Bergelson was able to live the life of a rentier, trying to find recognition as a man of letters. Around 1910 Meisel appeared as the head of the Kyiv-based Kunst-farlag (Arts Publication House), established in an attempt to become independent from Warsaw, the main Jewish publishing centre in the empire. Although this small enterprise did not upgrade Kyiv into a significant producer of Yiddish titles, its literary miscellanies Fun tsayt tsu tsayt (From Time to Time, 1911 and 1912) and a handful of its pamphlets represented the first collective output of the Kyiv Group of Yiddish Writers – the name under which they became known in Yiddish literary history. The imprint of the Kunst-farlag books featured Meisel’s Kyiv address and the name of the main distributor, ‘Boris Kletskin’s Vilna publishing house.’16 The Vilna and Kyiv Yiddishists’ publishing activities can be regarded as a turning point in the Russian Jewish intellectuals’ attempt to establish solvent outlets for modernist Yiddish writers.17 While Vilna-based Yiddishists usually had little to do with the co-territorial Polish, Lithuanian, and Belorussian cultures,18 the influence of Ukrainian literature and culture on Kyiv Jewish intellectuals was also rather marginal, though Taras Shevchenko’s poetry appealed to some of them.19 Russian and Western literatures (the latter usually in Russian translations) were the main models for the formation of aesthetic tastes and the ideological loyalties of Yiddish writers and readers. Ironically, even Yiddish literary production often played a minor role in Yiddish activists’ intellectual growth.20 Ukrainian and Yiddish belonged to the same category of ‘young,’ aspiring cultural mediums: they sought to build a culture on a par with recognized world cultures. According to the logic of Yiddishists, modern culture had to replace religion to become the new miracle catalyst, able to transform the geographically dispersed and predominantly obscurant Jewish population into a modern nation. Diasporic Jewish nationalists, committed to Yiddish high culture–building, constituted the leadership of the Kultur-Lige (Culture League) which was established in Kyiv in January 1918. The idea of such an organization belonged to Zelig Melamed, a hard-working Yiddishist socialist who was employed at Boris

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7.1 Yiddish Writers’ Group, Kyiv, 1912. Standing left to right: Yekheskel Dobrushin and David Bergelson; sitting: unidentified sitter, Leah Geshelina (Dobrushin’s wife), and Der Nister

Kletzkin’s publishing house. Melamed became the ‘nerve and engineer’ of the new organization.21 Abraham Golomb, a Yiddish educator, recalled: ... on a rainy day during the time of shooting in [Kyiv] streets, I was running warily down the Kuznechna Street towards the Jewish student canteen. Going up the street was Zelig Melamed (he would die in solitude in New York) and [he] shouted to me from afar: ‘I’ve got it, I’ve got it!’ In his pocket he was carrying the statutes of the Kultur-Lige. The organization developed miraculously quickly into numerous branches in almost all the towns of Ukraine – it became a legend. It established schools, training courses for teachers, a publishing house with a printing shop, a big bookstore …22

Among the founders of the Kultur-Lige were Bergelson, Dobrushin, and Meisel.23 At the early stages of the league’s existence it was hard to find a clear demarcation between cultural projects of the Kultur-Lige and the Ministry for Jewish Affairs. For instance, Meisel combined his leading role in the league with the position of superintendent of the publishing division at the ministry’s Department of Education.24 When Hetman Skoropadsky liquidated the Ministry for Jewish Affairs (and, generally, Jewish autonomy) in July 1918, the Kultur-Lige took over the whole Yiddish cultural network, trying to transform the state-sponsored autonomy into an independent, self-sufficient organizational structure.25

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Conceived as a nonpartisan organization whose aim was to construct and promote a new Jewish culture based on Yiddish and secular democratic values, the Kultur-Lige formed a ‘no man’s land’ where political opponents could cooperate in projects such as education, theatre, and publishing.26 No doubt, it was inspiring to see how Ukrainian became a state language after centuries of being treated as a ‘barbarian jargon’ of Russian.27 Yet in its constitution, accepted on 15 January 1918, the Kultur-Lige does not appear as a Ukrainian organization. Rather, the document defines the ‘whole territory of the Russian Republic’ as the domain of the new organization’s activities.28 In the 1918 pamphlet The Main Aims of the KulturLige, Ukraine is mentioned only as the place where a group of enthusiasts had fewer than nine months earlier decided to establish the new Jewish cultural network’s headquarters.29 To all appearances, the Kultur-Lige activists were full of self-importance and believed that ki mi-Kyiv tetse tora (from Kyiv the Torah will come).30 Characteristically, among the list of publications distributed through the KulturLige’s central bookstore there are only two titles translated from Ukrainian; both are David Hofshtein’s translations of children stories by Ivan Franko, who among Jewish activists had a special status as a ‘friend of Yiddish literature’ because he collected Yiddish folklore, translated from Yiddish, and was interested in Jewish problems.31 Still, contacts between Yiddish and Ukrainian activists were very limited. The Ukrainian theatre director and actor S. Semdor (or, Semen Doroshenko, born Simon Goldshtein), who worked with Les Kurbas, represented a unique example of Yiddish-Ukrainian cultural cooperation. Significantly, he could participate in meetings and other gatherings conducted in Yiddish.32 The Kyiv Art School and Alexandra Exter’s Studio formed the main breeding ground for Jewish artists interested in developing Jewish art as part of Yiddishist nation-building projects.33 An interest in folk art tradition was characteristic of a number of Kyiv-based Ukrainian artists, such as Heorhy Narbut. Some of their Jewish counterparts, too, achieved impressive results in manifesting national elements of their art. Their achievement also had roots in Ukrainian folk art, which had influenced Exter, the Cubist-Futurist leader of contemporary art in Kyiv (in 1919 she even held a high position in the Ministry of Education of Ukraine).34 Her younger colleagues Issachar Ber Ryback and Boris Aronson explained that their attachment to abstract forms of Cubism and Futurism had to do with such art’s aesthetic compatibility with Jewish folk art.35 By autumn 1918 the Kultur-Lige had seven sections: literary, educational, publishing, library, musical, theatrical, and artistic (visual arts). Writers and critics were central figures in all activities of the Kultur-Lige. Thus, Ryback, one of the founders of the Kultur-Lige, was regarded as a model Jewish artist, particularly because he was close to Yiddish literary circles.36 The league’s arts section was headed by Dobrushin, while Bergelson worked briefly as the literary director of the theatre school, whose main organizer and director (befittingly called a ‘commissar’), Ephraim Loyter, attracted to the project a few non-Yiddishist intellectuals, including Semdor.37 At the beginning of 1919, two more sections emerged in the league’s structure: the statistical and archival ones. Not the least of the league’s accomplishments was the establishment of a Yiddish educational network,

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7.2 Semen Semdor signed photo (YHOD)

including teachers’ training courses. The league’s publishing house opened bookstores in Kyiv and in the province. The first All-Ukrainian conference of the new organization was convened on 19 May 1919.38 The league’s and the ministry’s Yiddishist functionaries represented only a small minority of the Ukrainian Jewish population. During the 1917 elections to the AllRussian Constituent Assembly and 1918 elections to the provisional Jewish National Assembly, Zionist and religious parties had outpolled the Yiddishist socialists.39 The vast majority of the Jewish electorate either rejected modernization or associated their future hopes with modern culture in Russian and Hebrew. Small wonder that the Kultur-Lige faced the opposition of Zionist and religious groups, who had been sidelined by the socialists and secular liberals. Representatives of the American Joint Distribution Committee who came to Kyiv on 25 May 1920 found themselves in the middle of a conflict between the traditional communal organization and the Kultur-Lige.40 Yet it was not in the spirit of the time and place to listen to the constituency’s choice, particularly to the desires of non-proletarian masses. The socialists held that they understood the law of history and had the right to facilitate its implementation, whereas the circles that did not belong to the ‘revolutionary democracy’ had to satisfy themselves with the status of a helpless minority.41 Malka

7.3 A group of Kyiv Lige activists with two American delegates, May 1920 (although the handwritten note states: ‘Jewish art exhibition, Kiev, 1919’). Front row, right to left: Zelig Kalmanovitch, Nokhum Shtif, Wolf Latzky-Bertoldy, David Bergelson, two American delegates, Bal-Makhshoves, and Elias Tcherikower. Second row, right to left: Mark Epstein, Boris Aronson, Issachar Ber Ryback, Leyb Kvitko, and Joseph Tchaikov (YIVO)

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Frumkin (also known as Ester), an influential Bundist leader, explained that ‘we must not give power into the hands of the bourgeoisie. In this sense we denounce democracy.’42 Cultural force feeding was perceived as one of the most effective methods for both nation building and general social engineering. According to the Yiddishist activists, the masses were ‘national [that is, nonZionist and non-assimilationist], whether they want[ed] it or not, whether they recognize[d] it or not.’43 Radicalization of Traditions Yiddishists’ worship of literature was hardly surprising ‘in a country where literature takes the place of life.’44 Indigenous literature was envisaged as the most important component of the autonomous, extraterritorial Jewish nation, and therefore the problem of the national authenticity of young Yiddish literature was most serious.45 Dobrushin wrote in 1918, ‘We inherited the treatment of literature as a “holy thing” from the Jewish Enlightenment period, with its reverent celebration of culture.’ In his depiction of the opening ceremony of a library in a shtetl, a group of young enthusiasts of secular Yiddish culture put into a basement of a house of religious study a bookcase with Yiddish volumes by such writers as Sholem Aleichem and Yitshok Leybush Perets, and announced that the new bookcase would be their new Holy Ark.46 In 1918 the artist El Lissitzky used a similar motif of a new Holy Ark in his design of the stamp for a Kyiv publishing house.47 Selected elements of traditional Jewish life were to be incorporated in the newly created secular culture. In 1919 Dobrushin attempted to detect essential ‘primitive’ components of Yiddish art, similar to Oswald Spengler’s ‘prime symbols of a Culture.’48 (Bal-Makhshoves – the father of modern Yiddish literary criticism – later found similar ‘primitive’ components in stories by Der Nister, one of the most important Kyiv Yiddish writers, whereas Aronson would argue, in his book on Marc Chagall, that ‘nobody has yet revealed the secret of national [art].’)49 No doubt, the ethnographical expedition, led by S. An-sky (born Shloyme-Zanvl Rapoport) in the pre–First World War Pale of Jewish Settlement, provided the national culture builders with concrete ‘primitive’ components. In fact, it was one of the main aims of An-sky’s endeavour to use folklore material as sources for creating his ‘own [that is, Jewish] forms’ in literature, music, and art.50 The two issues of the almanac Eygns (Our Own), sponsored and distributed by the Kultur-Lige, were little noticed at the time of their publication in Kyiv in 1918 and 1920. Yet they occupy a remarkable place in Yiddish literary history as the forum of the Kyiv Group of Yiddish Writers, which was also known as the Eygns Group. The titles and designs of Oyfgang (Sunrise) and Baginen (Dawn), two other literary publications launched and discontinued in 1919, celebrated the beginning of a new era, the belief in a better world to come. The cover of Baginen, for instance, designed by Joseph Tchaikov, one of the Kultur-Lige’s leading artists (and Meisel’s brother-in-law), showed a naked young man, symbolizing the liberation of Jews from the fetters of the past.51 Kyiv almanacs, newspapers, and journals provided forums for numerous debuts, such as the poet Leyb Kvitko’s, who moved to Kyiv after the October revolution. Kyiv Yiddish publications also resuscitated those

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7.4 Cover of the journal Baginem (Dawn)

literati who did not write during the war. One of them was Lipe Reznik, who resumed his literary career after five years of silence, following the publication of his 1914 children’s book Der alter seyfer (The Old Book) in the Kunst-farlag. Like the Ukrainian Symbolists (though not necessarily under their influence), the Kyiv Yiddish writers disavowed the ethnographism and moralizing of their predecessors and strove for a hybrid of Europeanization with national identity. Russian Symbolists, especially Alexander Blok and the Imaginist Sergei Esenin, had a major influence on the Kyiv Yiddish poets.52 One of their achievements (particularly of Shvartsman and Hofshtein) was the landscape lyric, a relatively new domain in Yiddish literature.53 Hofshtein occupied a particularly prominent position in Kyiv literary circles. Although his first book came out as late as 1918, and his first poem was

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published in 1917, Hofshtein was already regarded as a classic of a kind and had a following among aspiring poets. His initial infatuation with communism became even stronger after the death of his cousin, Osher Shvartsman, a Red Army volunteer. Although the young Kyiv writers were modernists, they were little interested in an urban setting. This distinguishes them from their precursors and models from overseas, the New York Di Yunge (The Young Ones) group, who actively explored urban subject matter.54 In a mid-1930s retrospect, Bergelson, whose influence was immense on Yiddish prose, opened a window into his creative process and explained that lack of a suitable Yiddish vocabulary forced him to stage his early works mostly in shtetl surroundings rather than in a city, Kyiv, where he actually met the prototypes of his literary characters.55 More importantly, the Kyiv writers’ quest for modernity did not imply a decisive break with the tradition. They dreamt about a secular Yiddish-speaking nation whose culture would transform and integrate various elements of the centuries-long linguistic, aesthetic, and behavioural experience. Significantly, the writers lived in the proximity of the Pale rather than somewhere across the ocean. Writing about the artists who belonged to the same circle of Kyiv Yiddishists, the art historian Igor Dukhan distinguished innate historicism in their artistic experience of a radicalization of traditions. The same artists who practised ‘pure avant-garde’ when their work had nothing to do with Jewish topics and projects were more conservative in their ‘Jewish art.’56 In terms of literary and artistic output, the number of programmatic articles and statements sometimes exceeded the amount of creative work proper. The mood on the Yiddish Olympus built in post-revolutionary Kyiv was becoming more and more funereal. Bloodshed, deprivation, and political instability were the main reasons for pessimism and even panic. Dearth of mass consumers of Yiddish cultural production caused additional perplexity, especially as Yiddish intellectuals expected that the revolution would bring modernist writers a wider audience of readers. They particularly sought to reach the so-called conscientious, or intellectual, workers. However, their experience with Eygns had affirmed that their latest offerings had an insufficient number of consumers.57 In his article ‘Literature and Society,’ published in 1919 in issues 4–5 of the Kyivbased Bikher-velt (World of Books), Bergelson bemoaned the ‘solitude of Yiddish literature,’ whose readership was confined largely to ‘the uneducated common man, who has not grown to the civilized tradition and understands only pictures containing primitive lines, or the lubok (cheap popular print).’ He was annoyed with the popularity of Peretz Markish’s poetry, which eclipsed the much more complicated lyrics of Kvitko and Hofshtein. Bergelson compared the immediate post-revolution years with the ideological climate during the early years of Christianity, when all previous forms of culture had been replaced by such ‘naked forms’ as the cross.58 Markish, whose poetry, according to Bergelson, represented contemporary ‘naked forms,’ is usually associated with the Kyiv Group of Yiddish Writers, though, in fact, he had little to do with the Kyiv literary circle, trying to form his own base in Ekaterinoslav (later, Dnipropetrovsk), a city in central Ukraine. His poetry was influenced by Russian translations of Émile Verhaeren and Walt Whitman and, to a much lesser extent, developed under an influence of Russian Symbolism, which was characteristic of the Kyiv poets.59

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In 1920 Ukraine’s short-lived independence was practically liquidated. In the Soviet realm, Kyiv declined as the Jewish cultural Olympus, becoming a provincial, even if significant, centre of Jewish culture. As for the Kultur-Lige, there were attempts to secure its survival as part of the state-run educational and cultural system for all ethnic groups of the population. The Soviet leadership decided to delegate to the league at least two functions: first, to brainstorm and test new cultural initiatives and, second, to be the cultural organization for the Jewish masses.60 In January 1920 Anatoly Lunacharsky, the People’s Commissar (Minister) of Enlightenment (Education) in Lenin’s government, allocated a subsidy for the Kultur-Lige, but mentioned that it was a temporary measure, pending a decision which would define the role of the organization.61 According to Bergelson, the Soviet authorities sponsored the Kultur-Lige also in 1919.62 On 27 May 1920 Bergelson, together with Bal-Makhshoves and Nokhum Shtif, sent through the American representatives a joint letter to the poet Yehoash (Solomon Bloomgarden), the towering figure in the American literary world,63 asking him to make their appeal known to American Yiddish writers and activists. The three signatories represented the group of nine writers, artists, and political activists. In his separate letter, attached to the joint appeal, Bergelson explained that he saw America as the only remaining place ‘for saving the artistic energy, which they [the nine intellectuals] had inherited from Ukrainian Jewry. Will you, people known and unknown to us, help us? Will you get visas [for us], giving the exhausted group of artists a chance to come to America?’ We know that only one member of the group, Boris Aronson, would eventually settle in the United States and make a remarkable career as a theatre artist.64 On 16 September 1920 the Kyiv Yiddish daily Komunistishe fon (Communist Banner) reported on a meeting of Jewish communist culture activists. They welcomed the decision to Bolshevize the Kultur-Lige, stressing that, under the specific conditions of Ukraine, the independent league became a refuge for all kinds of erstwhile socialists as well as for the nationalist bourgeois intelligentsia.65 By that time the Kultur-Lige had spread from Kyiv throughout Ukraine; it had 99 branches with 283 institutions, including 63 schools, 54 libraries, 7 children’s clubs, and 53 orphanages and children’s homes.66 Inadvertently it had created a solid basis for Soviet Yiddish cultural programs. On 17 December 1920 the Central Committee of the Kultur-Lige was liquidated by a decree of the Kyiv Province Revolutionary Committee. Instead, an executive committee dominated by Communists was appointed. Internalization and Sovietization In 1920 Jewish intellectuals were abandoning Kyiv. Some people were afraid that their ideological views would not be to the Bolsheviks’ liking. In any event, many – arguably the majority of – activists of the Kultur-Lige moved to Moscow or Kharkiv, the new capital of Soviet Ukraine, or opted for emigration. Ephraim Loyter soon brought his theatre studio to Moscow, which was regarded as the main centre of the theatre world in post-imperial Russia;67 in 1925 it formed the basis for the Ukrainian State Yiddish Theatre in Kharkiv.68 In the same year, the troupe of the Belorussian

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State Yiddish Theatre, directed by Rafalsky, came to Minsk after studying for four years in Moscow.69 (Ryback would come from Paris to design the first performances of Rafalsky’s troupe in Minsk and Loyter’s troupe in Kharkiv.)70 In 1920 Bergelson came to Moscow planning to publish a periodical there, since virtually all the Yiddish literary talent associated with the Kyiv group had reassembled in Moscow. The publishing department of the Jewish Sections of the Communist Party employed Bergelson as an editor of Yiddish and Russian literature. Various editorial positions were occupied by Hofshtein, Dobrushin, and a few other Kyiv literati. In general, the Kyivans became the dominant Yiddish literary clique in Moscow. In 1921 Moshe Litvakov, one of the league’s activists, emerged as editor of the central Soviet Yiddish daily Der emes (Truth), while Dobrushin, Hofshtein, Kushnirov, and Oyslender would in 1922–4 edit the first significant Soviet Yiddish literary periodical, Shtrom (Current). However, many Kyivans chose to decamp from the cold, hungry city, often with the help of the Moscow-based Lithuanian ambassador (and poet) Jurgis Baltrušaitis, who provided them with passports.71 In emigration, some of the league’s former activists continued (or began) to believe that Ukraine was the fount of real Yiddish talent. The explanation of this phenomenon they found in the Hasidic (that is, predominantly Ukrainian) roots of modern Yiddish literature, though in reality it usually reflected their desire to underline the cultural divide between the Polish Jewry and the ‘Russian’ – that is, Ukrainian and Belorussian-Lithuanian – Jewry.72 Organizations modelling the Kultur-Lige appeared in scores of places, such as Warsaw, Kaunas, Paris, Amsterdam, and Berlin. In South Africa, the Far East, and the United States (for example, in Detroit) local activists attempted to consolidate all the ‘active forces’ under the umbrella of Yiddish leagues.73 However, none of the Yiddish leagues would achieve the Kyiv prototype’s scope of activities and suprapolitical status. Granted, if Ukraine had survived as an independent state, consolidation of power in the hands of Ukrainian nationalist parties and internal struggle among the Jewish parties would, probably, also have made impossible the KulturLige’s existence in its initial all-embracing form. In any case, such problems were characteristic of other young states’ environments. For instance, Kaunas had its Kultur-Lige from 1919, but it did not inherit the Kyiv league’s cross-party spirit and from the very beginning was a proletarian, communist-leaning organization; as such it was closed down by the authorities.74 The educator Abraham Golomb, who could compare the Ukrainian and, later, Polish experience of Kultur-Lige activities, came to the conclusion that it was hard to preserve the ‘apolitical spirit of Kyiv’ because Yiddish cultural and educational institutions were controlled by competing politicians.75 In Poland, the Kultur-Lige was run by the Bund.76 In the 1920s Berlin became a stronghold of Ukrainian Jewish emigration, represented there by a separate Union of Ukrainian Jews. Significantly, a group of Jewish entrepreneurs from Kyiv had managed to relocate themselves and their wealth to Germany in 1919, during the German army’s evacuation from Ukraine.77 Also, in the Union of Russian Jews, the most influential Jewish emigrant organization in Germany, a number of key positions were occupied by Ukrainian Jews, including its chairman, Yakov Teitel, and the head of the union’s juridical commission, Aleksei Goldenweizer.78 Yet only a relatively small circle of literati had nostalgic

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feelings towards the Kultur-Lige, and its Berlin organization did not become a viable organization.79 In 1922 the Kultur-Lige was established in Paris. The idea had been implanted by Zelig Melamed, the original league’s father, during his visit from Warsaw. Initially, the Parisian league united representatives of various political currents who would assemble in a café in the Latin Quarter. Unlike its Berlin sister organization, it succeeded in developing into an active organization, though it also became an arena for political intrigues and manoeuvres, until the ‘red faction’ attained, in 1925, full communist dominance in the organization.80 In Kyiv, the spirit of the Kultur-Lige continued to live on even after its Bolshevization. A number of the projects launched before 1920 did not stop in their tracks, especially as a few organizational components of the league survived in the new Soviet surroundings. For instance, the Artists Studio continued to operate up to 1924, when it became known as the Jewish Arts and Trades School. Mark Epstein was its only director until its eventual dissolution in 1931, and the traditions of the Kultur-Lige’s arts section were carried on in the art production of the school’s students.81 The publishing house of the Kultur-Lige also proved to be one of the longest-lasting vestiges of the expired league. Transformed into a cooperative enterprise, it emerged as the main producer of Soviet Yiddish books and existed till 1931.82 Isaak Nusinov, later a leading Soviet literary theoretician, for a short time played the role of the chief Jewish commissar in Kyiv. Following the Bolshevization of the Kultur-Lige, he spared no effort to construct new institutions of Yiddish cultural life. Together with Hofshtein and Oyslender, he established in 1921 the imprint Lyric, which became the most significant outlet for Kyiv and Moscow Yiddish literati. In December 1921 an attempt, led by Litvakov, was made to re-register the Kultur-Lige as a country-wide organization with headquarters in Moscow and ‘chief committees’ in Kyiv and Minsk.83 It was a stillborn project. A direct continuation of the Kultur-Lige tradition of highbrow national-revolutionary literature is associated with such writers as Lipe Reznik, David Volkenstein, and Noah Lurie. In 1924 they established in Kyiv a new literary group, Antenna, which had much in common with the organization of Ukrainian proletarian writers called Hart (Tempering). While Hart’s ideological pedigree was associated with the Borotbists (the Left Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionary Party), many of Antenna’s members were former sympathizers of various denominations of Jewish socialism. Hart and Antenna represented the so-called national communists, or those communists who believed in a golden age of all national cultures in the Soviet Union. A few Yiddish writers later became members of VAPLITE, the Free Academy of Proletarian Literature, which united ‘qualified writers’ after the disintegration of Hart. Although Antenna claimed to target all the strata of the working Jewish population rather than only the proletarians, it was an elitist group, as in this bigger pool they wanted to seek out and cultivate only the sophisticated reader, a search that the Kyiv Group had begun in the 1910s. In February 1925 Antenna joined the Association of Yiddish Writers in Ukraine, responding to the party-sponsored endeavour to create a centralized Federation of Soviet Writers; in 1926 this association

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produced an almanac, Ukraine.84 Apart from the Antenna writers, the new association had among its members also writers of the Kyiv group of young Yiddish literary talents, called the Vidervuks (New Growth). This main Yiddish literary ‘nursery’ in Ukraine also emerged from the ruins of the Kultur-Lige, when in 1922 the Lyric imprint established a sub-imprint for young writers, Vidervuks. Hofshtein, who edited and wrote the prefaces to the pamphlet-size poetic collections, was the recognized leader of the group. Within a few years, the group’s members became established writers. By 1923 some of their works appeared in the first anthology of young Yiddish poetry in Ukrainian translation.85 The Vidervuks writers’ enthusiasm for Yiddish, modernism, and the revolution formed a common denominator in their ideological and aesthetic outlooks. In 1922 the young poets’ works often appeared in the literary department of the Kyiv daily Komunistishe fon, which emerged in May 1919 as a continuation of the Fareynikte’s Naye tsayt and the Bund’s Folks-tsaytung (People’s Paper).86 In 1923 the newspaper even introduced a special department called ‘Vidervuks.’ In all, the Vidervuks was a proletarian growth on the stump of the Bolshevized Kultur-Lige. The group was strongly influenced by the worker correspondent movement, organized and sponsored by the party and Komsomol in an attempt to draw newspapers closer to their readership. The Komunistishe fon established at its editorial office the first group of Yiddish worker correspondents in 1922.87 Debutants of the Lyric and Vidervuks publications, such as Itsik Fefer and Moshe Khashtshevatsky, belonged to the Kyiv group of young Yiddish writers whom the Kharkiv-based Ukrainian journal for literary criticism proudly defined as originators of Yiddish proletarian literature in Ukraine.88 Compartmentalization Although Jewish non-territorial autonomy was anathema to Soviet communists, many components of Jewish autonomy, including three rural national districts, survived in Ukraine till 1941. Jewish activities, which became part of mainstream state and party work in the neighbouring Soviet republic of Belorussia, were much more compartmentalized in Ukraine.89 While such pundits as Khatzkl Dunets and Yakov Bronshtein occupied leading positions in both Yiddish and Belorussian literary criticism, in Ukraine there were no Yiddish-cum-Ukrainian critics of similar import. In general, the dream of Jewish autonomy born in the early post-1917 period of Ukraine’s independence had ultimately, in the Soviet Ukrainian reality, materialized in territorial and institutional Yiddish cultural pockets. The majority of Yiddish cultural organizations were segments of general Ukrainian bodies, such as publishing houses and educational institutions. Even Ukrainian cinematography had a Yiddish sector.90 At the end of 1928, the Yiddish poet Itsik Fefer and his four Ukrainian fellow writers – Mykola Tereshchenko, Ivan Le, Volodymyr Koriak, and Ivan Mykytenko – toured Germany representing Ukraine’s literature and culture.91 In general, the framework of Soviet organizations and institutions formed an environment which was conducive to cooperation between Yiddish and Ukrainian intellectuals. From 1924, the Kharkiv publishing house Chervony shliakh listed among its publications the Yiddish literary journal Di royte velt (Red World), which also printed

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translations from Ukrainian. Leyb (Lev) Kvitko, managing editor of the journal, helped Pavlo Tychyna, his neighbour and close friend, to learn Yiddish.92 Kvitko and David Feldman (the latter edited Di royte velt in 1925–1926) were members of VAPLITE; in 1930 they authored a pioneering anthology containing Yiddish translations of prose works by twenty-one Soviet Ukrainian writers, such as Ivan Mykytenko, Ostap Vyshnia, Mykola Khvylovy, Ivan Le, and Andry Holovko.93 This was not Kvitko and Feldman’s first experience in translating from Ukrainian. In 1922, when Kvitko lived in Germany, he published his translation of Ukrainian fairytales (Ukrainishe folk-mayses) in Berlin; Feldman’s translation of Mykola Khvylovy’s Syni etiudy (Blue sketches; Blove etyudn in Yiddish) came out in Kharkiv in 1927. (See colour plate 20.) In the 1930s, translations from Yiddish into Ukrainian and from Ukrainian into Yiddish would regularly appear in periodicals and in book form. For instance, Ivan Kulyk (born Israel Kulyk), a leader of Hart and (from 1934) the first chairman of Soviet Ukraine’s Writers Union, translated into Ukrainian Kvitko’s children’s poem ‘Khazerkeh’ (Small Sucking Pigs). Kulyk’s as well as other Ukrainian authors’ works appeared in Di royte velt and in book form. The story about Vasil Rolenko’s (Kulyk’s Ukrainian alter ego’s) immigrant life in pre–First World War America came out in two Yiddish translations: in 1930, presented enigmatically as Ralph K. Rolenato’s story Vasil Rolenko in Amerike (Vasil Rolenko in America) and translated by the Kyiv-based Monye Shapiro in 1933; it was published under the author’s real name and entitled Vos hot getrofn mit Vasili Rolenko (What Had Happened to Vasil Rolenko), translated by Der Nister. Among Yiddish writers, Hofshtein remained particularly committed to translating activities. As early as 1927, his translations of Shevchenko’s poems appeared in the Kultur-Lige publishing house’s edition of Vladimir Drunin’s school textbook Taras Shevchenko. The 1936 edition of Ivan Franko’s selected oeuvres in Hofshtein’s translation was followed by similar volumes of his translations of Lesia Ukrainka (1938) and Taras Shevchenko (1939). In 1939 Hofshtein also published his translation of Shevchenko’s Mandrivka z pryiemnistiu i ne bez morali (A Pleasurable Journey Not Lacking a Moral).94 In 1937 five Yiddish poets – Itsik Fefer, David Hofshtein, Leyb Kvitko, Lipe Reznik, and Motl Talalaevsky – included their translations in the anthology of Ukrainian Soviet poets.95 Initially, cooperation between Yiddish and Ukrainian theatre cultures developed very slowly. In the 1920s, Yiddish troupes did not perform plays by Ukrainian authors, although Ukrainians, including Kurbas and Sadovsky, performed Yiddish plays. Only in the 1930s did plays by Ukrainian authors, most notably Oleksandr Korniichuk, began to appear in Yiddish theatres’ repertoire.96 True, a close friendship linked Solomon Mikhoels, director of the Moscow State Yiddish Theatre, with Les Kurbas; the latter worked also with the Moscow Hebrew theatre Habima.97 Osip Mandelshtam wrote in 1926: ‘A few days ago in Kyiv two remarkable theatres met: the Ukrainian Berezil and the Yiddish Chamber Theatre [Evreiskii kamernyi teatr, later Gosudarstvennyi evreiskii teatr – State Jewish Theatre] from Moscow. Escorting the Berezil as they were about to depart for Kharkiv, the great Jewish actor Mikhoels said, turning to the Ukrainian director Les Kurbas, “We’re blood brothers”’ – a phrase which, ironically, also presaged their ultimately similar fates (both were murdered on Stalin’s orders).98 Mikhoels invited Kurbas to stage King Lear,

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which became the most famous production in the history of the Moscow State Jewish Theatre. ‘Kurbas who spoke Yiddish, loved working with Mikhoels and, as he told his Ukrainian colleagues, derived great joy from his relationship with this fine ensemble.’99 Kurbas’s arrest delayed the scheduled autumn 1934 premiere and forced the theatre to search for a new director.100 The 1938 Moscow theatre’s production of Tevye the Dairyman doctored Sholem Aleichem’s original version, emphasizing the friendly relations between Jews and Ukrainians. Lev Pulver’s music, combining authentic Ukrainian motifs with traditional Jewish tunes, helped to stress the fraternity between the Jewish and Ukrainian peoples.101 Ultimately, the Ukrainian model of compartmentalized Yiddish culture proved to be the most viable in the Soviet environment. By the end of the 1930s, Stalin’s police had ‘purged’ virtually all significant Yiddish cultural activists of Belorussia, though such key figures in the Kultur-Lige as Bergelson, Hofshtein, Dobrushin, Markish, and Kvitko would be tolerated and even encouraged by the regime as late as the end of the 1940s. Ironically, the elitist model of Jewish culture developed by the Kultur-Lige theorists meshed perfectly with the general attitude towards the national minorities in Soviet politics: the central authorities wanted to minimize the national culture’s influence on the corresponding national group, but at the same time to stimulate further development of the culture proper.102 Thus, some components of Yiddish cultural life, which had been tested in the years of Ukrainian independence, laid the foundations for the ever-shrinking compartmentalized model of Soviet Yiddish culture.

NOTES 1 Elias Tcherikover, Antisemitizm un pogromen in Ukraine, 1917–1918 (Berlin: Mizrekhyidisher historisher arkhiv, 1923) 66. 2 Khone Shmeruk, ed., A shpigl oyf a shteyn (Jerusalem: Magness Press, 1987) 225–8. 3 Henry Abramson, A Prayer for the Government: Ukrainians and Jews in Revolutionary Times, 1917–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999) 40. 4 Kh. D. Hurvits, Yidishe klasn un parteyen: A sotsyalistisher etyud (Petrograd: Geule, 1918) 35. 5 Tcherikover, Antisemitizm 70. 6 Solomon I. Goldelman, Jewish National Autonomy in Ukraine, 1917–1920 (Chicago: Ukrainian Research and Information Institute, 1968) 49; Mattityahu Minc, ‘Kiev Zionists and the Ukrainian National Movement,’ in Peter J. Potichnyj and Howard Astor, eds, Ukrainian–Jewish Relations in Historical Perspective (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 1988) 250. 7 Jacob Leshchinsky (Lestschinsky), Undzere natsyonale foderungen (Warsaw: Tsukunft, 1918). 8 Gennady Estraikh, ‘Utopias and Cities of Kalman Zingman, an Uprooted Yiddishist Dreamer,’ East European Jewish Affairs 36:1 (2006) 31–42. 9 Ben-Adir, Undzer shprakh-problem (Kyiv: Kultur-Lige, 1918) 45. 10 Nokhum Shtif, Yidn un yidish, oder ver zaynen ‘yidishistn’ un vos viln zey? Poshete verter far yedn yidn (Kyiv: Onhoyb, 1919) 65–96.

The Yiddish Kultur-Lige 213 11 Oleg Budnitskii, Rossiiskie evrei mezhdu krasnymi i belymi (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2005) 275ff. 12 See M.P. Khodos, Materialy po statistike naseleniia Kieva (Kyiv: n.p., 1926) 148–9. 13 See, e.g., Israel Joshua Singer, ‘A briv fun Amerike,’ Forverts, 7 June 1942: 5; and David Einhorn, ‘Dovid Bergelsons batsiung tsu yidishe shrayber nokh der bolshevistisher revolutsye,’ Forverts, 13 August 1949: 4, 7. 14 Yeshue Liubomirsky, ‘Farblibn in zikorn: A bleter zikhroynes vegn Osher Shvartsman,’ Sovetish heymland 1 (1965) 135–6. 15 ‘Literarish-kinstlerishe khronik,’ Literarishe monatshriftn 3 (1912) 96–7. 16 Abe Finkelshtein, ‘Vegn eynem a briv,’ Sovetish heymland 8 (1973) 168. 17 See Gennady Estraikh, ‘From Yehupets Jargonists to Kiev Modernists: The Rise of a Yiddish Literary Centre, 1880s–1914,’ East European Jewish Affairs 30:1 (2000) 17– 38. 18 At the same time, Sholem Asch, the most popular Yiddish writer in the interwar period, who was born and grew up in Poland proper, admitted the strong influence of Polish literature on his creativity – see ‘Sholem Ash vegn zikh,’ Der veker, 4 October 1930: 12–13. 19 It’s known, for instance, that even the Belorussian-born popular Yiddish poet and prose writer Abraham Reisen went into raptures over Shevchenko’s poems – see Zalman Reisen, Leksikon fun der yidisher literatur, prese un filologye, vol. 4 (Vilna: Boris Kletzkin, 1929) 353. See also Shmaryahu Gorelik, ‘Taras Grigoryevitsh Shevtshenko: Tsu zayn 50-yerikn yibileum,’ Fraynd (St Petersburg), 22 February 1911: 2; 23 February 1911: 2. 20 See, e.g., Nakhman Meisel, Forgeyer un mittsaytler (New York: YKUF, 1946) 338–9. 21 Khaim Kazdan, Fun heyder un ‘shkoles’ biz tsisho: Dos ruslendishe yidntum in gerangl far shul, shprakh, kultur (Mexico: n.p., 1956) 436. 22 Abraham Golomb, A halber yorhundert yidishe dertsiung (Rio de Janeiro: Monte Skopus, 1957) 98. 23 Zelig Melamed, ‘Bergelson der gezelshaftler,’ Literarishe bleter, 13 September 1929: 728. 24 Goldelman, Jewish National Autonomy 110. 25 Kazdan, Fun heyder un ‘shkoles’ biz tsisho 435–6. 26 Hillel Kazovsky, ‘The Art Section of the Kultur Lige,’ Jews in Eastern Europe 3:22 (1993) 6–7; Kazovsky, The Artists of the Kultur-Lige (Jerusalem and Moscow: Gesharim/Mosty kul’tury, 2003) 34–42; Kazovsky, ‘The Phenomenon of the Kultur-Lige,’ in H. Kazovsky, ed., Artistic Avant-garde of the 1910s and the 1920s (Kyiv: Dukh i litera, 2007) 24–37. 27 Ben-Adir, Unzer shprakh-problem 27. 28 Mikhailo Rybakov, ed., Pravda istorii: Diial’nist’ evreis’koi kul’turno-prosvitnyts’koi orhanizatsii ‘Kul’turna liha’ u Kyevi (1918–1925) (Kyiv: Kyi, 2001) 15. 29 Di grunt-oyfgabn fun der ‘kultur-lige’ (Kyiv: n.p., 1918). 30 A paraphrase of ki mi-tsion tetse tora (from Zion the Torah will come); cf. Nakhman Meisel, ‘Yidishe literatur un yidishe kinstler in Ukraine,’ in William Edlin et al., eds, Der ukrainer yid (n.p. [USA]: Committee of Ukrainian Jewish organizations, 1944) 48. 31 Ivan Franko, Der ber un dos melekhl (Kiev: Kiever farlag, 1918); Franko, Der hon un der shtekhler (Kiev: Kiever farlag, 1918); Kh. Nadel, ‘A fraynt fun der yidisher literatur,’ Sovetish heymland 7 (1966) 144–7. 32 Rybakov, ed., Pravda istorii 174.

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33 Liubov Latt, ‘Issakhar Ber Rybak,’ in Mikhail Parkhomovskii, ed., Russkoe evreistvo v zarubezh’e, vol. 1 (Jerusalem: Parkhomovskii, 1998) 291. 34 Kazovskii, ‘The Art Section of the Kultur Lige’ 14–16. 35 Avram Kampf, Chagall to Kitaj: Jewish Experience in 20th Century Art (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1990) 25–6; June Mamana, ‘From the Pale of Settlement to “Pacific Overtures”: The Evolution of Boris Aronson’s Visual Aesthetic,’ PhD diss., Tufts U, 1997, 52. 36 Leo Kening, ‘Ribak un di yidishe kunst,’ in Elias Tcherikover, ed., Yisokher-Ber Ribak: Zayn lebn un shafn (Paris: Issachar Ber Ryback Memorial Committee, 1937) 50. 37 Zalman Libinzon, ‘Dovid Bergelsons dramaturgie,’ Sovetish heymland 12 (1984) 151; Aleksandra Podoprigora, ‘Puti stanovleniia evreiskogo professional’nogo teatra v Ukraine v 20-e gody XX stoletiia,’ in Evreiska istoriia ta kul’tura v Ukraini (Kyiv: Asotsiatsiia iudaiky Ukraini, 1995) 155. 38 Kultur-lige: Byuleten num. 2 (Kyiv: Central Committee of the Kultur-Lige, June–July 1920) 29–30. 39 Goldelman, Jewish National Autonomy 79; L.M. Spirin, Rossia 1917 god: Iz istorii bor’by politicheskikh partii (Moscow: Mysl’, 1987) 273–328; Oliver H. Radkey, Russia Goes to the Polls: The Elections to the All-Russian Constituent Assembly, 1917 (Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1990) 19, 152–3. 40 Kultur-lige: Byuleten num. 2 13–14. 41 Goldelman, Jewish National Autonomy 57. 42 Minc, ‘Kiev Zionists and the Ukrainian National Movement’ 271. 43 Kultur-lige: Ershtes zamlheft (Warsaw, April 1921) 2. 44 Moissaye J. Olgin, A Guide to Russian Literature (1820–1917) (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Howe, 1920) 11. 45 Mikhail Krutikov, Yiddish Fiction and the Crisis of Modernity, 1905–1914 (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2001) 211. 46 Yekhezkel Dobrushin, Gedankengang (Kyiv: Kultur-Lige, 1922) 29, 31. 47 Kazovsky, The Artists of the Kultur-Lige 82–3. 48 Yekhezkel Dobrushin, ‘Yidisher kunst-primitiv un dos kunst-bukh far kinder,’ Bikher-velt 4–5 (1919) 13–23. 49 Bal-Makhshoves, ‘Dos dorem-rusishe yidntum un di yidishe literatur in 19tn yorhundert,’ in his Geklibene verk (New York, 1953) 109; Boris Aronson, Marc Chagall (in Yiddish) (Berlin: Petropolis, 1924) 30. 50 Veniamin Lukin, ‘Akademiia, gde budut izuchat’ fol’klor,’ in Valery Dymshits and Viktor Kelner, eds, Evreiskii muzei (St Petersburg: Simpozium, 2004) 72. 51 Hillel Kazovsky, ‘Jewish Art between yidishkayt and Civilization,’ in Gennady Estraikh and Mikhail Krutikov, eds, The Shtetl: Image and Reality (Oxford: Legenda, 2000) 88. For Tchaikov see Kampf, Chagall to Kitaj: Jewish Experience in 20th Century Art 27–8. 52 See, in particular, M. Lirov (Livakov), intro. to I. S. Rabinovich, ed., Sbornik evreiskoi poezii (Moscow-Leningrad: Gosizdat, 1931) 1; Hersh Remenik, Shtaplen: Portretn fun yidishe shrayber (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1982) 15, 25; and Seth Wolitz, ‘The KievGrupe (1918–1920) Debate: The Function of Literature,’ Yiddish 3:3 (1978) 97–106. Cf. George S.N. Luckyj, Literary Politics in the Soviet Ukraine, 1917–1934 (Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 1990) 30. 53 Bal-Makhshoves, Shriftn, vol. 4 (Vilna: B. Kletzkin, 1928) 37.

The Yiddish Kultur-Lige 215 54 Hillel Kazovsky, ‘Shtetl versus megapolis v tvorchestve evreiskikh poetov i khudozhnikov v Amerike,’ Zerkalo 17–18:140 (2002) 171–83. 55 David Bergelson, ‘Leksik-problemen in der yidisher literatur,’ Forpost 2 (1937) 140–53. 56 Igor Dukhan, ‘Kazovskii G. Khudozhniki Kul’tur-ligi,’ Vestnik Evreiskogo universiteta 9:27 (2004) 397–400. 57 Some 1500 unsold copies of Eygns remained in the publisher’s warehouse as late as 1921 – see Y. Rabitshev, ‘Di zakh, azoy vi zi iz,’ Komunistishe fon, 24 May 1924: 2. 58 David Bergelson, ‘Dikhtung un gezelshaftlekhkayt,’ Bikher-velt 4–5 (1919) 6–16. 59 Nokhum Oislender, ‘In 1917,’ Sovetish heymland 9 (1969) 130. 60 Kultur-lige: Byuleten num. 2 1–6. 61 Ibid. 31. 62 David Bergelson, ‘A geshikhte vegn Lenin, vos iz nokh nit dertseylt gevorn,’ Frayhayt, 19 January 1919: 7. 63 See, in particular, the chapter ‘Yehoash: The First Modern Yiddish Poet’ in Charles Madison, Yiddish Literature: Its Scope and Major Writers (New York: Schocken Books, 1971) 165–81. 64 Gennady Estraikh, ‘A kol-koyre tsu amerikaner kolegn: Briv funem “kleynem vistn indzl Kiev,” geshribn in 1920,’ Forverts, 17 March 2006: 18. 65 Abraham Abchuk, Etyudn un materyaln tsu der geshikhte fun der yidisher literaturbavegung in fssr, 1917–1927 (Kharkiv: Literatur un kunst, 1934) 18. 66 Kultur-lige: Ershtes zamlheft 24. 67 Frank Rich with Lisa Aronson, The Theatre Art of Boris Aronson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987) 8. 68 Khaim Tamarkin, ‘Moskve in di tsvantsiker yorn,’ Sovetish heymland 8 (1985) 126–7, 130–2; Jeffrey Veidlinger, The Moscow State Yiddish Theatre: Jewish Culture on the Soviet Stage (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2000) 58. 69 See Alfred Abraham Greenbaum, ‘The Belorussian State Jewish Theatre in the Interwar Period,’ Jews in Eastern Europe 2 (2000) 56–75. 70 Sonia Ryback, ‘Zayn lebns-veg,’ in Elias Tcherikover, ed., Yisokher-Ber Ribak: Zayn lebn un shafn (Paris: Issachar Ber Ryback Memorial Committee, 1937) 21–2. 71 Lev Bergelson, ‘Memories of My Father: The Early Years (1918–1934),’ in Joseph Sherman and Gennady Estraikh, eds, David Bergelson: From Modernism to Socialist Realism (Oxford: Legenda, 2007) 81. See also Kazys Norkeliunas, ‘Jurgis Baltrušaitis as Rescuer of Russian poets and Artists from Bolshevik Prosecution,’ Lituanus 42:4 (1996) 26–33. 72 Bal-Makhshoves, ‘Dos dorem-rusishe yidntum un di yidishe literatur in 19tn yorhundert’ 77–111; Nakhman Meisel, ‘Yidishe literatur un yidishe kinstler in Ukraine’ 47–56; see also Yehoshua Rapoport, Zoymen in vint (Buenos Aires, 1962) 381. The founder of Hasidism, Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer, or Baal Shem Tov (1700–60), built his powerbase in the Podolian town of Medzhibozh. 73 Ezra Karman and Ab. Viktor, Kultur-lige: Eynmolike oysgabe (Detroit), 4 January 1925. 74 Unpublished Yiddish memoirs of the former Kaunas activist David Tomback, preserved in the YIVO Archive (New York), RG 454, box 1, p. 10. 75 Golomb, A halber yorhundert yidishe dertsiung, 122–7. 76 Gertrud Pickhan, ‘Gegen dem Strom’: Der Allgemeine Jüdische Arbeiterbund ‘Bund’ in Polen 1918–1939 (Stuttgart and Munich: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2001) 230–5.

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77 A. Vol’skii, ‘Russkie evrei v Germanii,’ Evreiskaia tribuna, 9 Sept. 1921: 3. The first train with refugees arrived from Kyiv in Berlin on 3 January 1919 – see Vadim Kreid, ed., Vernut’sia v Rossiiu – stikhami … (Moscow: Respublika, 1995) 7. 78 See Elena Solominskaia, ‘Soiuz russkikh evreev v Germanii (1920–1935gg.): Urok istorii,’ in Mikhail Parkhomovskii, ed., Russkoe evreistvo v zarubezh’e: Stat’i, publikatsii, memuary i esse, vol. 5 (10) (Jerusalem, 2003) 211–13. 79 ‘Berliner “kultur-lige,”’ Undzer bavegung 5 (1923) 12; see also Einhorn, ‘Dovid Bergelsons.’ 80 M. Liro, ‘Di geshikhte fun der kultur-lige,’ 10 yor kultur lige (Paris: Kultur-Lige, 1932) 3–11. 81 Kazovsky, The Artists of the Kultur-Lige 52–6. 82 Y. Meisel, ‘Yidishe farlag-arbet in Ukraine,’ Komunistishe fon, 15 May 1924: 2; T. Draudin, Ocherki izdatel’skogo dela v SSSR (Moscow and Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe sotsial’no-ekonomicheskoe izdatel’stvo, 1934) 166; Khone Shmeruk, ‘Ha-pirsumim be-yidish bi-vrit ha-mo’atsot,’ in Khone Shmeruk, ed., Pirsumim yehudiyim bi-vrit ha-mo’atsot (Jerusalem: Hebrew University, 1961) lxxix. 83 See Gennady Estraikh, In Harness: Yiddish Writers’ Romance with Communism (Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 2005) 53. 84 Abchuk, Etyudn un materyaln tsu der geshikhte fun der yidisher literatur-bavegung in fssr 182–3, 192–9. 85 Vasyl’ Atamaniuk, Nova evreis’ka poeziia: Antolohiia (Kiev: Drukar, 1923). 86 See the issue of Komunistishe fon of 27 May 1923, marking the fourth anniversary of the merger-cum-Bolshevization. 87 See Estraikh, In Harness 112. 88 B. Tsukker, ‘Do henezy evreiskoi proletars’koi literatury,’ Krytyka 11 (1928) 48, 50. 89 See Gennady Estraikh, ‘The Soviet Shtetl in the 1920s,’ in Antony Polonsky, ed., The Shtetl: Myth and Reality (Oxford: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2004) 205–6. 90 See Iu. Morozov and T. Derevianko, Evreiskie kinematografisty v Ukraine, 1917–1945 (Kyiv: Dukh i litera, 2004) 246. 91 Heinz Sanke, ed., Deutschland-Sowjetunion: Aus fünf Jahrzehnten Kultureller Zusammenarbeit (Berlin: Humboldt-Universität, 1966) 287. 92 Beti Kvitko and Miron Petrovskii, Zhizn’ i tvorchestvo L’va Kvitko (Moscow: Detskaia literatura, 1976) 131, 135–6; Pavlo Tychyna, Zibrannia tvoriv, vol. 12.1 (Kyiv: Naukova dumka, 1990) 145, 350. 93 David Feldman and Leyb Kvitko, Antologye fun ukrainisher proze (Kharkiv: Melukhe farlag fun Ukraine, 1930). 94 Vladimir Drunin, Taras Shevchenko (Kyiv: Kultur-Lige, 1927); also in Ivan Franko, Gelkibene verk (Kyiv: Melukhe-farlag, 1936); Lesia Ukrainka, Gelkibene verk (Kyiv: Melukhe-farlag, 1938); Taras Shevchenko, Gelkibene verk (Kyiv: Melukhe-farlag, 1939). 95 Itsik Fefer et al., Fun di ukrainishe sovetishe dikhter (Kyiv: Melukhe-farlag, 1937). 96 See, e.g., Mordechai Altshuler, ed., Ha-te’atron ha-yehudi bi-vrit ha-mo‘atsot: Mehkarim, ‘iyunim, te‘udot (Jerusalem: Hebrew University, 1996), index. See also Yiddish translations of Korniichuk’s plays which came out in Kiev: in 1936 – Der umkum fun der eskadre (Zahibel’ eskadry) in D. Hofshtein’s translation and Platon Krechet in A. Huberman’s translation; in 1937 – Der emes (Pravda) in Hofshtein’s translation.

The Yiddish Kultur-Lige 217 97 See Vladislav Ivanov, Russkie sezony teatra Gabima (Moscow: Artist. Rezhissior. Teatr, 1999) 114. 98 See Leonid Katsis, Osip Mandel’shtam: Muskus iudeistva (Jerusalem and Moscow: Gesharim/Mosty kul’tury, 2003) 355. According to Katsis, the two theatres were ‘blood brothers’ because both were ‘folkish’ (ibid. 362). 99 Irena R. Makaryk, Shakespeare in the Undiscovered Bourn: Les Kurbas, Ukrainian Modernism, and Early Soviet Cultural Politics (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2004) 193. 100 Veidlinger, The Moscow State Yiddish Theatre 139–40. 101 Ibid. 180–1. 102 Cf. David Sfard, Mit zikh un mit andere (Jerusalem: Yerusholayimer almanakh, 1984) 119.

You Tell Me A short drizzle – and the pavements are spotted with typhus … A young novelist:– ‘I don’t want to, I can’t write! The city is so oppressive, life unnerves me.’ I say nothing. Somewhere nearby a bomb … ‘If only I could get away, you know, to the village. Swim, walk in the dew.’ ‘Smash the saboteur!’ – I read on a poster. And behind us old beggar women stretch out their hands. antistrophe Grass grows, wherever it wants. The wind hurls the army mobilization orders into the mud. The child cries – ‘Milk!’ but there’s not even a crumb in the hearth. You tell me: what is counterrevolution? Pavlo Tychyna, Instead of Sonnets or Octaves (1920)

Translated from the Ukrainian by Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipps

8 Politics and the Ukrainian Avant-garde myroslav shkandrij

The avant-garde in its heyday of 1908–25 generated prodigious cultural ferment in Ukraine. One of the first avant-garde art exhibitions in the Russian Empire, the Link Exhibition of 1908, took place in Kyiv, and Ukrainians participated heavily in all the early exhibitions in Moscow and St Petersburg. In the pre–First World War years they worked among avant-gardists in Paris, Munich, St Petersburg, and Moscow: Vladimir Tatlin, Alexander Archipenko, and Mykhailo Boichuk spent time in Paris early in their careers; David Burliuk and Vadym Meller exhibited with the Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider) group in Munich. Alexandra Exter is emblematic of the international interaction in the pre-war years that saw influences travel from East to West as well as West to East. She participated in the Link Exhibition, visited Paris, where she met Picasso, Braque, Léger, and Apollinaire, and established close contacts with artists from Ukraine such as Archipenko, Natan Altman, David Shterenberg, and Volodymyr Baranoff-Rossiné who were living there. Up to the time she finally emigrated to the French capital in 1921, she divided her time between Paris, Moscow, and Kyiv. (On Exter, see Dmytro Horbachov’s essay in this volume and colour plates 4, 9, 7, 21.) Ukrainians made major contributions: Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematism, Tatlin’s Constructivism, David Burliuk’s Futurism, Alexander Archipenko’s Cubist sculptures, Alexandra Exter’s theatre art, and Mykhailo Boichuk’s Monumentalism. In the revolutionary years of 1917–21 Exter’s Kyiv studio produced artists of the calibre of Anatol Petrytsky, Vadym Meller, Oleksander Khvostenko-Khvostov, Solomon Nikritin, Klyment Redko, and Aleksandr Tyshler. Bronislava Nijinska’s dance studio, Mykhailo Boichuk’s studio of Monumentalism, Les Kurbas’s theatre, and Mykhail Semenko’s Futurists were all active in Kyiv at the same time; often, they interacted: Petrytsky and Boichuk, for example, designed the stage sets for Kurbas’s productions.1 Towards an Art-Politics The years of the historical avant-garde (1908–28) were a time of great political turmoil and intense ideological debate. Although primarily concerned with pursuing new forms of expression, many avant-gardists were both politically motivated and concerned with linking new ways of perceiving the world to the business of

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remaking it. Their aesthetico-cultural and political projects were often, therefore, coupled or fused. However, by the late twenties and early thirties, the era of ‘total art-politics,’ as Boris Groys has called it, a radical simplification of form, stridency of tone, and uniformity of expression came to dominate Soviet literature and art. Groys, Andrei Siniavsky, and others have argued that the shift to this politicization of art had been psychologically prepared for earlier and that the avant-garde played a significant role in this process. Most commentators, however, have viewed the two decades that preceded Stalin’s ‘cultural revolution’ of 1928–33 as fundamentally different from the years that followed. A more sympathetic view of the historical avant-garde has situated it in a tradition going back to Kant and the Romantics, a tradition in which the intellectual tried to forge a new world by an act of will, often by retreating into the inner world of spirit. In the 1908–28 period, such utopian world-construction produced visionary, groundbreaking works. It was only in the late twenties that these visionary artist-communards received the seductive proposal of managing a great cultural-political transformation, of becoming ‘engineers of human souls.’ Some indeed accepted the invitation, but Stalin’s ‘cultural revolution’ of 1928–33 and the ensuing purges and terror should be distinguished from the earlier period. For one thing, the post-1928 period demanded a fundamental reinterpretation of the nature and function of literature and art. In literature, for instance, from the time of the Romantics, as Tzvetan Todorov has pointed out,2 a decisive contrast had been made between belles lettres or creative writing, on the one hand, and the utilitarian or practical use of language, on the other. Belles lettres found its justification within itself (was autotelic), while the practical use of language subordinated itself to external goals (was heterotelic). The autotelic view was accepted by Ukrainian Modernists and Symbolists, for whom literature dealt with symbolic facts, mythical and metaphorical frameworks that rearranged patterns of experience and revealed the world by transcending reality. In their first collection, Sbornik po teorii poeticheskogo iazyka (The Anthology of the Theory of Poetic Language, 1916), the Russian formalists contrasted the ‘autonomous value of linguistic representations’ with the ‘practical goal’ of language.3 Literature, according to them, foregrounded the use of language as device. The counterposition that became hegemonic in the thirties stressed the primacy of social function: literature and the arts were to serve the party’s educational and agitational tasks. Any foregrounding of artistic devices was condemned as ‘formalism.’ To a degree, this position had indeed been prepared for earlier by avantgarde groups. Mykhail Semenko, the leader of the Ukrainian Futurists, had early in the twenties called the notion of art as a ‘self-serving category’ both ‘inappropriate and dangerous.’ According to him, it was permissible only to ‘exploit’ the devices of art with the goal of agitating for the ideals of the working class.4 He put forward a harder version of this line in April 1929 in a debate entitled ‘Who Needs Art?’ where he insisted that art as an emotional category was dying: it had to be subordinated to reason and forced to perform socially useful tasks.5 Nonetheless, the concept of political education espoused by the party in the late twenties was far narrower than most avant-gardists could accept. Writers and artists were at this time instructed to serve the party in immediate, practical ways:

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8.1 Portrait of Mykhail Semenko by Anatol Petrytsky, 1929 (NAMU)

they were told to praise industrial projects, hail the Five-Year Plan, or denounce the regime’s critics. A crude ‘political’ interpretation of texts and artworks was used to assess ‘class sympathies.’ Overt propaganda, absolute loyalty, and a militant posture were demanded. In 1930 the declaration of the All-Ukrainian Federation of Revolutionary Soviet Writers stated that ‘every revolutionary Soviet writer should be an active builder of socialism, a disciplined fighter on the front of class war – this is our slogan and our command to the Army of Ukrainian Revolutionary Soviet Writers.’6 Although neither the intransigent tone, the mandatory optimism, nor the paradeground rhetoric were new, to be accused of ‘Hamletism,’ or ‘psychologism,’ or ‘tearful lyricism’ could now, in the new atmosphere prove fatal. A political charge expressed in poetry or prose carried a deadly menace, making even apparently

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harmless literary exchanges dangerous. This was a departure from all recent practice. At some deep level a break had occurred from the humanist tradition that celebrated the blossoming of the individual personality and welcomed the excitement produced by original, even transgressive, thought and feelings. Whereas most ‘civic’ writers and artists had previously attempted to assimilate political awareness to a wider spiritual culture, to integrate politics into art, from 1928 the move was to assimilate all of literature and art into politics. The structuring of human perceptions and feelings around slogans became a conscious aim, affecting the tone, diction, imagery, and rhetorical devices of poetry, prose, drama, and the visual arts. The demand was for a simple message, narrative closure, conventional psychological portrayal, and plot structure. Works that could not be reduced to easily demonstrable political categories, that remained puzzlingly complex or sophisticated, or that challenged simple categories and schemes came under attack. After the last burst of formal innovation by the avant-garde in 1929–30, stylistic novelty and parody were eschewed. In this last fling, ‘left art’ appeared to many to have been used by the party in order to complete the task of ‘destroying’ previous systems; from this moment on ‘left art’ could be harnessed to the purpose of ‘constructing’ whatever the regime judged to be new and useful. Ironically, in both Russia and Ukraine writers and artists who had been educated on revolt and iconoclasm were transformed into conformist political instruments. Some, of course, refused the role. Others, although they managed to produce what Jacques Ellul has called the ‘overt’ forms of propaganda, seemed genuinely incapable of producing the ‘covert,’ spontaneous or subconscious ones.7 Indeed, the literature and art of the late twenties and early thirties, as well as much later Soviet cultural production, can profitably be analysed as revealing a tension or conflict between these overt and covert messages. Oleksander Dovzhenko’s film Zemlia (Earth, 1930), on the surface a call for collectivization, is at a deeper level a hymn to the countryside and ancient ways. Yury Yanovsky’s novel Chotyry shabli (Four Swords, 1930), which treats the revolution as national resistance, Volodymyr Gzhytsky’s novel Chorne ozero (Black Lake, 1929), which views Soviet expansion as the spread of Russian hegemony, and Les Kurbas’s deflating production of Ivan Mykytenko’s play Dyktatura (Dictatorship, 1929) are prominent examples of works with ambiguous and subversive messages. Kazimir Malevich’s peasant portraits of 1928–30, as will be argued later, also resound with subversive tones. Another category of works shuffled the evaluative signs to make it difficult for a reader to identify positive and negative characters, thus leading to a more thoughtful assessment of events. Hryhory Epik’s novel Persha vesna (First Spring, 1931) is an example. But almost all writers knuckled under in some way, even rewriting their own works to fit the new requirements. A much-lauded classic of Socialist Realism and a work given the status of a patristic text, Andry Holovko’s Maty (Mother) now exists in two editions, the 1932 original and the 1935 revision. The same holds true for his Burian (Weeds, 1927 and 1932), Petro Panch’s Holubi eshelony (Blue Echelons, 1926 and 1928), and Volodymyr Gzhytsky’s Chorne ozero (Black Lake, 1929 and, after many rejected revisions, 1956). Yury Yanovsky’s Chotyry shabli (Four Swords, 1930) was criticized so strongly that the author felt obliged to write Vershnyky (Cavalry, 1935) as an act of literary-political contrition. Students of

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8.2 Yosyp Hirniak as a rich peasant with puppet houses that ran away from him, in Les Kurbas’s production of Dictatorship, 1930 (VT)

the literary heritage often have to deal with several possible versions of the same book – palimpsests in which imposed political sentiments and stylistic features obscure the original inspiration. Before the late 1920s, however, the introduction of a radically new sensibility had been interpreted by most avant-gardists in a broad aesthetico-cultural and philosophical sense: it was seen as the awakening and refinement of the mind and emotions. Throughout 1908–28 various forms of cooperation between the aestheticocultural and the political had been demonstrated. The avant-garde’s involvement in politics was a dialectic of responses to perceived inadequacies, much as the relationship between modernism and modernity has been seen as a dialectic in which the literary or artistic works responded to an unsatisfactory reality.8 Writers and artists criticized narrow-mindedness, backwardness, obscurantism, and prejudice in their various embodiments. Buffeted by conflicting political tendencies and competing discourses, they rapidly adapted to changing conditions while exhibiting a range of concerns. For instance, the attitude to the past – a crucial indicator of political preference – not only differed from individual to individual, but went through quick and complete changes. In the immediate pre- and post-Revolutionary years many were, at points, prepared to jettison all past values, while others preferred to modify or conserve them.9 In Ukraine, the political situation was defined by the existence of two powerful revolutionary movements: socialism and nationalism. Writers and artists contended with the competing social visions of communist and national liberation. Each vision claimed a different kind of awakened and transformed consciousness. In fact, writers and artists often found themselves attempting to reconcile the two

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visions. This reality of ambiguous and divided loyalties was later suppressed by the Soviet regime, along with details of involvement in the national movement during the years of the Ukrainian National Republic (1917–19) by most leading ‘communist’ figures, among them such prominent cultural figures as the poet Volodymyr Sosiura, the film-maker Oleksander Dovzhenko, the artist Mykhailo Boichuk, and the theatre and film director Les Kurbas. The National Difference The Ukrainian avant-garde negotiated four political transitions in the 1920s: the national revolution (1917–19), the establishment of Bolshevik power (1919–23), the period of Ukrainianization (1923–8), and the destruction of Ukrainian cultural and political life (1928–33). Many individuals prudently shifted their ground, aligning their views and artistic production with changing political imperatives. Accordingly, when Soviet rule was established, some representatives of the avant-garde claimed to represent the cultural revolution that ran parallel to the Bolshevik political revolution (1919–23), or the Ukrainianization movement (1923–8), or the attack on ‘bourgeois nationalism’ and ‘formalism’ (1928–33). The years preceding 1917 had witnessed the rapid growth of a nationally conscious intelligentsia, and most of this intelligentsia had participated in building the new Ukrainian National Republic during the revolutionary years. The governments of the Central Rada (1917–18), the German-backed Hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky (1918), and the Directory (1918–19) founded and supported cultural institutions such as the Academy of Sciences, the Academy of Art, publications, and performing groups. This legacy of state and nation building was unwillingly inherited by the Bolshevik regime, which initially not only rejected as counter-revolutionary the call for an autonomous or independent Ukrainian state, but even denied the fact that a separate Ukrainian nation existed. Many Russians, in fact, regarded the revolution as primarily a war against separatism and considered Ukrainian culture subversive almost by definition (it was denounced as ‘counter-revolutionary,’ ‘Petliurite,’ or ‘a German invention’). Some dismissed Ukrainian culture as derivative and incomplete, viewing it as merely a branch of Russian. Others condemned it as fundamentally flawed: inchoate, anti-Semitic, and unrefined. Moreover, in the early years of Soviet rule many Bolsheviks felt entitled to take revenge on ‘the counter-revolution’ by repressing Ukrainian culture. The composition of the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Ukraine (CP(b)U) in the early years of Soviet rule made such actions relatively easy: it was over a third Russian and a third Jewish. Until 1925, Ukrainians constituted only the third largest group within the party. Not surprisingly, then, from 1919 until April 1923 the CP(b)U leadership put forward the ‘struggle of two cultures’ theory, according to which Russian as the ‘culture of the city,’ and Ukrainian as the ‘culture of the village’ and representative of the backward peasant element, would compete for supremacy until the final victory of the higher and more progressive culture. It was, of course, assumed in party circles that Russian culture would soon emerge triumphant. These views are most closely associated with Dmytro Lebed, a secretary of the CP(b)U, but they had strong supporters in Moscow: Grigory Zinoviev, for example, raised the same arguments repeatedly throughout the 1920s.

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8.3 Founders, Ukrainian State Academy of Art, Kyiv, 5 December 1917. Standing, from left: Hryhory Narbut, Vasyl Krychevsky, Mykhailo Boichuk. Sitting, from left: A. Naievich, Oleksander Murashko, Fedir Krychevsky, Mykola Hrushevsky (head of the Ukrainian government), Ivan Steshenko (Secretary of Education), Mykola Burachek. Visible in the background are the works of Vasyl Krychevsky

As a consequence of such an ideology, Ukrainian institution building was severely hampered in these early years of Bolshevik rule, support for Ukrainian newspapers, publishing houses, and schools was withdrawn, and Ukrainian activists within the party were frequently treated with suspicion. Much of the party membership in fact continued to espouse a ‘struggle of two cultures’ view long after the theory had been officially rejected, and they opposed attempts to develop Ukrainian cultural and educational bodies. The experience of the Revolution made most Russian party members view all Ukrainians as potential nationalists and separatists. In his memoirs Nikita Khrushchev recalled that Stalin’s henchman in Ukraine, Lazar Kaganovich, ‘was fond of saying that every Ukrainian is potentially a nationalist.’10 The situation only began to change following the proclamation of a Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic as a constituent member of the Soviet Union (1922) and the condemnation of Russian chauvinism at the Twelfth Congress of the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik) in April 1923. On 1 August 1923, the CP(b)U announced a policy of Ukrainianization, including support for the development of the Ukrainian language in schools, educational institutions, and government. These concessions, Moscow realized, were required in order to obtain peace in Ukraine and to win over large sections of the population. Little, however, was

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done to implement the Ukrainianization policy until 1925, when Ukrainians became a majority within the CP(b)U and the pressure for change increased. In May 1925 Stalin dispatched Lazar Kaganovich to the new capital, Kharkiv, to become the First Secretary of the CP(b)U. His instructions were to instil life into the Ukrainianization policy, but to keep it under close political supervision. A number of commentators have suggested that a deal had been struck between Stalin’s faction in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and the leadership backing Ukrainianization in the CP(b)U. Accordingly, the latter agreed to support Stalin on all-Union issues in return for a faster pace of Ukrainianization. In June 1926 the Central Committee of the CP(b)U adopted further measures on Ukrainianization – the most sympathetic statement on the national question in Ukraine that the government had made. It drew attention to a crucial issue: the need for decisive results in Ukrainianizing the Party itself. In the view of many communist party members, Ukrainianization meant an ‘indigenization’ (korenizatsiia), which would be accomplished by nourishing a Ukrainian culture that was national in form but socialist in content: in other words, one that differed only in language and modes of delivery, but whose content would be formulated in and broadcast from Moscow and Leningrad. In fact, as soon as the schools, media, and government institutions began to Ukrainianize, the pressure for transferring real decision making to Kharkiv became unstoppable, and Ukrainian culture began to exhibit great vitality and assimilative power. Instead of willingly assimilating to the ‘superior’ Russian culture, a scenario that many party leaders had assumed to be an inevitable and ‘progressive’ phenomenon, the population of Ukraine began to develop its own cultural identity and institutions as strong competitors to the Russian. At the same time, Soviet Russia also ‘rediscovered’ its own national history and traditions. It began revising its negative attitude towards imperial conquest, cultural expansionisms and Russian nationalism. The enormous success, thanks to the sympathetic portrayal of tsarist forces and tsarist history, of Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel Belaia gvardiia (The White Guard, 1925) and his play Dni Turbinykh (Days of the Turbins, 1926) in the Moscow Art Theatre and publications such as Aleksei Tolstoi’s Piotr Pervyi (Peter the First, 1929) were symptomatic of this reassessment. (See Taras Koznarsky’s essay for a detailed study of Bulgakov’s The White Guard.) The 1920s can therefore be characterized as a struggle between Russian centralizing and hegemonist views, on the one hand, and demands for autonomy among national republics, on the other. When, in the mid-twenties, Ukrainian leaders insisted upon a full emancipation of their cultural life, a conflict with Russificatory tendencies came to a head. The Literary Discussion of 1925–8 was the critical turning point. In its final stages Mykola Skrypnyk, the powerful commissar for education in Ukraine, organized a series of important debates to lay out the boundaries of permissible expression. The first debate, which concerned Kurbas’s theatre, was held between 28 March and 15 April 1927 in Kharkiv. The second, a ‘literary dispute,’ took place on 18–21 February 1928 in Kharkiv. In an attempt to shield cultural figures from further criticism by handling the political discussions himself, Skrypnyk urged them to behave with decorum, to devote themselves to artistic production, and to avoid politics. The political atmosphere, however, continued to

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8.4 VAPLITE, 1926. Sitting, from left: P. Tychyna, M. Khvylovy, M. Kulish, O. Slisarenko, M. Yohansen, H. Kotsiuba, and P. Panch, A Liubchenko. Standing, from left: M. Maysky, H. Epik, O. Kopylenko, I. Senchenko, P. Ivanov, Yu. Smolych, O. Dosvitny, and I. Dniprovsky (VT)

deteriorate, and the third debate, also devoted to the theatre, which took place on 29 May in Kyiv and from 8–11 June 1929 in Kharkiv, bore the character of an inquisition. At this debate both Les Kurbas and the playwright Mykola Kulish faced a hostile gallery of condemnatory critics. By 1928, when the party closed down VAPLITE (the acronym for the Vilna Akademiia Proletarskoi Literatury, Free Academy of Proletarian Literature), a journal that had published outspoken social critiques, and when the group’s leader Mykola Khvylovy signed an admission of political errors and destroyed the second part of his controversial, still unpublished novel Valdshnepy (Woodsnipes, 1927), it had become clear that the tide had turned against the Ukrainianization policy and the ‘national communists’ who were its champions. The show trials of 1928 in fact signalled the beginning of a frontal attack on the entire Ukrainian intelligentsia. The most famous of these trials, which took place in 1930, was a kangaroo court staged in a public theatre in Kharkiv. Forty-five Ukrainian academics were accused of belonging to an underground counter-revolutionary organization (Spilka Vyzvolennia Ukrainy – Union for the Liberation of Ukraine). The charges were entirely trumped-up and the forced confessions served as pretexts for massive waves of arrests. By 1932–3, as collectivization, grain-requisitioning, and hunger took perhaps as many as five million lives, almost anyone could be accused of ‘bourgeois nationalism’ and summarily executed or exiled to Siberia. Thousands of cultural activists met this fate. Skrypnyk, Khvylovy, and several other prominent Ukrainian communists committed suicide. Skrypnyk, Ukraine’s powerful commissar of education, who had stressed the parallel and equal development of Russian and Ukrainian languages and cultures

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in Ukraine, had in the final years tried to continue Ukrainianization, by supporting, for example, the opening of Ukrainian theatre and opera companies. However, when ‘local nationalism,’ rather than ‘Russian great-nation chauvinism,’ was singled out in 1928 as the principle enemy (a reversal of the stance taken in 1923), it was evident to most observers that a major shift in policy had occurred. It was still safe to criticize Ukraine’s national past – its oppression under tsarism, legacy of backwardness and reactionary tendencies. The Futurists went furthest down this road, and were perceived by many as undermining the national movement through their violent attacks on the past. But criticism of the past, when this was extended to denunciation of Russia’s imperial legacy, particularly its history of conquest and Russification, drew sharp rebukes from the authorities. Mykola Kulish’s plays, which expressed contempt for the psychological servility instilled by tsarism and for prejudices towards Ukrainian culture, produced an orchestrated response that led to the closing of Kurbas’s theatre and the director’s disappearance in the camps. (See Nelli Kornienko’s essay in this volume on Kulish and Kurbas.) The successes of Kurbas and Kulish were in large part the issue. In 1926–33, when Kurbas linked up with Kulish and collaborated with the designer Vadym Meller and the composer Yuly Meitus, the Berezil productions dazzled the Kharkiv public and altered its view of Ukrainian culture. Berezil became the city’s leading theatre, just as it had won the distinction of being Kyiv’s leading theatre in the preceding years. It was seen as progressive, Western, and avant-garde, and eclipsed the achievements of Nikolai Sinelnikov in Kharkiv and Nikolai Solovtsov in Kyiv – the two Russian theatres in Ukraine that, since the turn of the century, had set the tone with their productions of Ibsen and Hauptmann. This was an unexpected and unwelcome development to those who expected the Russian stage to be the sole producer of serious talent, and who relegated Ukrainian work to an amateur, folkloric, provincial status. In fact, after Kurbas’s theatre had been forcibly disbanded in 1933, the aging Sinelnikov was again instructed to head the Russian theatre in Kharkiv – a symbolic attempt, it appeared to many, to restore pre-Revolutionary Russian cultural hegemony.11 Kurbas’s productions of Kulish’s ‘national trilogy’ – the plays Narodny Malakhy (The People’s Malakhy, 1929), Myna Mazailo (1929), and Sonata Pathétique (1930) – carried a forceful anti-colonial message. These stage performances appear to have mobilized the Russian or Russified cadre in the Party to crush the Ukrainian theatre and cultural movement under the guise of a struggle with ‘bourgeois nationalism.’ Here is one description of Kurbas’s success written in 1931, on the eve of the mass arrests: The Ukrainian theatre learned to mock the living lord [pan]. The theatre used a language which the cultured families of the former Russian officials [chinushi] had employed only in barber-shops and at the Central Workers’ Cooperative. It used to be a theatre that aimed to amuse the all-powerful Russificator and to bring sentimental tears to the eyes of those who represented beekeeping/melon-growing capitalists. Suddenly, this same theatre recalled that Ukrainian carvers had once been the equals of the Venetians, and itself dared to be the equal of the theatrical culture of its time. Could Sinelnikov’s apologists forgive this?12

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8.5 Scene from Myna Mazailo, directed by Les Kurbas and designed by Vadym Meller, 1929 (VT)

The despised national backwardness was presented in these works as the product of national oppression and the legacy of hegemonist views – views that were still richly present in government circles and in the party. The genesis and evolution of the Ukrainian avant-garde has, therefore, to be seen not only within the context of Western cultural developments, but also as a response to two revolutionary movements (socialist and national-liberationist) and to fluctuating Soviet attitudes towards Ukrainian culture. The need to negotiate between these competing pressures makes the avant-garde’s history particularly complex. In aesthetico-cultural terms, avant-gardists for the most part adhered to an aesthetic of rupture. Adherents of Futurism, for example, attacked encrusted attitudes, struggled with what they considered to be outdated public perceptions, and embraced radically new, ‘rational’ ways of perceiving the world. They were convinced that the new art had to be aligned with developments in international modernism. The writers Mykhail Semenko, Geo Shkurupy, and Oleksa Slisarenko expressed these attitudes most uncompromisingly. The ideal was frequently an anti-mimetic, anti-ethnographic, analytical art capable of dismantling and recombining elements of construction in a deliberate process. Although the old imperial Russian reality was denounced as reactionary and calls were made for the building of a new, enlightened, socially and nationally emancipated Ukraine, the national liberationist rhetoric had to be muted, especially during periodic ‘bourgeois nationalist’ witch-hunts. These were particularly intense in 1919–22 and after 1928. It was, however, possible at various times to satisfy both revolutions by engaging in what has been called a ‘collective oedipal revolt’13 by rejecting in equal measure imperial Russian and national sanctities.

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The Attraction of the New Why were Ukrainians attracted to and so prominent in the international avantgarde? One answer lies in their concern with both national and social emancipation. The combined ‘revolutions’ strengthened the conviction that the citadels of reaction required toppling, and that artists were free to borrow from an entire spectrum of liberationist currents in exploring their visions of the new. Ukrainian avant-gardists saw themselves as involved in a multi-faceted revolution. More than others, they linked the liberation from prejudices (which for them included imperialistic attitudes towards neighbouring countries and chauvinism towards minorities) to a spiritually reformed humanity. Their multifaceted revolt often led to an embracing of all aspects of the avant-garde (a programmatic position of Panfuturism), the idea of liberating humanity even from its own biological nature (an issue that is raised in Viktor Domontovych’s Doktor Serafikus, written in the twenties but published in 1947, and in Leonid Skrypnyk’s Intelihent, published in 1929). Like other avant-gardists, the Ukrainians exhibited a belief in the rationalization of the creative process, and in the new art as the transformer of civilization. Nonetheless, there remained a salient difference between the Ukrainian avantgarde and the Russian: it lay in the consistent application of culture-transforming principles to the goal of national liberation. Narratives of the avant-garde often fail to consider the fact that radicalism is frequently engendered outside ‘metropolitan centers,’ or that the latter can be bastions of conservative, imperialist, or authoritarian thought. It often goes unrecorded in such narratives that writers and artists have frequently journeyed to the capitals in order to overthrow dominant intellectual and artistic trends by introducing perspectives learned elsewhere. Discussions of avant-garde art, for example, rarely consider the Ukrainian background of Malevich, Tatlin, Archipenko, Exter, or Burliuk: ‘The South Russian flavor of much art and writing that was in due course to be influential in Moscow and in St. Petersburg,’ John Milner has written, ‘has scarcely been recognized.’14 A strong case, however, can be made for this background’s importance in generating and shaping an avant-garde. The Ukrainian intelligentsia’s concern with both social and national emancipation produced a principled libertarian-emancipatory stance. Such a stance might also have been influenced by the broad political culture of Ukraine, which Ivan Lysiak-Rudnytsky has claimed was defined by a Western attitude to individual rights and the separation of church and state. Ukrainian territories in the nineteenth century were the strongest supporters of liberalism and constitutionalism. In Lysiak-Rudnytsky’s view, the grafting of Byzantine theocracy onto Muscovy, where it fused with a state already organized along the lines of the Golden Horde, defined Russia’s political culture, that of a centralizing, despotic state.15 This produced a messianism that left a mark not only on the Slavophiles, but also on the radical intelligentsia and the Bolsheviks in the form of an inverted religiosity and maximalism.16 The maximalist-utopian strain was less prevalent in Ukrainian culture. Support for such a view can be found in the coexistence of different schools and tendencies in the Ukrainian arts community, including the avant-garde. Such was the case both in the Academy of Art formed in 1917–18 and in its later incarnation

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8.6 Les Kurbas’s production of Prologue at the Berezil, 1926

as the (avant-gardist) Kyiv Art Institute in the 1920s, in Panfuturism’s acceptance of all ‘isms,’ in the Berezil Theatre’s experimentation in different workshops and their announcement that, although they were not a communist theatre, they would welcome communists and all others, and, finally, in Mykhailo Boichuk’s exploration of collective and collaborative work through his various studios of Monumentalism. The Ukrainian avant-garde also differed from the Russian in the degree to which it made use of indigenous art forms. The turn to indigenous traditions among European writers and artists in the late nineteenth century had prepared for a strong Ukrainian interest in Modernism by encouraging the ‘assertion of independence from the Westernized cities of Russia and from the West as a whole.’17 A similar cultural shift in the Romantic and post-Romantic age (the 1820s–1840s) had given rise to a fascination with southern exoticism and folk cultures. It had been exploited by Ukrainians and other Slavs to win greater acceptance for their marginalized history and culture. In the same way, interest in primitivism and exoticism were exploited in the 1908–28 period. Many believed in the imminence of a Slavic cultural revival and held the view that Slavic civilizations displayed unique, non-Western features. Their cultural pasts ‘functioned as did the notion of exotic tribal and Eastern cultures in Western European art.’18 Picasso’s interest in primitivism and Gauguin’s in exoticism encouraged writers and artists to search for inspiration in their native traditions: the prehistoric carved stone idols in the steppe, the decorative arts of the Baroque age, and contemporary village crafts became sources of visual imagery. Leading writers, such as Yury Yanovsky, Maik Yohansen, and Arkady Liubchenko, and the film

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8.7 Ceramic plates. Dybyntsi, Kyiv province, 1905

director Oleksander Dovzhenko, also exploited mythology, folklore, and history in ambitious avant-garde works. Ukrainians felt a special ability to domesticate the ‘primitive,’ because of their access to a rich, active folk creativity with roots in pre-Byzantine, pre-Christian times. (On this point, also see Myroslava Mudrak’s essay in this volume.) They could readily draw on its myths, symbols, and forms. As newcomers to the European high-cultural table, they presented themselves as carriers of a vitality, innocence, and immediacy that others lacked. Their visual art was characterized by vivid colours and an extraordinary feeling for materials, an ability to integrate Cubist, Futurist, and primitivist elements, a tendency to mix the ancient with the contemporary, and a penchant for collaborative and collective work. From the first, primitivism became a major current in the visual arts. Exter in 1915–16 provided Suprematist designs for the peasant cooperatives of the villages of Skobtsi and Verbivka that created kilims (woven carpets) and embroideries. Maria Syniakova emphasized ‘primitive,’ almost childlike drawing in her paintings and ceramics, and sought inspiration in the tradition of tile painting which dates back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Although Syniakova enjoyed presenting herself as an unschooled student of nature, her entourage was sophisticated: among others, the poets Boris Pasternak and Velimir Khlebnikov, and the painter Mykhail Matiushin stayed at her family estate. Malevich, Petrytsky, the Boichuk school, and the Burliuk brothers in different ways also linked the avant-garde to an ancient folk culture that still played a vital part in daily life. These artists were not depicting an encounter of the Western with a foreign Other as much as painting from within the ‘Other.’ They were not mummifying or making museum pieces out of objects of primitivism, but revealing a contemporary artistic practice. Charlotte Douglas has written that in Malevich’s drawings ‘the subjective distance inherent in Western Primitivism, in Gauguin’s visions of an island paradise and Picasso’s savage masks, has been expunged in

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8.8 Abstract pysanky designs

favor of a sympathetic identity of the artist with his subject. The exotic “otherness” has been converted into a vision of the peasantry that is wholly and inimitably Russian-Ukrainian.’19 This is an important observation. European ‘primitivism’ had a deeply ambivalent relationship with Western imperialism and capitalist modernity. It has been noted that Picasso’s ‘Les Demoiselles d’Avignon’ is riven by a conflict stemming from ‘an internal psychological division between attraction and repulsion, classical superego and primitive libido, and results in an aggressive attack on the image of women which may disguise a deep fear.’20 Richard Sheppard argues that ‘whichever way one reads the painting, its violence and shock derive to a considerable extent from Picasso’s experience of the loss of a tradition within which he had previously been able to work but which a part of him was trying, unsuccessfully, to retain.’21 The Ukrainian variant of primitivism suffered fewer complexes because it was a rediscovery of its own tradition. The intimate relationship with primitivism is, perhaps, one major reason why the leap to a conceptual art was so quickly achieved by many artists in the immediate pre- and post-Revolutionary years: colour symbolism and simplified, abstract forms were already familiar to them from the icon and folk art.

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A further reason for the rapid domestication of the avant-garde, it has been suggested, can be found in certain features of Ukrainian culture. Among them, as readers of Nikolai Gogol learn, is a love of hyperbole, humour, and the grotesque and fantastic. The great writer (whose Ukrainian name is Mykola Hohol) introduced a Ukrainian sensibility into Russian, and through Russian into world literature. One could also point to the fascination, in Ukrainian writing and art, with limitless expanses, ‘cosmic’ dimensions, and the idea of human involvement in a universal energy. This latter intrigued contemporary writers such as Volodymyr Vynnychenko and Mykola Khvylovy, and artists such as Archipenko and Bohomazov. The interest in universal energy has frequently been linked to the cult of vitality which runs through much Ukrainian culture. Some avant-gardists, particularly David Burliuk and the Futurists, identified strongly with the idea of tapping into what they considered wild, unharnessed energies that were typically available in a frontier society, such as Ukraine had long been. In the early decades of the twentieth century, therefore, Ukrainians often mythologized their past – whether ancient, folkloric, or ‘frontier’ – and aligned it with the vigorous and ‘revolutionary’ aesthetic of the avant-garde. Finally, one could point to the utopian project of a reformed human nature, which attracted Ukrainians as a way out of the impasse of their political marginalization. The visionary dreamers of Mykola Kulish’s plays, Mykola Khvylovy’s disillusioned revolutionaries, Volodymyr Vynnychenko’s attraction to ‘concordism,’ Pavlo Krat’s utopian novel Koly ziishlo sontse (When the Sun Rose, 1913), or Dovzhenko’s Zvenyhora (1927) present unsatisfied yearnings for, or utopian projections of, a reformed human order in which the Ukrainian nation is allowed to take its respected place alongside others. To summarize, the confluence of the national and socialist revolutions gave the Ukrainian avant-garde a unique profile: (1) Its aesthetico-cultural positions can be seen as expressing an Oedipal rejection of and, simultaneously, dependence on links with the past. The struggle for the new aimed at eradicating the backwardness induced by tsarism, the colonialist’s contemptuous attitude, and the inbred inferiority complex of Ukrainians. Counteracting this, however, was a valorization of primitivism and exoticism, as thrilling to Ukrainian avant-gardists as the African and tribal was for French Cubists. The allure of the politically denied and forbidden also attached to the repressed national past, which could therefore be incorporated into an avant-gardist fusion of high and folk art, ancient and modern. (2) The avant-garde embraced a large range of Western cultural experiments in a democratic, multi-disciplinary spirit. Osip Mandelshtam, while living alongside the Berezil company, noted: In Berezil’s work there is something that is common to the work of all founders: it tries in the shortest possible time to give examples of the most varied genres, to outline all the possibilities, to master all the forms. The theatre which produced Jacquerie, Commune in the Steppes, The Haidamaks and Riff-Raff is not a single theatre, but one where several tendencies are in contest. Berezil will go through an honorable and gracious dissolution: from it will come the basic types of the future Ukrainian theatre and, working separately, they will continue its work.22

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8.9 Mykola Krychevsky, abstract textile design (fragment)

(3) At the same time, as Myroslava Mudrak has argued, the avant-garde exhibited a principled localism, a determination to develop its own idiom out of locally available resources: The avant-garde art of Ukraine of the 1910s to 1930s was precariously hinged on an oscillating pendulum between the present and past, local traditions and cosmopolitan practices. Abstraction helped to identify the problematic and to explore and experiment with artistic systems that could direct this process into the future. What is avant-garde about Ukrainian art, then, is not its inventiveness in ‘breaking the mold’ but in its deliberate and conscious re-education and reformulation of art’s function in a national culture. By not placing novelty as a premium, but operating instead within the framework of the enduring qualities of tradition, the Ukrainian avant-garde made claims on the aesthetic past to restore it to the dignity deserving of a modernist present.23

But to what extent was the avant-garde – an internationalist and pan-European phenomenon – Ukrainian in inspiration? The question is never asked of writers, or cultural figures such as Kurbas, because the evidence for such inspiration seems obvious. But what of artists? Naturally, the issues are different for each figure. In some instances their Ukrainian concerns are not necessarily significant: the works

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8.10 Scene from production of Mérimée’s La Jacquerie at the Berezil

of Archipenko, Tatlin, Malevich, or Exter do not require a Ukrainian contextualization for their appreciation or understanding. Many, including those who emigrated permanently to Paris, Moscow, or other centres, assimilated various traditions and became part of other narratives. Nonetheless, given the strength of anticolonialist, national-liberationist currents in the 1910s and 1920s, one would expect to see their powerful effects on the avant-garde. Malevich as Case Study Kazimir Malevich, one of the great figures in twentieth-century art, can serve as an illustration of the case being made here. As I have argued elsewhere, his life, autobiography, and art can be interrogated from this point of view.24 Critics have usually selected for emphasis those aspects of his life that link the artist to events in the Russian capitals and have dismissed the periods that preceded or followed. The account of Rainer Crone and David Moos reads: ‘Departing from his inadequate, intellectually bland provincial surroundings, Malevich journeyed to Moscow in search of artistic enlightenment … He moved to Moscow in 1904, and from this time on his artistic project became significant … Moscow and St. Petersburg … were places that spoke of reform and revolution. Centers of thought and centers of intrigue.’25 This narrative of Malevich as revolutionary dismantler of tradition, urbanist, first commissar of the Bolshevik Revolution, and theorist of the visionary new leaves little room for an admission that he was inspired by peasant primitivism and the icon. Yet until the age of seventeen Kazimir lived in small Ukrainian towns and settlements where his father worked for sugar refineries. Even in the ensuing move to Kursk, he associated with Ukrainians. When Malevich moved to Moscow he was already twenty-six. His links with Ukraine were re-established in 1928–30 after he

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lost his job in Leningrad and was hired as a lecturer by the Kyiv Art Institute. He joined two friends already on staff there, Andry Taran and Lev Kramarenko, and two other important avant-gardists, Oleksander Bohomazov and Viktor Palmov, whose theory and practice of Spectralism (investigations into the colours of the spectrum) were congenial to him. Tatlin also lectured there, and Archipenko was making plans to join the staff until the deteriorating political situation made this impossible. At this time, Malevich not only declared himself to be a Ukrainian but insisted that his family identify itself as such. He planned to transfer all his works to Kyiv and settle there permanently. His autobiographical sketches link his work closely with Ukraine. Two significant sketches have been published: the shorter one dates from 1923–5, the second and much fuller account from 1933. The later account relates vivid childhood memories, early attempts at painting, work as a railway clerk in Kursk and the move to Moscow in 1904. It juxtaposes village and city life. The author consistently depicts the former as far superior. Village children are freer, make their own colourful clothing, practise art, and live and work in a culture of song, dance, and creative expression. The young Malevich dreams of developing apiaries on the sugar-beet fields, so as to make unnecessary the use and production of sugar in the dismal, regimented factories. He sees machines as predatory creatures, some of which have to be caged because of their potential to maim a person. He dislikes the children of factory workers and organizes pitched battles in which he leads the village children against those of the factory in heroic and victorious combat. The peasants always struck him as ‘clean and well dressed.’26 ‘Clean’ is also an adjective that recurs throughout his writings as a positive description of the new art. The young Malevich imitates the peasants’ way of painting houses in the spirit of primitivism: ‘I watched in awe as peasant women painted designs on the walls and helped them to paint ornaments on the hearth. The peasant women were excellent at drawing roosters, horses, and flowers. The paints were all prepared on the spot from various clays and dyes. I tried to transport this culture onto the stoves in my own house, but it didn’t work.’27 The boy undergoes a psychological transformation that is much more than a ‘passing’ phase. Malevich describes a transformative process that leads to a total identification with the peasantry. Their language, dress, eating habits, and culture and the young man’s attempts to assimilate all these ways occupy half the autobiography and demonstrate the depth of this imprinting. Later, in Kursk, the young Malevich takes up the realist manner of Ivan Shishkin and Ilia Repin, and then becomes an impressionist. Suddenly, however, he rediscovers the painting of icons: ‘I felt some kinship and something splendid in them.’28 He recalls his childhood, ‘the horses, flowers and roosters of the primitive murals and wood carvings.’ He writes that at this moment he sensed the bond between peasant art and the icon: ‘Icon art is a high-cultural form of peasant art’; and continues: ‘I came to understand the peasants through icons, saw their faces not as saints, but as ordinary people. And also the coloring, and attitude of the painter.’29 Thus, through the art of the icon, Malevich tells us, he grasped the emotional art of the peasantry, which he had loved earlier but had been incapable of explaining to himself. The artistic connection between the little horses and roosters on peasant walls, the costumes and domestic tools, becomes clear to him. He

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8.11 Pysanky designs

decides not to follow the classical art of antiquity, nor its revival in the Renaissance, nor the realist art of the ‘Wanderers’ (Peredvizhniki). Instead, he writes, ‘I remained on the side of peasant art and began painting pictures in the primitive spirit.’30 At the end of his autobiography Malevich once again returns to the icon, informing the reader that this art form taught him that the essential thing was ‘the sensing of art and artistic reality through emotions.’31 Malevich both painted stoves in the traditional Ukrainian manner and contributed Suprematist designs for peasant cooperatives. In 1915 and 1916 embroideries on scarves, pillows, and patterns on kilims based on Suprematist designs were produced in the workshops of these village cooperatives and sold in Kyiv, Poltava, Moscow, and Berlin as examples of folk production. The influence of the icon and folk art was spiritual. Byzantine Orthodox spirituality and icon art encourage seeing through the world to a deeper reality; ‘reading’ icons is a way of contemplating the world beyond that of appearances. The icon’s colours, forms, and symbols are codes that facilitate entry to this spiritual realm. The folk arts of Podillia (southwestern Ukraine on the left bank of the Dniester River) were an important influence: The closest analogy to his Suprematism are the geometrical forms of wall paintings in the homes of Podillia, the pysanky (painted Easter eggs) with their astral signs, the patterns of the plakhta (woven woman’s skirt) with their magical code of universal elements (fire, earth, water). The paintings of Malevich, in which sharply delineated patterns are scattered on a white background, capture the spirit of folk art and folk cosmology.32

The black square, circle, and cross are symbols with a long evolution in folk creativity and are common in mural art and embroidery. The cross, for example, symbolizes salvation and protection; in combination with the vase and the bird, it represents the tree of life. The Yampil region of Podillia, in which Malevich lived

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until he was twelve, is known for tall, light, painted wooden crosses, such as those that often recur in Malevich’s works, particularly in 1928–30.33 (See colour plate 8.) There is also, of course, a pre-Byzantine, pre-Christian symbolism underpinning icon and peasant art. A pagan symbolism of colours and forms is evident in Easter egg designs, embroideries, and mural art. All the things that Malevich mentions as having such a powerful effect upon him – the homes of peasants, their clothing and rituals – convey elements of this all-pervasive mythology in a mysterious but systematic, ‘encoded’ manner and can be seen as influencing Suprematism. The paintings of Malevich’s post-Suprematist 1928–30 Kyiv period, in contrast to the serene style of his peasant portraits of 1911–13, depict a disturbed world. Like his 1933 autobiography, they can be read as a protest against the treatment of the village. The faceless, armless peasants convey the helplessness of their class, indeed of the common people as a whole. They are isolated figures, dislocated from their background. In his ‘Untitled (Man Running)’ (1928–30) a figure is portrayed as running from a sword towards a cross. On the back of ‘A Complex Presentiment (Half-Length Figure in a Yellow Shirt)’ (1928–32), Malevich wrote: ‘The composition is made up of the elements of the sensation of emptiness, loneliness and the hopelessness of life. 1913, Kuntsevo.’ Although backdated, like the other paintings, because such sentiments were punishable with imprisonment at the time of the Five-Year Plan, this description probably accurately conveys the artist’s mood in the late twenties and early thirties. The figure itself is described by Sarabianov as ‘cramped by the expanse, the neck is stretched, the arms extended. Edged to the right, the figure has lost its dominant position on the surface of the canvas and is torn from the centre. These devices symbolize the uprooting of mankind, its proximity and muteness, its captivity and doom.’34 This series of paintings appears to record the presentiment of the catastrophe that was engulfing the peasantry. Other drawings from the period show a coffin, a hammer and sickle, and Orthodox crosses on the faces of peasants. Malevich may have been aware of the mass movements that were springing up in the rural areas in reaction to the terrible events, and which bore a mystical, eschatological character. One of the largest, that of the ‘Kalynivka Miracle,’ prophesied the end of the world and the coming of the anti-Christ. In folk songs that have survived from this and similar movements, symbols of death, salvation, and the Anti-Christ are common. They can be linked to images of the coffin, the cross, and the hammer and sickle in Malevich’s paintings from the period.35 The artist was aware of such an upsurge of activity among the peasantry and was influenced by it. He chose to use symbols that were familiar to the popular psyche in order to convey in these paintings an intuitive sense of imminent disaster. Like other avant-gardists in revolt against tradition, therefore, Malevich in both his Suprematist and post-Suprematist (post-1928) periods drew inspiration from his Ukrainian background and sources. In fact, he returned to some of these original sources of inspiration in the late twenties in order to protest the treatment of the countryside. Once more the emancipatory dialectic of social, national, and spiritual revolutions proved inextricably intertwined and powerfully motivating.

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NOTES 1 See Polina Samiilenko, Nezabutni dni horin’ (Kyiv: Mystetstvo, 1970) 25–6. 2 Tzvetan Todorov, Literature and Its Theorists: A Personal View of Twentieth-Century Criticism, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1987) 17–18. 3 Todorov 11. 4 Mikhail’ [H.] Semenko, ‘Mystetstvo iak kul’t,’ Chervonyi shliakh 3 (1924) 227. 5 Semenko, ‘Komu potribne mystetstvo,’ Literaturna hazeta, 1 May 1929. 6 ‘Deklaratsiia Vseukrains’koi federatsii revolutsiinykh radians’kykh pys’mennykiv,’ Molodniak 1 (Kharkiv, 1930) 124. 7 Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes (New York: Vintage Books, 1973) 61–87. 8 Richard Sheppard, Modernism-Dada-Postmodernism (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2000) 23. 9 Ibid. 24. 10 Khrushchev Remembers, trans. and ed. Strobe Talbott, intro., commentary, and notes by Edward Crankshaw (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970) 172. 11 Valerian Revuts’kyi, Piat’ velykykh aktoriv ukrains’koi stseny (Paris: Vydannia pershoi ukrains’koi drukarni u Frantsii, 1955) 17. 12 V. Khmuryi, Iosyp Hirniak: Etiud (Kharkiv: Rukh, 1931); rpt. in V. Khmuryi, Iu. Dyvnych, and Ie. Blakytnyi, V maskakh epokhy: Iosyp Hirniak (N.p.; Ukraina, 1948) 15. 13 Sheppard 24. 14 John Milner, Vladimir Tatlin and the Russian Avant-Garde (New Haven: Yale UP, 1984) 7. 15 Ivan Lysiak-Rudnyts’kyi, Mizh istoriieiu i politykoiu: Statti do istorii ta krytyky ukrain’skoi, suspil’no-politychnoi dumky (N.p.: Suchasnist, 1973) 15. 16 Andrei Sinyavsky [Siniavskii], Soviet Civilization: A Cultural History, trans. Joanne Turnbull with Nikolai Formozov (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1990) 4–13. 17 Milner 7. 18 Charlotte Douglas, Kazimir Malevich (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994) 12. 19 Ibid. 14. 20 Christopher Butler, Early Modernism: Music and Painting in Europe 1900–1916 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994) 108–9. 21 Sheppard 28. 22 Osip Mandel’shtam, Kievskii proletarii; quoted in Iosyp Hirniak, Spomyny (New York: Suchasnist, 1982) 225. 23 Myroslava M. Mudrak, ‘Rupture or Continuum? Ukraine’s “Avant-Garde” in Search of a System,’ in The Phenomenon of the Ukrainian Avant-Garde, ed. Myroslav Shkandrij (Winnipeg: Winnipeg Art Gallery, 2001) 29. 24 Myroslav Shkandrij, ‘Reinterpreting Malevich: Biography, Autobiography, Art,’ Canadian-American Slavic Studies 36:4 (2002) 405–21. 25 Rainer Crone and David Moos, Kazimir Malevich: The Climax of Disclosure (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991) 51–1. 26 Kazimir Malevich, ‘Chapters from an Artist’s Autobiography,’ trans. Alan Upchurch, October 34 (Fall 1985) 29. 27 Ibid. 29 28 Ibid. 38.

Politics and the Ukrainian Avant-garde 241 29 30 31 32

Ibid. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid. 44. Oleksandr Naiden and Dmytro Horbachov, ‘Malevych muzhyts’kyi,’ Khronika 2000 3–4 (1993) 221–2. 33 Ibid. 216. 34 Dmitry Sarabianov, ‘Malevich at the Time of the “Great Break,”’ in Malevich: Artist and Theoretician, ed. Galina Demosfenova (Paris: Flammarion, 1991) 146. 35 Naiden and Horbachov 221.

Art, especially the theatre, must return to its original form – that of a religious act. It is, after all, in its essence a religious act … It is a powerful device for transforming the coarse into the refined, ascending into the higher spheres, transforming the material. The theatre is truly a temple and should be pure and silent, even though many different prayers will be said in it. Les Kurbas, Director’s Diary, Bila Tserkva, 10 July 1920

Translated from the Ukrainian by Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipps

9 Kyiv’s Multicultural Theatrical Life, 1917–1926 hanna veselovska

It is difficult to overestimate the artistic and social importance of the Sadovsky Theatre in Kyiv, the only Ukrainian troupe with its own theatrical premises at the beginning of the twentieth century. Organized by Mykola Sadovsky in 1907, the troupe introduced a new approach to production in Ukrainian theatre and a new repertoire, which for the first time included Ukrainian translations of European dramas. (See Mayhill Fowler’s article at the beginning of this volume for more on the Sadovsky and Solovtsov Theatres.) The Sadovsky Theatre also gave birth to the Theatre Studio headed by Les Kurbas in 1916, which developed into Kyiv’s Young Theatre. A new era in Ukrainian theatre began with the political changes in Ukraine after February 1917. Aesthetic innovation was most obvious in the work of Les Kurbas at the Young Theatre, whose goal was the creation of a theatrical model of modernist art. Primarily made up of young actors, the company eventually generated most of Ukraine’s important theatre artists of the twentieth century.1 If twentiethcentury Ukrainian theatre can be represented as a genealogical tree with a dense crown of branches, the roots of this metaphorical plant can be found in the Young Theatre’s ‘brotherhood of faith’2 that existed in Kyiv from 1917 to 1919. (For more on the Young Theatre see Virlana Tkacz’s article in part 3 of this book). Until March of 1917, Kyiv’s theatrical life was relatively placid. Only occasionally did a theatrical event, usually one presented by a touring company, manage to stir the scene. The Russian Solovtsov Theatre was the major theatre in Kyiv, well known both in Russian capitals and in the provinces. There were also several other Russian-language theatrical enterprises of varying quality, as well as the Ukrainian Sadovsky Theatre and a Polish troupe. Most significant organizational changes in the theatres of Kyiv occurred under the patronage of the Central Rada. The first open meeting of theatre artists was held in Kyiv on 12 March 1917, and a decision was made to call a national theatre council. An organizing committee was elected, headed by Spyrydon Cherkasenko and Les Kurbas as secretary. At the meeting it was decided to publish a newspaper; the first issue of Teatralni visti (Theatrical News) appeared on 1 April 1917. On 24 April the Committee to Create a Ukrainian National Theatre was established, composed of representatives from various fields.3 The main topic of discussion among the theatre artists of Kyiv became the creation of two Ukrainian state theatres, one musical, the other dramatic.

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9.1 Ivan Marianenko as Khlestiakov in the production of Gogol’s Inspector General at the Sadovsky Theatre, 1908

9.2 Panas Saksahansky, People’s Artist of the Republic. Cover: Nove mystetstvo (New Art) 13 (30 March 1926)

Ukraine’s first state theatre, the Ukrainian National Theatre, was headed by Ivan Marianenko, a well-known actor and director in the Sadovsky Theatre. Later he would also work in Kurbas’s Berezil Theatre. The Ukrainian National Theatre (Ukrainskyi Natsionalnyi Teatr) was founded by the Central Rada, and was later supported by the government of Hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky, which came into power in the spring of 1918. The theatre opened in the fall of 1917 with Volodymyr Vynnychenko’s drama Pryhvozhdeni (Downtrodden), directed by Mykola Vorony. According to the leading Ukrainian art critic, Dmytro Antonovych, this production exposed the limitations of the Ukrainian National Theatre, condemning it to ‘a future of producing only Vynnychenko.’ Antonovych believed that this muchcriticized production showed that ‘the Ukrainian actor remembers his past unfortunately all too well and does not distance himself from the melodramatic tone and clichés of the Ukrainian ethnographic theatre.’ Antonovych added: ‘The melodramatic tone of the actors at the beginning of the play left an unpleasant impression … Although, at times, Marianenko rose above melodrama, … as did [the actress Liubov] Linytska,4 who had several interesting moments.’5 In the first weeks of its existence the Ukrainian National Theatre primarily staged plays by Vynnychenko and social dramas by Ivan Karpenko-Kary, a nineteenthcentury Ukrainian playwright. Later, it presented such western European plays as Hermann Sudermann’s The Fires of St. John and Molière’s Tartuffe.6 Antonovych’s review of the National Theatre’s production of Tartuffe was also negative, although some critics acknowledged Marianenko’s successful interpretation of the title role of this first Ukrainian-language production of Molière in Kyiv. In the second half of the season the Ukrainian National Theatre exhibited a new direction in its choice of plays. Of the seven new productions, three were historical dramas (Mykhailo Starytsky’s Bohdan Khmelnytsky and Oborona Bushi (The Defense of Busha), and Liudmyla Starytska-Cherniakhivska’s Hetman Doroshenko). But it was quite clear that the theatre’s first season had not met expectations and reorganization was inevitable.

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The kaleidoscopic change in the rhythm of life, the chaotic presence of a myriad of artistic ideas, and a unique aesthetic multilayering transformed Kyiv’s cultural life in 1917–19 into a very complex phenomenon that has not yet been fully examined. It was a time when theatrical innovation, like an extraordinarily compressed spring, exploded with accumulated force at the moment of revolutionary change. New theatrical ideas were born with practically no gestation, then instantly put into practice, and just as quickly became old hat. The rapid development of theatrical experimentation did not allow for the lasting implementation of any artistic innovation. The artistic explorations that began to appear sporadically in various theatrical venues of Kyiv from the middle of 1917 also lacked a unified program or an aesthetic common denominator. They even seemed to vie with each other – displays of Symbolism were negated by Futurist events, which, in turn, were neutralized by Expressionist innovation. Under the governments of the Hetman and the Directory, there were rapid organizational changes in culture and attempts to establish new forms of national art. Instead of a reorganization of the Ukrainian National Theatre, Kyiv saw the formation of two new theatre companies in the fall of 1918. These were the National State Theatre (Derzhavnyi Narodnyi Teatr), headed by Panas Saksahansky,7 and the State Dramatic Theatre (Derzhavnyi Dramatychnyi Teatr), headed by Oleksander Zaharov,8 which opened in November 1918 on the premises of the Operetta. The organizers hoped that the newly formed collectives would embody two directions in Ukrainian theatre: the traditional and the innovative. As the traditional troupe, the National State Theatre performed Ukrainian classics such as Ivan Kotliarevsky’s Natalka of Poltava, Ivan Karpenko-Kary’s Suieta (Vanity), and Liudmyla Starytska-Cherniakhivska’s Hetman Doroshenko. Alongside these, one of the best productions was of a European classical drama, Schiller’s The Robbers.9 In 1919 the National State Theatre was renamed the Troitsky Narodny Dom (Troitsky People’s Theatre), taking its new name from its premises. Its premieres included Vynnychenko’s Young Blood, noteworthy because Ukraine’s best-loved actress, Maria Zankovetska, appeared in it. In the fall of 1922 this troupe was renamed the Zankovetska Theatre and was headed by Borys Romanytsky and Oleksander Korolchuk, two students of Zankovetska.10 The State Dramatic Theatre had a more innovative repertoire of modern Ukrainian plays and world classics such as Gerhart Hauptmann’s The Weavers and Drayman Henschel, and Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts. In an interview before the season opened, director Borys Kryzhevetsky11 noted: ‘We choose to start with plays by Hauptmann, Ibsen, Lesia Ukrainka and Oleksander Oles, since the artificial and boring depictions of “folk life” of the old Ukrainian theatre seem so distant to us.’12 The actors who appeared at the State Dramatic Theatre13 were among the best and strove to find a new style of acting. The season opened with two productions: the premiere of Lesia Ukrainka’s Lisova pisnia (The Forest Song) and Hauptmann’s The Weavers, the first Ukrainianlanguage production of play. The press acknowledged that the staging of The Forest Song, by Zaharov and Krzhyvetsky,14 was exceptionally successful. ‘The Ukrainian stage had not seen such meticulous preparation.’15 The set for the production was designed in an ‘extraordinary high style’ by the famous Russian designer Mikhail Mikhailov,16 a colleague of Meyerhold (although from contemporary descriptions, it seems to have been naturalistic).

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9.3 Liubov Hakkebush in Lisova pisnia (Forest Song), 1918–19

As Prokhor Kovalenko, a participant in the production, noted, it was the ‘first time that three-dimensional decor was used in Ukrainian theatre – tree trunks had textured bark, water creatures emerged from trapdoors that were cut into the floor and camouflaged by reeds.’17 Another participant, Petro Terniuk, also described the set: ‘A shell, painted sky-blue, was constructed on stage. It enhanced the acoustics, and created very interesting colour patterns when lit. In the background to the left there was a small cliff and stream.18 A willow stood in the centre of the stage. The entire set had texture. Trees were painted on cardboard. Leaves appeared opaque, creating the impression of depth, like a real forest in Volyn.’19 At the same time, Kyiv’s well-known art critic Yevhen Kuzmin20 maintained that The Forest Song was ‘long and dull, as if an effort has been made to “bury” both the play and its audience. The decorations are gloomy, faded, and colourless. The real dried reeds that are stuck about the stage rustle like paper. Water nymphs appear: they have long, loose hair and are dressed in pretty nightgowns.’21 One of the theatre’s last premieres was the production of Vynnychenko’s play Mizh dvokh syl (Between Two Forces), written in 1918 about the revolutionary events in Ukraine. The administration of the State Theatre received an order from the government to stage this timely political drama on 27 December and premiered the show on 30 December. This was Aleksandr Zaharov’s first directorial effort in Ukrainian theatre and it was a great success.22 Mykola Vorony, a poet and the director at the first National Theatre, wrote: ‘Terrible, horrible … The nightmares that we lived through last year we were forced to relive in the theatre. It is a powerful effective photograph, an exact replica of our unadorned reality … The production and performances of the actors are exemplary.’23 The year 1917 marks the disappearance and dissolution of the city’s previous strict division into separate cultural ethnic enclaves in theatre that emerged partly naturally, but were also the result of enforced measures. Between 1917 and 1919 Kyiv’s theatrical avant-garde became international, accepting the internationalist position and program. First of all, theatrical innovators wanted to break with tradition, and to persuade the audience not simply to ‘watch theatre,’ that is, observe events on the stage. The goal of avant-garde was to create a mystical theatrical event, and both Symbolists and Futurists accepted this idea. The main factors that

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distinguished the contentious avant-garde from the set ways of the traditionalists were the rejection of the literary, a mystical quality, and theatricality. Russian-Language Theatre From the moment that avant-garde explorations ceased belonging only to the Russian-language art scene, the representatives of this cultural enclave made more conservative choices in order to retain their audience than did the artists in Polish, Ukrainian, or Jewish circles. Perhaps this was because they felt that radical art was seen to imply radical politics. One of the first theatres to challenge traditional art in the Russian-language theatre milieu was the newly created Great Theatre of Miniatures. On 15 April 1918 this troupe first showed Arthur Schnitzler’s La Ronde, which had been banned by censorship in Kyiv. The play had been previously produced in Russia only by The Crooked Mirror in Petrograd and by Kokhmanovsky’s troupe in Moscow. Even before the premiere, an intense debate arose about the contents of Schnitzler’s drama in the press, especially in the periodical Theatrical Life (Teatralnaia zhizn). In several interviews in Theatrical Life, the play’s director, Kostiantyn Berezhny,24 defended Schnitzler against accusations of pornography. He drew parallels between La Ronde and the realities of contemporary life, especially during the ‘Kyiv Apocalypse’ of 1918. According to Yury Kister, the contributor to Theatrical Life, Berezhny felt that ‘the point of La Ronde lay in its social idea, which separates Schnitzler from pornography. This idea is revealed in the closed circle, because all segments of society create a sexual circle, which closes with the prostitute.’25 We know from the reactions in the press that the director created a stage image that the Kyiv audience did not expect. ‘Instead of the usual rectangular proscenium,’ a reviewer noted, ‘a special oval arch was constructed. This is related to the concept of the round dance. Artistic allusions instead of naturalistic recreations were used in each scene.’26 Berezhny explained his concept: ‘What is important in art is “how,” and not “what” … The absence of any realistic details in the staging at the Great Theatre of Miniatures was deliberately underlined in this non-realistic production of La Ronde.’27 Emphasizing innovation in the design and production, Kister related these to the once-fashionable Viennese Secession. Schnitzler remained a topical playwright for him, even in 1918: ‘His sensuality explodes in the refined jagged forms of the modern, in decadence, and sexual seductiveness.’ Kister noted the success of the ‘decorations depicting the street and the garden. This is our city today, horrible in its dizzying dissipation.’28 For the Kyiv of 1918, where changes in theatrical aesthetics occurred so quickly, the production of La Ronde was a unique homage to the Viennese Secession, which did not have time to develop locally. The show can be seen as a nostalgic farewell to the art of the 1900s, as a production staged on the eve of the theatre scene’s total fascination with extreme leftist experimentation.29 At the same time, La Ronde was a step towards the new mystical theatrical event. The Great Theatre of Miniatures found itself at odds with conservative elements in Kyiv’s theatrical milieu, both with those who supported productions of Ukrainian classics and with entertaining shows in the Russian theatres.

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The Dramatic Theatre, which opened in the fall of 1918 on Bulvarno-Kudriavska Street, distinguished itself among the Russian-language theatres with innovative acting. Although it was located far from the centre of the city, the theatre managed to gain notice among theatre-goers and critics with its unusual repertoire, exceptional staging, innovative set design, and a unique style of acting. Productions on Bulvarno-Kudriavska Street were reviewed from time to time in Theatrical Life, and also were described by the experimental director Heorhy Kryzhytsky,30 who lived in Kyiv at the time. On its small stage were shown such plays as Lermontov’s Masquerade, Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, Henning Berger’s The Deluge, and plays previously banned by censorship – Rudolf Lothar’s König Harlekin (King Harlequin),31 Andreev’s King Hunger, and K. R.’s mystery-play The King of the Jews.32 In the opinion of Kryzhytsky, the last two productions were the most interesting, and featured Lev Fenin33 in the leading roles. According to Kryzhytsky, the production of The King of the Jews, based on a play by the cousin of Tsar Nikolai II, Grand Prince Konstantin Romanov (known as ‘K. R.’), became an important event in the life of Kyiv largely ‘because of the brilliant acting by Lev Fenin in the leading role of Joseph of Arimithea.’34 Director Leonid Lukianov,35 who would later direct shows in Tairov’s Kamerny Theatre, and designer Hryhory Komar36 staged the play as a symbolist ritualistic-mystical theatre event, with music by Alexander Glazunov (conducted by Reinhold Glière). Konstantin Narodin in his article in Theatrical Life attested to its symbolist nature: ‘The play, with its captivating mystical plot, unfolds before us, without dwelling on details, especially in terms of design … In this simple production, deliberately focused on mystery, the theatre has found a true symbiosis of play and production; this explains the interest in the show.’37 The set by Hryhory Komar was ‘severe, but designed with taste,’ and distinguished by innovation. ‘A row of large white lilies along the footlights created a frame for the stage picture.’38 Describing the decor, the reviewer Konstantin Narodin added: ‘Lukianov solved all the problems and dealt with the difficulties of staging The King of the Jews on such a small stage.’39 In addition to the play’s mystical tone and set, the performances amazed the audiences. The role of Aleksandr was played by Aksel Lundin, later a well-known actor in Kyiv and one of Ukraine’s first film directors, who ‘made up for two or three weak places with a competent performance, setting a tone of inspiration and ecstasy. His partner, Lia Radetska, was also able to find a true note of youthful ecstasy.’ So perhaps belatedly, actors in Kyiv were gradually mastering the aesthetics of stage symbolism in this production of King of the Jews. However, soon both Lundin and Fenin would be advocating something very different – revolutionary art, with its billboard style, heightened form, grotesqueness, and épater- lebourgeoisie attitude. Masquerade, based on Lermontov and staged at the Dramatic Theatre, also presented a new type of production for the audiences of Kyiv. ‘The scene of the ball was moved … to the balcony,’ wrote Heorhy Kryzhytsky. ‘The auditorium was somewhere down below, and up here, just below the ceiling, only a part of the huge chandelier (on the backdrop below) could be seen through the capitals of the

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9.4 Juliusz Osterwa

columns. As music resonated from below, individual masked characters ran up to the balcony. Intimate episodes of the tragedy played out far above the din of the ball.’ Thus, thanks to the descriptions of a few shows, we know that in some Russian theatres in Kyiv there was a trend of restaging well-known plays with new direction and design employing an innovative (for Kyiv) use of theatrical space.40 Polish-Language Theatre The New Polish Theatre led by Josef Flach41 also used new directing methods. The director of the theatre was Juliusz Osterwa and the set designer Wincenty Drabik.42 This theatre was based on the new acting theories of Nikolai Evreinov, Theodore Kommissarzhevsky,43 and Max Reinhardt. Actors received studio training grounded in François Delsarte’s and Émile Jaques-Dalcroze’s methods.44 Juliusz Osterwa, who was a friend of Les Kurbas, was truly an artist of note in Kyiv. It is said that Kurbas became interested in staging Jerzy ĩuławski’s Ijola with the Young Theatre after seeing Osterwa perform in this play.45 The renowned Polish actress Stanisława Wysocka also worked in Kyiv. From 1911 to 1916 she worked in the Kyiv Polish theatre led by Franciszek Rychłowski. In 1916 she organized the experimental Studio Theatre (almost at the same time as Les Kurbas’s Youth Theatre), and in 1918 headed another Polish theatre in Kyiv with Kazymir Dunin-Markewicz. Stanisława Wysocka’s experiments with students of the Dramatic Conservatory on a production of Snieg (Snow), based on the work of the well-known Polish dramatist and modernist Stanisław Przybyszewski, seemed to herald a continuation of the modernist current in Kyiv’s theatre circles. In the spring of 1919 the Polish Young Theatre created by Wysocka worked in the premises previously occupied by Les Kurbas’s Young Theatre. Wysocka managed to stage several innovative productions in this theatre, including Stanisław WyspiaĔski’s Wyzwolenie (Liberation)46 and Juliusz Słowacki’s Balladyna (Ballad) before she left Ukraine.

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9.5 Cover by Aleksandr Schervachidze of Vasily Kamensky’s The Book on Evreinov, 1917

German-Language Theatre In 1918, during the Hetmanate, a German theatre existed for almost four months on Mykolaivska Street in the centre of Kyiv. Its first production was Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Minna von Barnhelm, which was presented in a traditional realistic manner. This production, as well as the few other premieres the theatre managed to produce, was not experimental. The press only noted the theatre’s ‘soft intimate quietude.’ It ceased to exist when the war ended and German troops left Kyiv. Evreinov The big event in the fall of 1918 in the artistic circles of Kyiv was the arrival of Nikolai Evreinov. The theatrical elite began to ready itself for the appearance of this famously scandalous director and playwright. Evreinov’s radicalism divided the theatrical community. Before Evreinov’s tour, Theatrical Life featured a scathing review of The Book on Evreinov by young theatre critic Stefan Mokulsky.47 The author of the book was the Futurist Vasily Kamensky, who hailed Evreinov as a genius, the finest director of the time, an artist-philosopher, and a pioneering scholar on theatricality and the theatricalization of life. In the fall of 1918, Les Kurbas called Evreinov ‘Eastern Europe’s greatest theatrical leader of all time.’ Evreinov arrived in Kyiv from Petrograd, escaping from the Bolsheviks. He performed in Kyiv at the Kruchinin Theatre in the plays Stopyk and Maniurochka and Vesiolaia smert (Happy Death),48 from the repertoire of the Crooked Mirror Theatre in Petrograd. Then Evreinov gave a lecture entitled ‘Theatre and the Scaffold.’ The folk drama Tsar Maximillian inspired his concept of a scaffold theatre. According to the director, theatre was born out of the bloody spectacle of executions. The proof, he said, was the archaic text of the drama, recently published in the collection Northern Folk Dramas. The main scenes were the encounter with Death, the preparation for execution, the execution itself, and the burial.49 One can say that this presentation was the initial step towards the creation of the Theatre of Cruelty. In his Kyiv lecture Evreinov first insisted on provocatively identifying the

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theatre with the scaffold. His reasoning was that both were spectacles. ‘The Theatre and the Scaffold’ also tried to take the idea of ‘theatricality’ beyond the narrow professional realm, transforming it from the aesthetic to the social.50 Bolshevik Nationalization The theatres of Kyiv were nationalized in May 1919 by the new Bolshevik authorities. The Pall-Mall Theatre of Miniatures was transformed into the Shevchenko Red Army Club. The Bergonier Theatre became the Red Theatre, and the Young Theatre ceased to exist because it was merged with Zaharov’s State Dramatic Theatre to form the Shevchenko First State Theatre of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. As part of this new troupe, the artists of the Young Theatre would stage the celebrated adaptation of Shevchenko’s poem ‘Haidamaky,’ directed by Les Kurbas, in 1920. From 1920 to 1922 the Shevchenko Theatre occupied the former premises of the Bergonier Theatre in Kyiv. It brought together the leading theatre artists of Kyiv, including designers Anatol Petrytsky, Vadym Meller, and Kostiantyn Yeleva, and Russian directors Aleksei Smirnov, Oleksandra Smirnova-Iskander, and Kostiantyn Berezhny, who found themselves in the city at the time, and the actors Ivan Marianenko, Liubov Hakkebush, Serhy Karhalsky, Oleksander Serdiuk, and others. The most famous productions of the Shevchenko Theatre were Zaharov’s The Stone Master by Lesia Ukrainka, with a set designed by Anatol Petrytsky (see colour plate 13) and a musical score by Naum Pruslin; Berezhny’s staging of Juliusz Słowacki’s Mazepa, designed by Vadym Meller; Berezhny’s production of Giants of the North based on Ibsen’s play The Vikings of Helgeland, designed by Petrytsky; and Vynnychenko’s drama Chorna pantera i bilyi medvid (The Black Panther and the White Bear), directed by Vasyl Vasylko. In the spring of 1919, after the Young Theatre was dissolved, Les Kurbas prepared to stage plays at the Musical Drama Theatre.51 The Musical Drama Theatre lasted only three months. The theatre was organized by the actor Semen Butovsky. Stepan Bondarchuk, Kurbas’s colleague from the Young Theatre, was named manager, and Mikhailo Bahrynovsky was named conductor. Michael Mordkin, the internationally renowned ballet dancer, was the choreographer, while Anatol Petrytsky was the resident designer.52 (For more on Mordkin and the dance avantgarde in Kyiv see Maria Ratanova’s article.) In his memoirs, Vasyl Vasylko, an actor at the Young Theatre, described Petrytsky’s set for Mykola Lysenko’s Utoplena (The Drowned) staged by Mikhailo (Mikhail) Bonch-Tomashevsky: ‘Petrytsky eliminated all the everyday details from the stage. He built a sloped platform and covered it with a green carpet. In his allusive style, he painted white-washed cottages, enveloped in the soft pink mist of spring cherry blossoms. There was a fence with delicate poplars by Halia’s house, and a pond by the old mansion, which seemed to fade into moonlit greenery. The trees, cottages, and landscape looked fantastic. The willows, cherry trees, and young poplars were whimsical, fairy-tale-like; the entire picture impressed the viewer with an unexpected mix of soft lilacs, pink whites, silvery blues, and brilliant greens.’53

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9.6 Konstantin Mardzhanov

Petrytsky’s design for The Drowned aestheticized the Ukrainian picturesque; folk elements were mythically poeticized. Chimerical, secretive nature predominated instead of the somewhat contrived world usually presented by the ethnographic theatre. Petrytsky also worked on Mykola Lysenko’s Taras Bulba, directed by Les Kurbas, a production which the Kyiv audience never saw. Petrytsky moved away from the primitive towards the heroic and monumental in his design for Taras Bulba. According to Vasylko, Petrytsky’s boldly coloured decorations were destroyed by the White Guard when Denikin’s Army invaded Kyiv. The former Solovtsov Theatre (renamed the Lenin Theatre in 1919) was turned over to Konstantin Mardzhanov, who headed the All-Ukrainian Theatre Committee. (For a discussion of Mardzhanov’s early work in Kyiv at the Solovtsov Theatre see Fowler’s essay at the beginning of this volume.) Mardzhanov had arrived in Kyiv in the late fall of 1918, when the city was ‘gloomy in the evening; as dark as a village,’ according to Dmytro Dontsov. ‘I was sitting in a cafe on Vasylkivska Street [one of the main streets in the centre of Kyiv]. There were only sparsely laid out candles on the tables and no electricity. There were no streetcars; once in a while a car would rumble down the street.’54 Mardzhanov was not a very popular individual and there was enormous competition in the arts in Kyiv in 1918 owing to the large wave of theatre artists from Moscow and Petrograd. Before the Bolsheviks arrived in Kyiv, Mardzhanov ran the Bi-Ba-Bo Cabaret, which he first organized in Petrograd with the poet Nikolai Agnivtsev. The artists of the Bi-Ba-Bo came to Kyiv to escape the hunger in Petrograd, and established the cabaret in the basement of the François Hotel. Soon the cabaret was renamed the Crooked Jimmie. Later, at the beginning of the 1920s, it would move to Moscow. During the winter of 1918–19 the literary and artistic life of Kyiv met at the Crooked Jimmie. This was the first phase of Mardzhanov’s career in Kyiv this time around. The cabaret’s productions were immortalized in Bulgakov’s novel White Guard and opened to the public only when the Bolsheviks took over Kyiv in the spring of 1919. The cabaret then moved to the Intimate Theatre on the Khreshchatyk and the basement premises were given by Mardzhanov (as Kyiv’s commissar for

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9.7 Isaak Rabinovich, set design for Oscar Wilde’s Salome, 1919

theatre) to a group of young artists that included Grigory Kozintsev, Aleksei Kapler, and Sergei Yutkevich, later all important Soviet film artists. They opened the Harlequin Mini-Theatre in the space. Konstantin Mardzhanov’s first production at the former Solovtsov Theatre in May 1919 was Lopez de Vega’s Fuenta Ovejuna, a legendary show often described and analysed in Soviet sources. On the one hand, this was truly an experimental show. The set designer, Isaak Rabinovich, created a uniquely stylized, expressively coloured, stage set. (See colour plate 15.) On the other hand, the inflammatory, free-willed direction placed the masses at the centre of the show as the main character, totally reflecting the revolutionary mood of the times. Rejecting stylistic unity, Mardzhanov boldly joined various theatrical devices: on a stage covered with a bright orange fabric against a turquoise backdrop, he created a precise geometric mise-en-scène, with grotesque, buffoon-like moments. At the same time, the actors presented the great tragedy of the uprising in their performances. Mardzhanov’s second production in 1919 – Salome, based on Oscar Wilde’s play – is less well known. In 1908, Evreinov and Meyerhold had attempted to stage Salome almost concurrently.55 The ban of Evreinov’s production at Vera Komisarzhevskaia’s Theatre caused the financial ruin of the theatre. Meyerhold’s Salome never opened.56 After the ban was lifted, Salome was first produced in the fall of 1917 by Tairov in Moscow’s Kamerny Theatre, with Alisa Koonen in the lead, and a set by Kyiv designer Alexandra Exter. Tairov beat Mardzhanov to the mark by only several weeks. In November 1917 Mardzhanov’s Salome was shown in Petrograd at the Troitsky Theatre of Miniatures. The Salome shown in Kyiv in 1919 was the last Salome of the age. Subsequent productions (Volodymyr Tatishchev’s in the Red Torch Theatre, and Sandro Akhmeteli’s in the Shota Rustaveli Theatre)57 belong to early Soviet art. The main

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9.8 Isaak Rabinovich, costume sketch for Salome production, directed by Konstantin Mardzhanov. Lenin Theatre, Kyiv, 1919 (BM)

difference was in how Salome herself was portrayed. Director Mardzhanov and the actress Yureneva did not show her as a revolutionary who opposed tyrants. She was a mannered, lascivious decadent who only desired pleasure. This Salome performed during the revolutionary Apocalypse and became the sign for it. Prophetic strength underlay the character of Salome – she tore off the seven veils as though seven demons were tempting her, while she summoned the seven angels of the Apocalypse. Comprehensive information about the production at the Lenin Theatre is available thanks to an archival document from Khronika mystetstv i khudozhnoi promyslovosti (The Chronicle of Arts and Artistic Production), published by the Ukrainian Print Bureau of the People’s Commissariat for Education. The reaction was very negative. The anonymous reviewer begins by stating: ‘Staging Wilde’s Salome in our time means taking on a great responsibility. Only the gods can resurrect the dead, and sometimes the justification for a resurrection is beyond the powers of the gods. The production of Salome, soon to be seen in Kyiv, can be regarded as propaganda for the lack of talent and ignorance.’58 What did the audience in Kyiv actually see on stage? ‘Visually – all is well,’ noted the chronicler. ‘Narrabot [looks good] standing on the scaffold in profile looking off into the distance, and the motionless executioner beside the cistern has two poses, one static, statuesque, with both hands leaning on his sword, and the other dynamic, as the attacking Nubian, during John the Baptist’s cries. Herod’s page doesn’t look quite as well.’59 Later most memoirists and researchers of the Kyiv Salome would limit themselves to positive impressions of Isaak Rabinovich’s set design: ‘When many years later, I saw the great Czech designer’s Josef Svoboda’s constructions for Shakespeare’s Hamlet,’ wrote Sergei Yutkevich. ‘I remembered that a novice Soviet artist had built analogous grandiose white stairs, which began at the footlights and extended up into the depth of the stage. This bold architectural spatial solution by Rabinovich differed greatly from the set designed by

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9.9 Isaak Rabinovich, set design for Salome, 1919

Alexandra Exter for Tairov’s production at the Moscow Kamerny Theatre, which consisted of mobile colour curtains. Exter had a studio in Kyiv which was the centre of artistic life for the young generation.’60 In Rabinovich’s design, ‘Gold cylinders and square towers rose beautifully, reminiscent of Appia’s simplified style. Glimmering under the light of a hidden moon, the mysterious towering steps of a dark terrace provide a lovely but under-utilized space for group scenes, a spotlight called attention to the figure of the executioner dressed in a red tunic, but the illusion disappears all too quickly,’ wrote the Kyiv art critic Yevhen Kuzmin.61 All the critics – Kuzmin, the anonymous chronicler, and the later memoirists – agreed that, on the whole, the Kyiv Salome was not a success. Wrote Kuzmin:‘The severe executioner is transformed into a scrawny bit player, and the gradually bored spectator mercilessly notes a chain of unfulfilled desires – the wish to capture Salome’s mysterious seductive persona in the lines of her costume, the futile attempt to transform the laziest fat rats from Poltava straight out of Gogol into Herod’s soldiers, or the provincial young ladies out of Ostrovsky’s plays into Herod’s dancing girls. The bored audience is unconvinced that screeching sounds reminiscent of whirring propellers, the thunder of cymbals and gongs, and wailing of trumpets, is what makes for high tragic style.62 Even Vera Yureneva, the star who played Salome, couldn’t rescue the production. Moreover, according to Kryzhytsky, her performance was worse than Natale Tamara’s,63 an actress of the operetta who played the role in Mardzhanov’s Petrograd production, or that of the young Kyivan actress Sharol-Khorol.64 ‘Nothing can be said about Yureneva,’ notes the chronicle. ‘Nothing good can be said either about her portrayal in general, or in detail. Only several moments are praiseworthy – when totally concentrated, [she] sits at the edge of the cistern.

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9.10 Isaak Rabinovich, costume sketches for Soldiers, Salome production, 1919 (BM)

Tired, deep in thought, she circles the head on the plate and cringes; then she lowers her head on the steps. Here, as in the deep tones – a prelude to conversations with the dead – both aestheticism and realism are correctly balanced.’65 The Mardzhanov production did not meet the expectations of the Kyiv artistic community, Salome was important as one of the few productions of Oscar Wilde’s plays in Kyiv. The monumental beauty of golden geometric shapes and the visual sanctity of the prophet came together on the stage, yet everything else looked artificial, overly exalted. ‘The gestures, cold and rhetorical, were as false as the intonations. Salome and Tetrarkh in turn fell on their backs to depict “passion,” forcing the audience to observe their protruding legs, other actors (including the guards!) rolled about on their stomachs to highlight oriental despotism. Disgust and pity rose in our hearts. One felt sorry for the actors, involved in this “mess,” one felt sorry for the audience, especially our “youth,” the new audience that is starting to fill the theatres. Now they will think this is “Wilde,” this is the “East,” this is real “theatre,” this is all there is to art.’66 Lev Nikulin67 wrote in his memoirs, ‘People in theatre understood that in fact the productions of Wilde’s Salome and Lope de Vega’s Fuente Ovejuna represent the previous era.’ Before his departure from Kyiv on 28 June 1919, Mardzhanov managed to prepare several more productions at the Lenin Theatre – Vasily Kamensky’s Stenka Razin, Dmitry Merezhkovsky’s Tsar Aleksei, and also the eighth Jimmiead at the Crooked Jimmie Cabaret, then at the Merchants’ Garden. On 20 August 1919 Denikin’s Army took Kyiv and many innovative artists who had closely collaborated since the beginning of the year scattered in all directions. Some left even before the White Guard took Kyiv, some left with the Bolsheviks on boats down the Dnipro River, others left on foot for Vinnytsia or Kamianets-Podilskyi, the headquarters of the Directory Government. There were those who sought refuge with the French

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9.11 Vera Yureneva

forces that occupied Odesa, and some even left for Tbilisi, held by the Mensheviks until March 1921. (For more details on Denikin’s destructive regime in Kyiv see Michael F. Hamm’s essay in the first chapter of this book.) Street Celebrations But in May–June 1919, very different agendas, in both art and propaganda, were being promoted by organizations created by the Bolshevik government. The most prominent event was the famous May Day celebration. On the hillsides of Kyiv artists prepared to present the mystery Communism Is Conquering the World. Headed by Alexandra Exter, the painters Isaak Rabinovich, Vadym Meller, Anatol Petrytsky, Aleksandr Tyshler, Nisson Shifrin, Sofia Vyshnevetska, Liubov Kozintseva-Erenberg, and Sergei Yutkevich transformed the city into a unique carnival. ‘The façades of all the buildings on Khreshchatyk, as well as all the streetcars, were covered with banners and posters. There was a huge outdoor exhibit featuring the trends in art. Of course, the Futurist, Cubist, Suprematist, Constructivist, and other “avant-garde” tendencies were best represented … All the artists did their best, they were sincere and inspired. They used folk graphics and traditional design to propagate the revolutionary subject matter,’ recalled Yutkevich.68 Almost all the artists of Kyiv were also involved in the preparations for Red Army Day. Rabinovich painted a huge poster for the festivities. Klyment Redko caught the moment in his memoirs: ‘Shifrin politely bustles about looking very serious. Bohomazov, in charge of one of the front groups, is nervously at work. At ease, as always, Khvostenko paints Ukrainian figures against a background of sunflowers. Petrytsky’s fantasy is bold, and rather theatrical. Tyshler charms with lyricism and dignity. The delicate Chelichev energetically aims for new achievements in art, nostrils flared, like a pure-bred stallion. Krychevsky’s collective works with academic authority. The event must be a national holiday, and includes talent from all the arts – architecture, sculpture, theatre, music, poetry, and literature. The avant-garde artists take Khreshchatyk, Kyiv’s central thoroughfare, hostage. Original colourful banners, painted by a group of artists led by Exter and Meller, hang in parallel rows across the street.’69

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Another revolutionary holiday in Kyiv was Universal Learning Day, on 9 June. The All-Ukrainian Musical Committee proposed to stage Verdi’s Aida at the Hippodrome,71 and Lev Nikulin was ordered to ‘write a socially relevant three-act scenario for the circus entitled Everyone to Arms, a one-act play about the Revolution entitled The Homeland in Danger, and a one-act play for Red Army clubs entitled The Last Day of the Paris Commune – all this was to be done in five days.’71 The Club Scene Any discussion of Kyiv in 1919 must mention the celebrated KhLAM Club (an acronym for Artists, Writers, Actors, and Musicians, but literally meaning ‘Trash’), which best embodied the city’s artistic and political diversity. The idea of opening a Bohemian cafe in Kyiv arose in the middle of 1918 with the arrival of many refugee artists from Russia.72 However, KhLAM did not open until the end of the winter of 1919, and its first home was in the basement of the Continental Hotel. Archival documents attest to the fact that Kyiv’s KhLAM was not a stable structure. It changed over time, transforming from a motley bohemian cafe into a barely veiled commissars’ club that was controlled by the new Bolshevik authorities. Like most artistic organizations in Kyiv, KhLAM was at first financially owned by its shareholders, which included several artistic groups. These were the Hermes Group (Natan Vengrov, Benedikt Livshits, Vladimir Makkaveisky, Yury Terapiano, Ilia Erenberg), the Obelisk Group (Nikolai Agnivtsev, Lev Nikulin, and others), and the Ursa Major Group. Also included was the artist workshop of Isaak Rabinovich, Nisson Shifrin, and Aleksandr Tyshler. It is impossible to identify everyone who was part of KhLAM, since there were ‘many people always there lunching, dining; many Soviet workers took time off to rest in its artistic milieu.’73 As Sergei Yutkevich wrote about the artists who visited there: ‘Just who didn’t I meet at the cafe, sipping glasses of tea at the marble tables. The tables were often pushed together to create an improvised stage for performances by poets such as Osip Mandelshtam, Yury Smolych, Emanuil Herman,74 Pavlo Tychyna.’75 At KhLAM everything artistic, national, and political was so interwoven that it was difficult to distinguish a political worker from an artist, or vice versa. A constant visitor was Commissar Aleksandra Kollontai, who lived in the Continental Hotel, which came to be known as the ‘Building of the Soviets.’ She was often accompanied by her friend Vera Yureneva, the well-known actress who had just married Mikhail Koltsov, an artist and political functionary. All life seemed theatricalized in Kyiv in 1919. KhLAM transformed into a theatrical absolute where it was difficult to distinguish actors from audience; everyone was part of the spectacle. Another artistic cafe-club opened about the same time in the basement of No. 9 Mykolaivsky Street. This was the Liokh mystetstva (Art Cave), where various artistic groups presented evenings of poetry and music, mini-shows, and skits. The club was officially opened on 30 April 1919, by the Free Association of Artists, but its actual organizers were the Ukrainian and Russian poets Vladimir Makkaveisky, Volodymyr Yaroshenko, Vasyl Blakytny, Vasyl Chumak, and Mykhail Semenko, and actors of the Young Theatre headed by Les Kurbas.

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9.12 Anatol Petrytsky, self-portrait, 1926

Les Kurbas’s colleague Stepan Bondarchuk recalled: ‘We found a vacant basement on Mykolaivsky Street. The boys found some boards and built a small stage, where they placed a piano they found … Anatol Petrytsky painted the walls. On one wall he painted a full-length self-portrait. Dressed in a jacket that was too small and in paint-splattered pants, he leans against a long-handled large brush. There is a daisy in his buttonhole.’76 Volodymyr Koriak remembered capricious decorated panels that Petrytsky hung on the walls, including a lantern painted near the ceiling. He also remembered the exceptional cabaret atmosphere of the club.77 Events at the Art Cave took place every Monday and Saturday. The opening night, ‘A Spring Evening,’ was organized by various Kyiv poets. The following gathering was to be called ‘Spring Songs,’ and was prepared solely by Ukrainian poets and actors. The Art Cave also presented Les Kurbas and Young Theatre actors in an evening of Pavlo Tychyna’s poetry. The Tychyna Evening was remembered by most as the club’s best performance. The Young Theatre performed the poem ‘In the Church Square …’ as a collective recitation, in a way similar to how Kurbas had dramatized Shevchenko’s poetry. Petrytsky created a large stylized flower for the performance of ‘The Clarinets of the Sun,’ which included movement by Polina Niatko. Most of the young Ukrainian poets who presented their work at the Art Cave78 professed the most radical artistic positions and promoted the new proletarian art. Vasyl Ellan-Blakytny was probably the most active participant of the gathering at the Art Cave. He had made a name for himself as both a poet and an ideologue of Proletcult, a radical organization promoting proletarian culture. Theories of proletarian culture, as well as articles influenced by Formalist theory, appeared on the pages of Mystetstvo (Art), the first Soviet Ukrainian arts journal, edited by Hnat Mykhailychenko and

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9.13 Alexander Dovzhenko, portrait of Pavlo Tychyna in Hart, vol. 1, 1924

Mykhail Semenko. Contributors included Les Kurbas, Anatol Petrytsky, Hryhory Narbut, and others. Programmatic articles were written by Mykhailychenko (‘Proletarian Art’), Ellan-Blakytny (‘Toward the Problem of “Proletarian Art”’), and Volodymyr Koriak, the future ideologue of the class theory in art. Ukrainian Theatre as Spectacle Ukrainian theatre, which totally lacked radical innovation until 1917, underwent a sharp turn to the left by 1920. Preferring non-realistic, allegorically symbolic creativity, it was distancing itself from traditional Ukrainian theatre. Most ‘leftist’ directors at the beginning of the 1920s upheld the principles of the Proletcult. Marko Tereshchenko, Kurbas’s colleague at the Young Theatre, founded an experimental collective that began its work in Kyiv in November 1919 as the All-Ukrainian Central Studio Drama Group. Later it was renamed the Hnat Mykhailychenko Theatre and lasted until 1925, when it was liquidated by the government. It must be stressed that this radical left theatre received more government support than any other avant-garde theatre collective in Ukraine. Its importance in the aesthetic diversity of artistic currents has yet to be reassessed. Soviet art critics did not dare

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9.14 Marko Tereshchenko at the Young Theatre (YHOD)

label Tereshchenko’s creative experiments as Futurist, even though there were Futurist characteristics in the theatre’s work. Central Studio’s premiere production was a composition entitled Pershyi budynok Novoho svitu (The First Building of the New World), presented at the Kyiv Opera on 10 December 1919. The set was designed by Petrytsky, who previously had created sets for Bonch-Tomashevsky’s Futurist productions and Kurbas’s experimental plays. The score was composed by Anatoly Butsky, who subsequently created the score for Kurbas’s celebrated productions of Gas and Jimmie Higgins. The first piece Tereshchenko directed was created by the collective, and consisted of a series of separate sketches generated by studio members. ‘In time,’ Tereshchenko wrote, ‘we moved from études to creating an entire composition, capable of poetically reflecting the spirit of our time.’ Tychyna supported this idea. We began to create a script. We looked for poetry, literature, and music which would help us deepen and embody our idea of a revolutionary oratorio. Butsky, a marvellous pianist who could improvise, chose the music for the show.’79 The core of the script was formed of poems by Tychyna (‘Plow,’ ‘In the Church Square,’ ‘Psalm to Iron’), Volodymyr Sosiura, Vasyl Chumak, Semenko, and Ellan-Blakytny, as well as scenes from Émile Verhaeren’s play The Dawn. The critic Yury Mezhenko noted that what was most important was motion and image. The sound value of the word was not used (which would make it overly psychological in comparison to the cosmic tension). There was movement, movement was primary. Images from the texts were connected by association with movement. The actor was an element of the movement, sound served as a cry to intensify ecstasy. The meaning of the composition lay not in the individual, but in mass movement, in the millions, millions of muscular arms. Movement and image were not illustrative. Movement was not used to illustrate or develop an image, just as the word was not used to explain an action. Rather, it was the collective ecstatic impulse that revealed the cosmic storm, the destruction of the world.80 The First Building of the New World possessed only an approximate script, rather than a full-fledged text; its final literary form was completed later in 1921, thanks to Tychyna. It was reviewed by Myroslav Irchan: ‘First of all, on stage we see not individual men and women, but a collective mass. Second, we see the movement

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9.15 Scene from Carnival, directed by Marko Tereshchenko, design by Vadym Meller. Hnat Mykhailychenko Theatre, Kyiv, 1923

and enthusiasm of millions. In this collective work the old order and its decomposition, the rise of the masses, and the social revolution are presented in a very interesting way. The spectator is so captivated that he starts to involuntarily feel that he is a member of the collective.’81 Taking the theory of collective creation to its logical end, at the beginning of the 1920s Marko Tereshchenko also organized mass actions and staged dramatizations of ‘trials’ similar to those organized by directors in Petrograd, with the participation of workers and soldiers. Analysing the mass street spectacles in Petrograd, researchers of Russian revolutionary theatre have compared them with traditional western European carnivals and mysteries, as well as traditional folk festivals and farcical spectacles. The script of the mass spectacle Trud i kapital (Work and Capital), staged by Tereshchenko, with texts by Tychyna, is indeed similar to traditional mysteries. This modern mystery, produced in the Kyiv Circus in 1921, used allegory, symbolism, elements of phantasmagoria, and collective action. Dramatic characters that represented ‘capital’ (capitalists, generals, clergy) were positioned above, in the place usually occupied by the orchestra, and the representatives of ‘work’ (the masses) remained below in the arena. A wide staircase united the upper platform with the arena. This is where the action between the two warring camps took place. ‘The characters emerged on stage from three entrances,’ Tereshchenko wrote, ‘a

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9.16 Scene from Universal Necropolis, directed by Marko Tereshchenko, design by Vadym Meller

central one and two on the sides … Pantomime was important and improvisation was employed. The production used choirs, dancers, and acrobats. This made the spectacle complex, colourful, and synthetic.’82 Searching for new theatrical forms, the avant-garde artists of the beginning of the 1920s borrowed conventions from previous theatrical traditions, including the medieval. The attempt to rejuvenate the theatre by using ancient theatrical traditions was widespread throughout Europe at the beginning of the 1920s. Experiments with mass actions prompted Tereshchenko to theorize about the method of collective creation. His brochure Mystetstvo diistva (The Art of Performance), published in Kyiv in 1921, is a unique manifesto of revolutionary avant-garde theatre. In it he stated: ‘The actor of the new proletarian theatre must liberate himself from the oppression of the author, director, designer, and stage technician in order to become a free creator and organizer of his art, just as a worker in communist society transforms himself from a slave of the machine into a master of production. This means that the actor must be a universal artist: an author, director, and everything else required for theatrical spectacle. Not only does the actor free himself through such universality, but the history of theatrical art itself is also radically transformed: the actor becomes a spokesman for his own ideas and moods because he himself creates the action, not merely transmitting what was written by the author or composer, or developed by the director. Such an actor can be a true artist, because he initiates his own tasks rather than expressing the thoughts and images of others, as is customary in all other theatres … In this new theatre the artist will experience his action sincerely and will never speak in false, stereotypical tone.’83 The 1921 composition Nebo horyt (Heaven on Fire), based on poetry by Oleksa Slisarenko, Mykhail Semenko, and Geo Shkurupy, became the Mykhailychenko Theatre’s second collectively created production. The critic Vasyl Vasylenko wrote:

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9.17 Scene from Universal Necropolis, directed by Marko Tereshchenko, design by Vadym Meller

‘Heaven on Fire reflected the vague, symbolic, yet at the time original idea about the unavoidable and imminent destruction of the old world. Collective motion and creation with revolutionary symbolism were used to transform the great expectations of the working masses into theatre by the Mykhailychenko performers. Despite the vivid form and collective mass spectacle, new to Ukrainian theatre, the production failed to captivate the masses. Heaven on Fire only represented an attempt at conveying the mood of the masses at the time. The mass collective spectacle enveloped by a symbolic veil was only the first rung, the first step on the road towards proletarian theatre.’84 The first two compositions of the Mykhailychenko Theatre were developed according to the ‘art of spectacle’ method, and were based on a fixed rhythmic scheme. Performers freely interpreted the individual components of the proposed rhythmical scheme; the director-constructor built the entire theatrical composition from these individual pieces. The spatial construction of the set reflected the rhythmic scheme. Marko Tereshchenko used the method of collective creation in two subsequent productions: Carnival, based on Romain Rolland’s Liluli (see colour plate 12), and The Universal Necropolis, based on Ilia Erenberg’s The Extraordinary Adventures of Julio Jurenita and His Disciples, The Life and Death of Nikolay Kurbov, and Trust D. E. According to Vasylenko, Carnival was first shown on the stage of the Kyiv Opera on 8 September 1923, with a set design by Vadym Meller and score by Mykhailo Verykivsky. This production was the beginning of a second, livelier, period of the Mykhailychenko Theatre. In Carnival, Vasylenko notes, ‘Tereshchenko provided a sharp satire of heaven, saints, and religion by making use of the same “collective method.” But now it was more polished, emphasizing the performance of individual artists … The Universal Necropolis represented the continuation of this trend. Despite its somewhat abstract character, modern life in capitalist Europe was harshly ridiculed through the grotesque … The Mykhailychenko performers depicted modern life intensely. This marked the beginning of a new period.’85 The avant-garde direction in Ukrainian theatre was manifest in the work of Favst Lopatynsky, Hnat Ihnatovych, Borys Tiahno, Vasyl Vasylko, and other colleagues of Les Kurbas, who created a unique school of acting and directing. The

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9.18 Favst Lopatynsky, 1919 (VT)

characteristic features of the theatres in Kyiv of this period were creative experimentation, the struggle of aesthetic trends, the implementation of new artistic methods, and the invention of new theatrical forms. At the beginning of the 1920s the ‘circusized’ theatrical spectacle became one of the most popular stage forms. Kurbas, Lopatynsky, Vasylko, and Igor Terentiev86 used circus elements to rethink the national tradition in Ukrainian theatre. Critic Yury Mezhenko noted: ‘The revolutionary age doesn’t look to tradition. Art today must be without precedents.’87 In Ukraine, classics were ‘rejuvenated’ without substantial alteration of the text, but with the introduction of circus elements: actors swung on trapezes, twisted on horizontal bars, jumped across pummel horses. Favst Lopatynsky’s experiments were particularly successful. Today he is unfortunately little known; after his arrest in 1933 and execution in 1937 his name was erased from Soviet theatre scholarship. However, in 1925 Lopatynsky was recognized as the author of several plays, a theatre and film director, as well as the de facto head of the Berezil while Kurbas was directing films in Odesa. His interpretation of Marko Kropyvnytsky’s classic operetta Poshylys u durni (They Made Fools of Themselves) is one of the most interesting reconsiderations of a classic by a European director of the time. They Made Fools of Themselves opened on 8 November 1924 at the Berezil, which the government had recently relocated to the old Solovtsov Theatre, the best theatre building in Kyiv. Although the text was originally set in a village, circus elements dominated all aspects of this production. The play’s unusual set design was described by theatre critic Petro Rulin: ‘Instead of an inviting meadow there was circus safety net, instead of romantic depiction of girls we had a sharp parody of the stereotypical picturesque dress.’88 Lopanytsky transformed the old village characters into clowns, with clown make-up, grotesque wigs, and bizarre costumes. For example, the young Oryshka (Zina Pihulovych) was dressed in wide breeches (embroidered like ritual cloth) and a corset, with a cap on her head. Kuksa (Iosyp Hirniak) appeared in kozak sharovary (trousers) that were too short for him and ballooned like a skirt. He also had a long curved sword stuck in his sash. Instead of couplets and songs, and lyrical declarations of love, found in the original, Lopatynsky substituted acrobatic movement. This was a very physical show,

266 Hanna Veselovska

9.19 Scene from They Made Fools of Themselves, 1924 (VT)

with somersaults, trapeze work, and clowning replacing the verbal core, the essential part of the original play as traditionally performed.89 The bicycle scene probably best illustrates the production’s satiric, ironic edge. Instead of mounting a horse, as in the original, the miller Kuksa heads off to church on a bicycle, a very expensive and rare item at the beginning of the 1920s. But he rides a child’s tricycle, so that his role as a rich moneyed peasant is instantly ‘lowered,’ physically and metaphorically. A similarly effective satiric twist was used in the third act, where the rivals, Kuksa and Dranko, attempt to deceive one another and head out to different churches. Proletarskaia pravda wrote: ‘The political barbs scattered throughout the play have deep meaning and topicality. They are well chosen, and so successfully embedded into the old text that their introduction does not strain the play. The collision among the supporters of the three churches in a Ukrainian village is presented very sharply, as we’ve never before seen on the Ukrainian stage, but it is justified artistically.’90 The Russian Theatre In addition to the Ukrainian theatres, both Russian and Yiddish-language troupes continued to exist in Kyiv in the middle of the 1920s. Kyiv’s Russian Drama Theatre was a private enterprise, and was not on the list of proletarian collectives. In the fall of 1924 this troupe was forced to abandon its magnificent stage in the Solovtsov

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9.20 Yosyp Hirniak as Kuksa in They Made Fools of Themselves, 1924 (VT)

Theatre,91 and the Berezil Artistic Association was given the premises. The Russian Drama Theatre was assigned the premises of the Shevchenko Theatre (formerly known as the Bergonier Theatre).92 The Kyiv press consistently attacked this privately owned Russian theatre for its backward, pre-Revolutionary repertoire, aesthetically old-fashioned productions, and support for the star system. Surprisingly, this theatre staged The Black Panther and the White Bear by Vynnychenko, a Ukrainian author who was viewed as a petty-bourgeois writer, as well as a political rival in exile. The Russian Drama Theatre also staged Shakespeare, Shaw, and Ostrovsky, as well as plays from the revolutionary repertoire. For example, in March 1924, director Kostiantin Berezhny staged King Coal, a play by Yevgeny Yanovsky based on the novel by Upton Sinclair. The constant official criticism led to the appointment of Alexander Kanin, a student and colleague of Meyerhold, as the theatre’s artistic director. He opened the 1924–5 season with Ernst Toller’s Expressionist drama Broken Brow,93 with Aleksei Kharlamov and Vera Yureneva in the leading roles. The play was a sharp psychological parable about the agony of existence in post-war Europe. According to a contributor for Proletarskaia Pravda, the play presented the problem emphatically: ‘Europe dances the fox-trot, while disemboweled human flesh stares into a noose. That is Toller’s concept, that is his protest.’94 Toller’s intention of revealing and foregrounding the moral and physical suffering succeeded because of Kharlamov’s masterful performance. ‘Kharlamov transferred the focus to Eugene’s personal tragedy … Great technique and a strong temperament allowed Kharlamov to demarcate subtly the boundaries between the social and the personal,’ noted a reviewer.95

268 Hanna Veselovska

9.21 Semen Semdor (YHOD)

Obviously, director Kanin did not employ the devices of Expressionist theatre, since his mass scenes were entirely traditional. According to critical opinion, his use of cabaret ‘did not turn out well. The last act was too long; the dances in the third act were overdone – pitiful, helpless invalids on stage.’96 Although the play received positive reviews in the press, Kanin left Kyiv in February 1925. In addition to disagreements about repertoire, Kanin could not tolerate the unstable position of the Russian theatre in Kyiv and the unfavourable work conditions: ‘the poorly equipped stage of the Bergonier Theatre, the absence of props, decorations, costumes, [and] the limited possibilities of private enterprise.’97 The Yiddish Theatre The Undzer Vinkl Theatre, whose repertoire featured mainly Yiddish-language authors such as Sholem Asch,98 Yakov Gordin, and Isaak Leib Peretz,99 was founded in Kyiv in 1919 under the auspices of the Yiddish section of the All-Ukrainian Theatre Committee. Theatre activist Noah Loiter100 headed the collective with Esther Kaminski, a star well known and celebrated in Europe and the United States as ‘the Yiddish Duse.’ At the beginning of the 1920s other Yiddish-language theatres were established: the First Yiddish Workers’ Theatre, the Kultur-Lige Studio, and the Onoyb (or ‘Beginning,’) Theatre. Onoyb’s troupe, composed of young actors, was led by Semen Semdor, formerly an actor and director in Les Kurbas’s Young Theatre. In 1922–3 there was the Yiddish Volksbühne (People’s Theatre) in the Podil area of Kyiv. Headed by directors Yakov Libert and Yury Rakitin,101 this theatre staged mostly traditional Yiddish plays. In 1922 the Goldfaden Kunst Vinkl Theatre became the first Yiddish-language theatre in Ukraine to have its own permanent house. Leading Russian, Ukrainian, and Yiddish theatre artists worked there, including Marko Tereshchenko (Les Kurbas’s colleague), Aksel Lundin (who had appeared on the stage of the Russian theatre on Bulvarno-Kudriavska Street), as well as Aleksei Smirnov, Liia Bugova, and Lazar Kalmanovych.102 At first Kunst Vinkl Theatre attempted to distance itself from the traditional Yiddish production style, and instead followed leftist avant-garde trends. For

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example, in 1923 Lundin staged the German Expressionist play From Morn to Midnight by Georg Kaiser. The production was conceived as ‘a wheel growing in momentum,’ which corresponded to the Expressionist aesthetics of Kaiser’s play. The production’s set designer, Solomon Zarytsky, remembers its stage design: ‘We introduced fade-outs and fade-ins into the production. On stage we had a screen and a special shutter (like a movie camera). At appropriate moments it opened and closed the scene. The stage was filled with flickering, characteristic of the cinema, which was created by the rotation of the shutter.’103 But according to the press, the concept failed: ‘The play proceeded at a uniform, sluggish tempo. Following the vivid and dynamic prologue, the first scene (the bank robbery) was dull and slow. The second scene (with the Florentine lady) seemed livelier. The uniform pace of other scenes and the absence of a climax made the play boring. Several characters, particularly the cashier and bank director, were straight out of ethnographic theatre. The bank director played by Kalmanovych was a caricature. The role of the cashier was built contrary to all theatrical rules. The extreme, intensely eccentric tension present from the actor’s first appearance eliminated any possibility of growth and character development. Remaining on a single note, the actor failed to draw the audience into the action. Director Lundin and set designer Zarytsky decided to design the stage in a Constructivist style. Some very effective stylized constructs were intermixed with inconvenient and poorly utilized platforms. In addition, the set was changed seven times during the performance. The lighting effects were feeble: darkness was overused, as was the incessant flickering of lights.’104 Epilogue In the 1920s a network of permanent state theatres was established by the government in Ukraine. Later, these theatres would be strictly controlled by the authorities. In Kyiv some theatre collectives ceased to exist, while others were created. Some troupes, it seems, merely changed their names. For instance, the Solovtsov Russian Theatre was nationalized in 1919 and renamed the Lenin Second State Theatre of the Soviet Republic. In 1922 most of the troupe became part of a private enterprise again, only to be re-nationalized and renamed the State Theatre of Russian Drama in 1926. Later this troupe became the Lesia Ukrainka State Theatre of Russian Drama, which exists to this day in Kyiv. The Kunst Vinkl Yiddish Theatre, however, ceased to exist in 1928. At the beginning of the 1920s the Ukrainian Shevchenko and Zankovetska Theatres were forced to leave the city, while Marko Tereshchenko’s collective (Hnat Mykhailychenko Theatre) was ‘reorganized’ and sent off to Odesa in 1925. The government changed its cultural policy in the second half of the 1920s. The policy of Ukrainianization was initiated, while at the same time more controls were imposed on the theatres. From the mid-1920s on, heated discussions took place among theorists of Soviet art concerning the need for a dominant creative method that would determine and regulate the artistic process in the country, to be finally transformed into a single unified creative style. The concrete problems of creative work and the methods of discussing them came under theoretical scrutiny.

270 Hanna Veselovska

By the end of the 1920s, Soviet political and cultural activists created a harshly defined ideological system of control over the theatre. In time, representatives of the Ukrainian theatrical avant-garde began to be physically liquidated, and their achievements were relegated to oblivion. The onslaught of the Stalinist system wiped out the important accomplishments of the Ukrainian, Russian, and Yiddish theatrical avant-garde of Kyiv in the 1920s. By the early 1930s Socialist Realism was the only permissible creative method in art. Translated by Virlana Tkacz

NOTES 1 These include Hnat Iura, Marko Tereshchenko, Vasyl Vasylko, Polina Samiilenko, Polina Niatko, and many other artists, such as the theatre designer Anatolii Petryts’kyi and the Ukrainian poets Pavlo Tychyna and Mykhail Semenko. 2 ‘Tovarystvo na viri,’ or ‘Brotherhood of faith,’ is how the Statutes of the Young Theatre described the organization. This term once was also used for cooperatives. 3 Ivan Marianenko, Les’ Kurbas, Volodymyr Vynnychenko, Liudmyla Staryts’kaCherniakhivs’ka, Oleksandr Oles’, Spyrydon Cherkasenko, Serhii Iefremov, Oksana Steshenko, Fedir Krychevs’kyi, Oleksander Koshyts’, and others. 4 Liubov Linyt’ska (1865–1924), Ukrainian theatre actress. 5 D. Antonovych, ‘Vidkryttia pershoho Ukrains’koho National’noho teatru,’ Robitnycha hazeta, 19 Sept. 1917. 6 Both plays were directed by Hryhorii Haievs’kyi, while the Molière’s play was translated by Volodymyr Samiilenko. 7 The National State Theatre is today’s Zankovets’ka Academic Theatre in Lviv, whose official founding date was long thought to be 1922 when, as the result of a government edict, the Kyiv Troitskii Dom (Troits’kyi Dim) was renamed the Zankovets’ka Theatre. 8 The State Dramatic Theatre is today the T.H. Shevchenko Theatre in Dnipropetrovsk. 9 Panas Saksahans’kyi directed this first Ukrainian production of the play in Kyiv. 10 The theatre opened its season in the fall of 1922 with a production of Hnat Khotkevych’s Hard Times. Saksahans’kyi was again invited to direct the show, to be designed by Ivan Buriachek, with Maria Zankovets’ka, Ivan Mar’ianenko, Severyn Pankivs’kyi, Liubov Linyts’ka, and Varvara Liubart in the cast. 11 Borys Kryzhevets’kyi (1883–1941), Russian theatre director who worked in Ukraine. 12 Teatral’naia zhizn’ 27 (1918) 13. 13 Zamychkovs’kyi, and also Ivan Mar’ianenko, who worked there only several months. 14 It is interesting to note that both directors were Russian. 15 Teatral’naia zhizn’ 34 (1918) 16. 16 Mikahil Mikhailov (1875–1940), Russian theatre designer. 17 Prokhor Kovalenko, Shliakhy na stsenu (Kyiv: Mystetstvo, 1964) 130. 18 Prokhor Kovalenko (1884–1963), Ukrainian actor. Petro Terniuk (1908–82), Ukrainian theatre critic. Running water was rendered by gas as was then the custom. 19 Kultura i zhyttia, 31 July 1988. 20 Ievhen Kuzmin (1862–1942), Kyiv art critic.

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21 Quoted in I. Verykivs’kyi, Stanovlennia ukrains’koi radian’skoi stenohrafii (Kyiv: Mystetsvo, 1981) 64. 22 Aleksandr Zaharov (1877–1941), was born Aleksandr Fessing in Ielysavethrad, Kherson guberinia. He graduated from the Moscow Philharmonic School and worked at the Moscow Art Theatre and Aleksandrinskii Theatre in St Petersburg, before moving to Kyiv. 23 Tsentral’nyi derzhvnyi arkhiv vyshchykh orhaniv vlady Ukrainy (TsDAVO) f. 1429, op. 1, spr 51, ark 113. 24 Kostiantyn Berezhnyi (1891–1928), Russian and Ukrainian theatre director who worked in various theatres in Ukraine in the 1920s. 25 Iu. Kister, ‘Mysli i vpechatleniia,’ Teatral’naia zhizn’ 11 (1918) 11. 26 ‘K postanovke “Khorovoda” Schnitslera,’ Teatral’naia zhizn’ 10 (1918) 17. 27 ‘Bereznyi, K. “Khorovod” – ne pornografia,’ Teatral’naia zhizn’ 13 (1918) 10–11. 28 Kister 11. 29 Director Berezhnyi himself would soon display leftist tendencies. 30 Heorhiy Kryzhyts’kyi (1895–1975), Russian theatre director who worked in Ukraine. 31 Rudolf Lothar (born Rudolf Lothar Spitzer) (1865–1935?) Hungarian-born Austrian writer, playwright, and critic. König Harlekin (King Harlequin), written in 1900, was also known in Russia and Ukraine as The Fool on the Throne. 32 K. R. is the pen name of Konstantin Romanov (1858–1915), Grand Prince, member of the Russian tsar’s family, poet, and playwright. 33 Lev Fenin (1882–1952), Russian actor. 34 H. Kryzhyts’kii, Dorogi teatral’nye (Moscow, 1976) 60. 35 Leonid Luianov (1884–1967), Russian theatre director who worked in Kyiv. 36 Hryhorii Komar (1886–1948), Ukrainian painter and set designer. 37 K. Narodin, ‘Teatral’nye vpechatleniia,’ Teatral’naia zhizn’ 33 (1918) 9–10. 38 Kryzhyts’kii, Vyperedzhaiuchy chas (Kyiv, 1984) 19. 39 Narodin 9–10. 40 This division of stage and off-stage space was new for the audience in Kyiv, but represented a passé, old device for practitioners from the imperial capital, who arrived in the city in 1917–18. 41 Josef Flach born Josef Falenski (1873–1944), Polish critic and theatre historian. 42 Juliusz Osterwa (1885–1947), born Julian Andrzej Maluszek, started as an actor in the Polish theatres of Krakow. He performed in Poznan and Vilnius, and travelled to western Europe before the outbreak of the war. During the First World War, he was deported to Samara, Russia, and then headed the Polish theatre of Moscow, where he met Konstantin Stanislavskii and Aleksandr Tairov. In 1916 Osterwa moved to Kyiv and headed the Polish Theatre, where he directed dramas by Juliusz Słowacki and Stanisław Wyspianski, as well as appearing in Słowacki’s Kordian and The Constant Prince (Ksiaze Niezłomny) and Stefan Zeromiski’s Sulkowski. He left Kyiv in 1918 to work in Warsaw. In 1919 Osterwa created Reduta, Poland’s greatest experimental theatre between the wars. Wincenty Drabik (1877–1963), Polish set designer and painter. 43 Fiodor Komissarzhevskii, Russian director and producer (1874–1954), who worked with his sister Vera, a famous actress. 44 Émile Jaques-Dalcroze (1865–1950), Swiss composer and music educator, who inspired many theatre artists.

272 Hanna Veselovska 45 See M.H. Labins’kyi, ed., Molodyi teatr – heneza, zavdannia, shliakhy (Kyiv: Mystetstvo, 1991) 245. 46 Stanisław Wyspianski (1869–1907), Polish playwright, poet, and painter. 47 Stefan Mokuls’kyi (1896–1960), Ukrainian and Russian theatre historian, author of several books on the history of French theatre. 48 Vesiolaia smert (Happy Death), a play by Nikolai Evreinov, premiered in 1911 in St Petersburg. In 1922 Jacques Copeau staged it in his theatre in Paris. 49 N. Evreinov, ‘Teatr i eshafot: K voprosu o proiskhozhdenii teatra kak publichnogo instituta,’ Mnemozina: Dokumenty i fakty iz istorii russkogo teatru XX–veka, ed. V.V. Ivanov (Moscow: GITIS, 1966) 288. 50 Antonin Artaud would develop the idea of a Theatre of Cruelty in his manifestos, later collected in his famous book The Theatre and Its Double. It is very likely that Artaud became familiar with Evreinov’s ideas in 1921 during his (Artaud’s) work with Charles Dullin’s troupe in Paris, which premiered ‘Naiholovnishe’ (Most Important), one of Evreinov’s most theatricalized works. Starting from the Russian director’s socially functional theory, Artaud searched for theatre of the ‘real human condition and arrived at a new language, the langue of gesture hieroglyphs, which does not have a certain hidden meaning but is its essence thanks to its naturalness and archetypical nature.’ 51 The State Musical Drama Theatre was the first Ukrainian musical theatre. It was housed in the Second City Theatre erected in 1912. The building does not exist today. 52 The theatre had an artistic council, consisting of Mykhailo Bahrynovs’kyi, Mykhailo (Mikhail) Bonch-Tomashevs’kyi, Semen Butovs’kyi, Les’ Kurbas, Stepan Bondarchuk, and Iakiv Stepovyi. Because many names were hushed up during the Soviet era, it is not surprising that theatrical historians started to attribute the staging of Lysenko’s The Drowned to Les Kurbas, although it was actually directed by Bonch-Tomashevs’kyi. This was the premiere production and opened the theatre on 28 July. 53 Cited in Iurii Stanishevs’kyi, Rezhysura v ukrains’komu radians’komu opernomu teatri (Kyiv, 1973) 97. 54 D. Dontsov, ‘Shchodennyk 1918,’ Khronika 2000 (Kyiv) 19–20 (1997) 276. 55 Evreinov’s production, called The Tsarina, was based on Salome. 56 The production, entitled The Dance of the Seven Veils, was to open at the Mikhailovskii Theatre, with a design by Leon Bakst and dance numbers, by Mikhail Fokine, to be performed by Ida Rubinstein. 57 Volodymyr Tatishchev (born Volodymyr Harting) (1874–1934), Russian theatre director and designer. Sandro Akhmeteli, born Aleksandr Akhmetelashvili (1886– 1937), considered the best Georgian theatre director, headed the Shota Rustaveli Theatre in Tbilisi, Georgia from 1926 to 1935. He was executed during Stalin’s purges in 1937. 58 TsDAVO f. 1738, op. 1, spr 42, ark 1. 59 Ibid. 60 S. Iutkevich, ‘Iz nenapisanykh memuarov,’ Panorama iskusstv (Moscow) 11 (1988) 77. 61 Ie. Kuzmin: ‘Salomeia,’ Zori 1 (1919) 41. 62 Ibid. 63 Natale Tamara (1873–1934), Russian operetta actress. 64 No further information is available about this Kyiv actress.

Kyiv’s Multicultural Theatrical Life, 1917–1926 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72

73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98

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TsDAVO f. 1738, op. 1, spr 42, ark 1, 2. Kuzmin, ‘Salomeia’ 41. Lev Nikulin (1891–1967), Russian writer. Iutkevich 79. K. Redko, Dnevniki. Vospominaniia. Stat’i, comp. V. Kostin (Moscow: 1974) 48–50. There is no evidence that the event actually took place. L. Nikulin, Zapisky sputnika (Leningrad, 1932) 35. According to Teffi’s memoirs, the café represented a unique continuation of Petersburg’s celebrated cafes ‘The Wandering Dog’ and ‘The Musician’s Rest Stop.’ See N.A. Teffi, Zhyt’io-byt’io. Rasskazy. Vospominaniia (Moscow, 1991) 310–11. TsDAVO f. 1738, op. 1, spr 6, ark 1. Emanuil Herman (born Emil Krotkii 1892–1963), Russian poet and parodist. Iutkevich 78. S. Bondarchuk, ‘‘‘Molodyi teatr.” Chomu ia vziavsia za pero?’ in Labins’kyi 161. Volodymyr Koriak (born Vol’ko Bliumshteyn), Orhanizatsia Zhovtnevoii literatury (Kharkiv, 1925) 236–7. Dmytro Zahul, Volodymyr Iaroshenko, Volodymyr Kobylians’kyi, Vasyl’ Chumak, Vasyl’ Ellan-Blakytnyi, and others. M. Tereshchenko, Kriz let chasu (Kyiv, 1974) 16. Iu. Mezhenko, ‘Teatr Mykhailychenkiv,’ Chervonyi shliakh 9 (1923) 163–4. M. Irchan, ‘Pershyi budynok novoho svitu,’ TsDAVO f. 2189, op. 1, spr 35, ark 51. Tereshchenko 8–9. Cited by Ia. Mamontov, ‘Suchasnyi teatr v ioho osnovnykh napriamkakh,’ Nove mystetstvo 22 (1926) 2–3. Vasyl’ Vasylenko, ‘Shliak “Mykhailychenkivtsiv,”’ Hlobus 10 (1925) 235. Ibid. Igor Terentiev (1892–1939), Russian theatre director who worked in Ukraine in 1929–30. Iurii Mezhenko, ‘Na shliakhakh do novoi teorii,’ Chervonyi shliakh 2 (1923) 203. Petro Rulin, ‘Berezil v rokakh 1922–1932’ (Berezil in the years 1922–1932), Zhyttia i revolutsiia (Kyiv) 11–12 (November–December 1931) 102–22. Iosyp Hirniak, Spomyny [Memoirs], ed. Bohdan Boichuk (New York: Suchasnist, 1982). ‘Premera “Poshylys u durni” v Khudozhestvennom obedynenii “Berezil,”’ Proletarskaia Pravda, 5 Nov. 1924. It was called the Lenin Theatre in the 1920s. Ironically, the Solovtsov’s troupe had first played in Kyiv in 1891 at the Bergonier Theatre. The play was originally called Hinkemann in German; the title of the Ukrainian translation was Evhen Neshchasnyi or Unfortunate Eugene. Bis. [pseud.], Proletarskaia Pravda, 23 Oct. 1924. Ibid. Ibid. See L. Khodorovskaia and A. Klynchyn, Put’ rezhyssiora. A. I. Kanin. 1877–1953 (Moscow, 1962). Sholem Asch (1880–1957), Polish-born novelist and dramatist in the Yiddish language who lived in the USA from 1910.

274 Hanna Veselovska 99 Isaak Leib Peretz (1852–1915), modernist Yiddish-language author and playwright. 100 Noah Loiter (1890–1966), theatre director. 101 Iakov Libert (1874–1946), actor who worked in Yiddish theatres in Kyiv. Iurii Rakitin (1882–1952), Russian actor and theatre director who briefly worked in Ukraine and later in Belgrade. 102 Oleksii Smirnov (1890–1942), Russian theatre director who, at times, worked in Ukraine. Liia Bugova (born Liia Feldsher, 1900–81), Russian Yiddish actress who worked in Ukraine. Lazar Kalmanovych (1883–1946), Ukrainian Yiddish actor. 103 S.M. Zaryts’kyi, Roky pratsi i zustrichei/ /Kriz’ kinoob’iektyv chasu: Spohady veteraniv Ukrains’koho kino (Kyiv: Mystetstvo, 1970) 305. 104 Ian. [pseud.], ‘Kaisera “Z ranku do pivnochi” Ievteatr Kunst-Vinkl,’ Barykady teatru 2–3 (1923) 17.

PART THREE ‘Fire and Motion’

KIEV/KYIV/KɂÏB/KɂEB/KIJÓW/ʥʥʲʩ ʷ

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In the Orchestra of the Cosmos (excerpt) I Blessed be Matter and space, number and measure! Blessed be colour, timbre, and fire, Fire, the major note of the universe, Fire and motion, fire and motion! Pavlo Tychyna, In the Orchestra of the Cosmos (1921)

Translated from the Ukrainian by Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipps

10 Towards a New Vision of Theatre: Les Kurbas’s Work at the Young Theatre in Kyiv virlana tkacz

Les Kurbas arrived in Kyiv in March of 1916. He was twenty-nine years old and he had great expectations.1 As a resident of Western Ukraine and a citizen of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he was travelling into a new land; but as a Ukrainian he was stepping into the heartland – the city of Kyiv. By 1925 Kurbas would make the city his own, re-shaping the vision of Ukrainian theatre and becoming its most important figure. Here we will examine his work at the Molodyi teatr (Young Theatre) in Kyiv from 1917 to 1919, which was the first step in the process. Kurbas’s work with the Young Theatre culminated in a series of productions that explored the possibility of a theatre inherently related to the ground-breaking work of Bronislava Nijinska in dance, as well as that of Alexandra Exter and Kazimir Malevich in the visual arts. In this chapter we will look at the formation of the Young Theatre and those productions that helped Kurbas crystallize this new vision of theatre. Kurbas came to Kyiv in 1916 to play the leading romantic roles in Mykola Sadovsky’s Theatre, the most prestigious Ukrainian theatre of the time. Appearing in such roles as Khlestakov in Gogol’s Inspector General, Kurbas quickly became one of the company’s most popular actors. But he already dreamed of creating a new Ukrainian theatre. Soon Kurbas met other young theatre artists who were equally dissatisfied with the work of the Sadovsky Theatre. Their critique of Sadovsky’s Theatre was not unique, but reflected a major division in the theatrical world of Europe and was the result of a shift in the definition of theatre. In the early part of the nineteenth century the stars were the centres of the productions. Plays were cut or rewritten to fit their demands, and staged to highlight their performances. A production was often interrupted by applause after the star’s solo, and well-received sections were even repeated. Ukrainian theatrical troupes continued this aesthetic well into the twentieth century. This was an actor’s theatre – theatre as virtuoso individual performances. Most of the productions of the Sadovsky Theatre were entrenched in this definition of theatre and its resulting aesthetic. The general trend in nineteenth-century Europe, however, had been towards ever-greater realism and integration of production elements with an emphasis on the text. In the last decade of the century the new independent theatre introduced the idea of treating the proscenium space as the fourth wall of the room portrayed

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10.1 Les Kurbas, 1919

on stage. The actors were to behave on stage as if in real life and were to lose the awareness of the audience. Although this theatre developed the director and ensemble acting, these were used to serve the text and to help create the illusion of reality. This was really a playwright’s theatre – theatre as a play text brought to life on stage by an ensemble. Although the Sadovsky Theatre introduced longer rehearsals and work with the ensemble, it still primarily depended on the individual virtuoso performances. The actors who had spent most of their careers restricted to playing in village musicals and melodramas seemed awkward in the plays of Lesia Ukrainka and Volodymyr Vynnychenko, whose texts, like the new realistic drama of Europe, demanded a shift in approach from the reproduction of conventionalized external reality to the creation of a specific environment or milieu to support psychological explorations of character in a theatre of conversation. These problems served as a catalyst for the formation of a drama section at the Lysenko Musical Institute in Kyiv. Although it provided the only formal theatrical training in Ukraine, the school at first had little impact on established theatrical life. The newly trained actors had no choice but to work in the old troupes. Two months after he arrived in Kyiv, Kurbas met with a group of former Lysenko students and proposed that they establish a studio dedicated to theatrical innovation. They decided to study new trends in art and began preparatory work on Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. As actor Yosyp Hirniak notes: ‘At the time, neither Kurbas nor the talented young group had any clear, concretely drawn creative project or plan.

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They only possessed the zeal and the desire to find the way to a new form of expression in the theatre. The Revolution of 1917 overtook this work.’2 With the fall of the Russian empire, the imperial restrictions on Ukrainian culture ceased to exist. Kurbas left the Sadovsky Theatre and helped organize a national committee of theatre workers. He also joined the editorial board of a new theatrical journal, Teatralni visti (Theatrical News). There, in a review of an ethnographic production which noted that the young actors were unfamiliar with the manners of the village, Kurbas wrote: ‘Yesterday I understood that we have a new young generation that will create the new theatre.’3 Several months later,4 the members of Les Kurbas’s theatre studio would officially open their new theatre and create the basis for a revolution in Ukrainian theatre. The Formation of the Young Theatre and the First Season In September 1917 Kurbas and his actors organized themselves formally as the Molodyi teatr (Young Theatre). At its inception the Young Theatre was unlike any other theatre in Ukraine. Most of the actors were graduates of a theatre institute. The group wrote an artistic manifesto and Kurbas published an article introducing the group’s goals to the general public.5 The goal of the Young Theatre Association in Kyiv is to create and bring to life those forms of theatrical art which can express the artistic individuality of the contemporary young generation of Ukrainian actors who are not ‘Ukrainophiles,’ but are part of a national form of European culture that rejects the banal traditions of Ukrainian theatre and will create its own values, especially in the art of acting, without being merely a provincial manifestation of other cultures.6

The group wanted to present a new reality on stage – the life and concerns of the new urban Ukrainians, who saw themselves as Europeans. This was to be a revolution in Ukrainian theatre in terms of art, not politics: ‘Art is not created for external purposes; its purpose exists in itself, in the reason for its creation. Theatre exists because the actor must have a place in which to express his artistic individuality.’7 The group agreed that style was primary in art; that, in the theatre, style determines the form of gesture, voice, tone, and rhythm of a production.8 At the same time, the group did not support any particular stylistic trend. Kurbas directed four of the five productions that season and each was an experiment in a different style. While rehearsing a play, the actors would study the history and theories of its particular style, presenting the play only when they felt that they had explored all of its possibilities.9 The season opened on 24 September 191710 with a psychologically realistic play, Vynnychenko’s The Black Panther and the White Bear. Kurbas directed the show and performed the leading part of an artist who is forced to choose between his art and the welfare of his family. The press reaction was encouraging. Dmytro Antonovych, a leading theatre critic, noted:

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10.2 Scene from Young Theatre’s production of Volodymyr Vynnychenko’s The Black Panther and the White Bear. Les Kurbas in the centre

We must admit that we came to this theatre’s first production with a very heavy heart. We remembered … a very strong production of Black Panther by a Russian-language theatre in Kyiv. But this first show proved that the Young Theatre is competent, and can not only survive comparison with other theatres, but actually surpasses them in terms of art. We can now say without hesitation that no other Ukrainian theatre has produced such a strong show this year … The troupe’s achievement is not found in individual performances, but in the tone and verve of the entire production, something very unusual for the Ukrainian theatre.11

Then Antonovych added: ‘It seems this is not an actor’s theatre, but we won’t pin a label on this group so early in the game.’12 Vynnychenko’s play required that the company bring the text to life through ensemble acting and foreground its psychological explorations. The Young Theatre’s first production obviously succeeded in terms of the definition of theatre it embraced. (See Mayhill Fowler’s discussion of Black Panther at the Solovtsev in her essay in this volume.) Several weeks later, on 15 October 1917, Kurbas directed the second show – Max Halbe’s Youth, a German play he had translated. The critic for Robitnycha hazeta, noted: ‘You wonder how it is that these artists, who have never seen West European life and the Western European stage, can give as accurate a portrayal as we witnessed yesterday. This is the achievement of the director and at the same time it points to the undeniable talent of the actors.’13 The second show reinforced the collective’s mastery of the definition of theatre it had championed. The group was also finding an audience in Kyiv that wanted to see a ‘Europeanized’ Ukrainian theatre.14

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10.3 Les Kurbas and Olimpia Dobrovolska in Max Halbe’s Youth

10.4 Olimpia Dobrovolska in Autumn, from Evening of Études by Oleksander Oles

Kurbas’s next production, the lyrical and symbolic Evening of Études, by the Ukrainian poet Oleksander Oles,15 was the most stylized presentation of the Young Theatre’s first season. Although Oles’s lyrical poems were highly regarded, many felt that his short dramatic scenes, known as études, were impossible to stage.16 Kurbas showed that this could be done. Kurbas stressed the musicality and rhythm in the études he staged.17 Polina Samiilenko, an actress at the Young Theatre who did not take part in this production, described her reaction: I sat as if listening to an unknown symphony; you cannot yet comprehend it, nor can you tear yourself away. Kurbas built Oles’s études on a fine sense of inner rhythm, not so much on [the rhythm] of the poetic language (the études are laconic) as on the rhythm of unspoken thoughts and feelings. He demanded from the actors an almost musical harmony of gestures and movements.18

Aware that he was exploring virgin territory for Ukrainian theatre, Kurbas decided to introduce his audiences to the new ideas. Before the premiere performance, he appeared on stage dressed as a Harlequin and explained: ‘The symbol is not in the characters or in the external action, but in what exists in between the lines – in that which forces us to fall silent and listen to the echo of eternity. The symbol exists in what is created between the characters, in what moves us, this is what the author wants.’19 Kurbas was informing his audience that the task of the theatre had shifted – the actors and director now served the text (and what the author wanted), not by helping to create the illusion of reality, but by creating another reality, an inner reality on stage. According to Kurbas, this inner reality had to be expressed through the ‘rhythm and intonations, movement and gesture, feelings and poses, light and shadows.’20

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10.5 Anatol Petrytsky

The visual design for the Evening of Études supported this shift in direction. Kurbas had found a designer, Anatol Petrytsky, who understood his approach.21 Petrytsky’s design for the Evening of Études was unlike anything previously seen on the Ukrainian stage: ‘ He decisively broke with the traditional one-room set. For the étude Autumn he created a snow-covered window; the outline of its frame melted into the winter’s night haze. And for The Dance of Life he used a backdrop with a linear pattern.’22 The lighting was particularly important in conveying the mood of the show: When the curtain opened, the audience could make out two objects in the dark. In the centre stood a large window lit by moonlight. To the left there was a suggestion of a redglowing fireplace. Otherwise, the stage was dark. The actors entered into the light cast by either source or at their intersection. Afterwards they would retreat into the darkness. The characters were often seen only in silhouette, not fully lit. The mise-en-scènes were built so that the actors entered the light as the situation or the dialogue required.23

The young ensemble was praised by the press. Dmytro Antonovych wrote: The Young Theatre showed us totally new pieces, for the first time attempting to present Oles’s Symbolist plays in a Symbolist tone … It is inappropriate to mention individual performances – as such they did not exist – rather, this was a unified collaboration [created by] a group of actors and especially by the director. One must admit that Kurbas managed to breathe a living soul into Oles’s generalized symbols.24

In his production of Oles’s Études, Kurbas was redefining theatre for both his actors and his audience as theatre that could present an inner reality on stage. This production would become the first step in his search for a new vision of theatre. The political situation in Kyiv became highly volatile that winter and the government changed hands several times in the spring. Still, the Young Theatre managed to open two more productions: Thought, directed by Hnat Yura, which was not marked by any experimentation, and Kurbas’s production of Jerzy ĩuławski’s

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Ijola, a tragic love story set during the time of the Inquisition. Polina Samiilenko, who played the title role, describes Kurbas’s preparatory work with her: Kurbas would go with me to the library, find the paintings of Goya, and show me his portraits, as well as the Los Caprichos etchings [depicting scenes of witchcraft and sorcery intermingled with social satire] … The atmosphere created by the Inquisition in which the heroine lived started to haunt me. Kurbas knew how to awaken our fantasy so that we could find the seed for the image of the role.25

Kurbas translated the mystical, impressionistic Polish verse play, directed it, and played the leading role.26 He greatly admired Juliusz Osterwa, the Polish actor who had created this part.27 Samiilenko mentions that it was during these rehearsals that Kurbas started saying that the actors needed to create an image based on a certain idea.28 Stepan Bondarchuk agreed with Samiilenko: ‘What was essential in the previous productions Kurbas directed was the way he composed the rhythm of the show, but during our work on Ijola we first started working on building the physical outline of an artistic image.’29 The play opened on 12 April 1918 and was the last production of the season.30 Dmytro Antonovych again wrote the major review for Robitnycha hazeta: ‘On the whole the production was interesting, and in moments even captivating, but in no way was it satisfying or complete … It would be very good if the Young Theatre did not stop working on this play, but continued to polish some scenes and rework others.’31 The review cut Kurbas to the quick. He handed in his resignation, but the members of the theatre refused to accept it.32 Throughout the season the actors continued training in their studio. Aware of their own limitations, they hired outsiders, teachers who conducted classes in movement, aesthetics, fencing, and voice. Acting, however, was taught by Kurbas.33 In his acting classes Kurbas introduced the actors to the notion of mimetic presentation of a role, stressing the importance of finding the right gesture. He opposed acting based on impulse and emotionalism, insisting that the actors learn to fix a role, that is, be able to repeat their choices exactly.34 A contemporary article about the Young Theatre mentions that the group was studying the systems of gestures developed by François Delsarte and Émile Jaques-Dalcroze.35 Delsarte approached acting scientifically to develop an elaborate analysis of the way that various parts of the body communicate emotions and ideas.36 Dalcroze, by contrast, stressed the importance of rhythm and moving to music.37 It seems that Kurbas used these studies to develop two important aspects of his actor training system: one stressed the importance of gesture and the visual image to communicate ideas, while the other emphasized the importance of movement to music. In the alternating tension between these two approaches, Kurbas would find his way towards a new vision of theatre. Kurbas was also leading his company towards another shift in its definition of theatre. In the early part of the twentieth century the new art theatre movement, led by the English director and designer Edward Gordon Craig,38 rejected the idea that the purpose of theatre was to illustrate theatre texts or mimic reality. The new

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art theatre movement would develop the idea that the theatre was the production – the series of stage images created by the director. These images were to embody the director’s concept of the play and would become the focus for twentiethcentury theatre criticism. This was a director’s theatre. The ideas of the new art movement in theatre soon rang clear in Kurbas’s declarations. By October 1918 Kurbas would write in his article ‘Teatralnyi lyst’ (Theatrical Letter): Realism, even when not fully practised is the most anti-artistic expression of our time. It has gained control of the theatre and is paralysing its every creative attempt … Gesture has died, the word has died, elements through which the actors display their art have died, and what remains is a chaotic deadly ‘lifelikeness’ for the presentation and illustration of literary sentiments and grimaces.39

These passages are very similar in tone and content to Craig’s attacks on realism, which he opposed as ‘the blunt statement of life, something everybody misunderstands, while recognizing.’40 He felt that ‘Realism is only Exposure, whereas Art is Revelation.’41 Realistic acting had turned the actor into an artless imitator: ‘[Actors] must create for themselves a new form of acting, consisting for the main part of symbolic gesture. Today they impersonate and interpret; tomorrow they must represent and interpret; and the third day they must create. By this means style may return.’42 The solutions Kurbas proposed are also reminiscent of the new theories. To renew itself, the theatre would have to renounce the dominance of literature and return to its source: theatre. Kurbas declared that ‘the substance of theatre is not literature, but gesture and sound,’43 and that ‘actors and directors who discard the tyranny of literature and give prominent place to the other arts will create the renewal of the theatre out of its own elements.’44 In his ‘Theatrical Letter’ Kurbas also declared that the creation of ‘the style of our time … is the first and most important postulate that excites contemporary art, or rather its creators.’45 Kurbas admitted he was still searching for this style, but proposed two promising avenues for exploration. The first, Kurbas felt, was Symbolism, ‘which arises from a purely theatrical phenomenon [and] promises us a future of unprecedented manifestations.’46 This judgment was based on Kurbas’s own experience, since his work on Oles’s symbolist études was his first step towards a new vision of theatre. Traditionally, the director had been expected to organize a production and perform its leading role. The result was that he had total control over the interpretation of the leading role and a profound influence on the other performers, but was deprived of the distance required for conceptual control of the entire stage picture. The Young Theatre’s first two productions remained well within the frame of literal textual illustration, departing from accepted practice only in rhythm, not in the conceptual interpretation of a play’s text. Oles’s études could not succeed on those terms. The director had to interpret these pieces theatrically, to create them in visual terms. For the first time, Kurbas

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10.6 Young Theatre rehearses the movements of the chorus for Oedipus Rex

found a designer, Anatol Petrytsky, who could work from a director’s concept instead of just illustrating the place of action required by the text. Concern with the visual design of a production was an essential aspect of the new theories of theatre. It is no coincidence that the major proponents of new art movement in theatre were all themselves designers, director-designers, or directors who worked with strong designers.47 Kurbas’s experience in directing an open-ended text such as the études and his work with Petrytsky opened a new field of vision for him. It was from this experience that Kurbas developed his enthusiasm for Symbolism ‘arising from a purely theatrical phenomenon.’48 The second direction Kurbas suggested in his ‘Theatrical Letter’ was a return to the classics: ‘The movement towards Greece and Shakespeare [filtered] through our own experience is a movement so far unsuccessful because it is understood only in terms of literature. But it is a true movement that eventually will find the correct path.’49 One of the main reasons for this suggestion was that Kurbas had already begun such an exploration himself. The Young Theatre was working on a production of Oedipus Rex that would open in the autumn, and Kurbas was hoping to stage Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.50 Although Symbolism and a return to the classics were promising directions to explore, Kurbas felt that neither would actually constitute the new style. ‘Somewhere between these two poles wanders the synthesis, the style of our time, the basis of its forms.’51 Kurbas did hazard some guesses as to the form that the style of the time might take in the near future: ‘Perhaps there will be almost no

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words … Perhaps what will replace them will be the wealth of primitive sound. Perhaps the theatre of improvisation will be reborn.’52 In these speculations Kurbas accurately predicted his own explorations in the next several years. And, as we saw, he was already preparing his actors to focus on the skills that would help them perform beyond words. The actors of the Young Theatre continued their studies on the creation of images and developing their sense of movement during the summer of 1918 when the troupe travelled to Odesa.53 On their return to Kyiv, Kurbas’s workshops in acting focused almost exclusively on the creation of visual images to the extent of excluding language:54 ‘We did études or mimodramas [mimed exercises without words] … on various themes and prepared monologues without using words. Polina Samiilenko worked on Lady Macbeth’s monologue, Olympia Dobrovolska chose Juliet.’55 At the same time, the actors immersed themselves in the study of movement. The Young Theatre now had classes three times a week with Mikhail Mordkin, one of the great ballet dancers of international acclaim,56 who found himself in Kyiv sharing a space with the Young Theatre. (See Maria Ratanova’s essay for a discussion of Mordkin’s work.) Stepan Bondarchuk, a member of the Young Theatre, observed: ‘Work with Mikhail Mordkin inspired us with its originality, temperament and grand sense of plastic form. The exercises were not the standard classical ones we knew, nor were they the usual academic dances. Rather you could call them creative études. Mordkin would ‘sing’ with his beautiful body to music, and we would try to do the same.’57 Kurbas’s emphasis on the creation of images and the company’s work on movement with Mordkin would shape the actors’ performances in the second season. They also prepared the troupe to embrace a new vision of theatre. The Second Season at the Young Theatre The Young Theatre’s second season was more ambitious than the first and included twice as many productions.58 Here we will focus only on the four productions that propelled the group towards a new vision of theatre. The season opened on 16 November 1918 with Oedipus Rex by Sophocles, the first Ukrainian production of an ancient Greek play. The group had first come together in 1916 to research this play. They spent months studying various facets of classical Greek culture. Their fascination with Greek art ‘was shared by the avant-garde [throughout Europe] at the beginning of the century,’ and ‘reflected trends in philosophy and anthropology … Philosophers from Nietzsche to Ernst Cassirer were asserting that ‘primitive’ or mythical thought, which understood experience in terms of pre-logical images, was superior to the scientific rationalism of contemporary Western civilization.’59 One of the most famous artists who turned to the Greeks was, of course, Isadora Duncan, who created her own imagined Greek style of dance that became known throughout Europe as ‘the new dance.’60 Edward Gordon Craig, who was Duncan’s great love, also turned to classical Greek art for inspiration, as had such artists as Delsarte and Dalcroze. They all hoped to find renewal in pre-logical images and fundamental forms.

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10.7 Les Kurbas as Oedipus, Vira Shchepanska as Jocasta, and Volodymyr Leontovych as Creon

Like other artists, Kurbas pursued the fundamental elements of drama. Choosing one of the oldest dramatic texts, he also emphasized the oldest elements within it. The chorus, believed to be the original theatrical device, had its origins in the group of dancers in masks who sang and danced during religious rituals. Bondarchuk wrote that the chorus was the main character of Kurbas’s production.61 By emphasizing the movements of the chorus, Kurbas was stressing the original aspects of this primal form of drama. Since Kurbas studied in Vienna and is said to have participated in a crowd scene in Reinhardt’s Oedipus Rex, various theatre scholars have stressed Reinhardt’s influence on Kurbas. But the photographs of the production reveal that Kurbas’s chorus had more in common with the dancerly movements of Duncan or Dalcroze, rather than the dramatic mass effects Max Reinhardt sought. Alexandr Deich, who lectured on the history of the theatre at the Young Theatre, likened the movements of the chorus to the new ballets of Mikhail Mordkin.62 This similarity was hardly accidental, since Mordkin, as we saw, taught movement at the Young Theatre at the time. Kurbas’s links to the world of dance and the influence it had on his productions have been underestimated. A careful look at the second season reveals that movement and the ideas prevalent among avant-garde dancers and visual artists were essential to Kurbas’s productions of this period and would thrust him forward in his quest for abstraction in theatre. Movement was certainly central to the production of Oedipus Rex. Describing the Young Theatre’s show, Dmytro Antonovych noted that ‘the interest of the production was not in individual performances, but in the mass scenes, especially the chorus. Most impressive were the pictorial and sculptural groupings … and their harmonious … movements.’63

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10.8 Chorus in Oedipus Rex

In a review Yakiv Savchenko described in detail the movement and the concept of Kurbas’s Oedipus Rex: The chorus harmoniously joins every rhythm with an appropriate gesture. That is to say, every musical note has a musical gesture. This is the tone of the entire show. On the whole the chorus with its beautiful gestures and movement creates a deep, aesthetically unforgettable impression, and in fact continuously holds the spectator in a state of tension. The tragedy and the individual characters are secondary; they appear as colourful fragments in the music of the action. The audience does not see the tragedy. On stage something else is taking place: the music of words, the music of gesture, the music of human souls over which tragedy has spread its dark wings.64

If Savchenko is correct and if movement created the tension on stage, then movement was indeed the source of drama in Kurbas’s production. Savchenko also noted: ‘The chorus does not act alone. It accompanies the tragedy of Oedipus and the characters of the play, becoming the rhythmical echo of their experiences, and their souls; it’s as if through music [the chorus] reveals the depths of their suffering and their unending grief.’65 Kurbas’s use of the chorus to echo emotions and Oedipus’s thoughts perhaps make this his first experiment with the use of the chorus to embody the inner life of a main character, something that he would develop so successfully in Jimmie Higgins a few years later. Kurbas’s use of the chorus would be an important step towards breaking down the illusion of reality on stage. It would help him present many aspects of a single interior moment and can be related to Picasso’s multi-focal portraits or Alexandra Exter’s fractured landscapes.

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10.9 Hnat Yura and Yona Shevchenko as the shepherds, Les Kurbas as Oedipus

Kurbas also used the chorus in Oedipus Rex to create the most memorable image in the show. Antonovych noted that ‘towards the end, the men in the chorus roared like thousands on a great plain, and then the entire chorus … created the impression of a single multi-headed organism.’66 Thus, at the end, Kurbas used the chorus to create the image of a beast, very much like the sphinx that was terrorizing the city at the beginning of the story. If the chorus was a reflection of Oedipus’s inner life, then the director was implying that by the end of the play Oedipus’s inner life was the beast terrorizing the city of Thebes. We can say that Kurbas staged the play that has often been called the perfect drama as a movement piece with a powerful visual image created by the chorus that expressed the essence of his interpretation of the play. By creating images that would express his interpretation, Kurbas was taking the first steps towards becoming a modern theatre artist – a conceptual director. In so doing he was also requiring his actors to shift their objective. The focus for the actors would now become the creation of images in motion that reflected a specific inner reality instead of mimicking the external behaviour of the individuals. To help the actors shift their focus to the conscious creation of images Kurbas turned to theatrical conventions from the past. During the second season he chose plays from different periods that required special approaches to stylization. Vasyl Vasyko noted: ‘Every time Kurbas chose a new play, we would enter into a new unknown world. A new page of theatre culture would reveal itself to us; a new way of recreating life.’67 Less than a month after the production of Oedipus Rex, on 12 December 1918, the Young Theatre presented the only comedy Kurbas would ever stage.68 In his

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10.10 Chorus reacts to the news the servant brings

production of Franz Grillparzer’s Woe to the Liar!, a witty Austrian verse comedy, Kurbas had his actors use the techniques of the commedia dell’arte,69 a theatrical convention that differed both in time and place from the play’s script. The actors of the commedia dell’arte improvised their lines according to a scenario, but at the heart of the production were the various lazzi (bits of comic business) and the displays of acrobatic skills that stopped the flow of time in the show and gave focus to the performer. At the turn of the century many modern artists had turned to the commedia dell’arte because it introduced a carnival sense of time, during which anything could happen. By introducing various lazzi and acrobatic tricks into a scripted text, Kurbas was foregrounding the performers and the theatrical devices over the characters they played and the flow of the narrative. That is to say, the emphasis in this production was on the performer with his abstracted mask-like make-up as he displayed his virtual skills, rather than on the character absorbed in the action of the play. Kurbas’s use of these techniques in his production of Woe to the Liar! proved popular with the audience and also with the actors, at least partly because it allowed them to exhibit their skills as performers. The set Anatol Petrysky created for the show was also very engaging. Leaving most of the stage floor space free for the actors’ improvisations, Petrytsky painted the most imaginative set he would create at the Young Theatre. The reviewers praised Kurbas’s direction and Petrysky’s set: Fantastically drawn colourful trees, giant keys, houses smaller than a human foot, fish in the river, an enigmatic forest – all these were very appropriate and reflected the unreality of much in this play. The performances were sustained and graceful. One felt the strong hand of a director uniting all the performers in pursuit of one artistic goal.70

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10.11 Les Kurbas, Vasyl Vasylko in Franz Grillparzer’s Woe to the Liar

While the actors enjoyed displaying their skills in this show, they were also being introduced to a very important new way of looking at their task on stage. Yona Shevchenko, then an actor at the Young Theatre and later one of the most respected theatre critics, would write: ‘It was at the Young Theatre that our understanding of the real essence, the real nature of theatre first appeared; [it was] the understanding of theatre as a game, and the productions that point to this are Woe to the Liar! and Vertep [the puppet Nativity Play].’71 However, not every show that stressed the nature of theatre as game was popular with all the actors of the Young Theatre. Some did not readily accept the director’s new dominant role in a production and wanted to retain their old prerogative as the interpreters of a text; they felt that strong directorial concepts were limiting them. The split in the collective grew as Kurbas moved away from using traditional plays for his productions and exploded when the text he chose was not even written for human actors. The vertep was a traditional Nativity puppet play that included both sacred and secular scenes staged in a two-storey puppet house.72 In the first part, the Nativity scene takes place on the top floor, while scenes with King Herod take place on the lower floor. After Herod’s first scene with the Three Kings on the lower level, a star lights up on the very top of the puppet house and the action immediately is transferred to the upper level, where the Three Kings present their gifts.73 The jump from the lower level to the upper is an instantaneous jump in time and space which feels very modern, very cinematic. This type of jump was possible because the vertep never attempted to create an illusion of reality. Time was abstract here and space was symbolic. The jump was from the mundane to the spiritual, from the evil to the blessed. Such types of moments were exactly what attracted modern artists to folk art. Here the possibilities of art beyond realism were revealed. (Some of these points are discussed by Dmytro Horbachov and Myroslava Mudrak in this volume.)

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10.12 Traditional Nativity puppet house

The second part of the vertep was totally unrelated to the first. In the only transitional connection, the Old Man remarked: ‘Oh Granny, we have lived to see the time when Herod is no more.’74 The relationship to time was abstract; it seemed as if Herod died yesterday, but the action took place in a Ukrainian village. Space was also not realistically depicted. Despite the village setting, Herod’s throne remained on stage throughout the second part, and at one point a goat even hid behind it.75 The central character of the second part was the Zaporozhets, a Ukrainian warrior from the sixteenth to eighteenth century, that is, contemporary with the vertep text. Most of the scenes in the second part consisted of his confrontations with various stock village characters that end either with a dance or a fight. The scenes of the second part were not connected to each other, except by the presence of the Zaporozhets and the movement of the puppets in rhythm to the folk songs. The puppet play ended with a scene in which a peasant donated a pig to the local school and then there were appeals to the audience for donations. The critic Alexandr Deich considered Kurbas’s production of the Vertep to be one of the best at the Young Theatre and Kurbas would concur, later listing it as one of his best productions with the group. But the Vertep was very unpopular with some of the actors of the Young Theatre, who blamed one person for Kurbas’s decreasing interest in them as actors: Edward Gordon Craig, who had become a

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10.13 Traditional puppet representing King Herod

10.14 Traditional puppet representing Death

bête noir among actors throughout Europe. The theatrical world was scandalized by his essay ‘The Actor and the Über-Marionette,’ in which he wrote that acting was not art since the contemporary actor does not dream of creating, but only tries to rival a photograph. The best that this actor can do, wrote Craig, ‘when he wants to catch and convey the poetry of a kiss, the heat of a fight, or the calm of death, is to copy slavishly, photographically – he kisses – he fights – he lies back and mimics death – and when you think of it, is not all this dreadfully stupid?’76 These incendiary remarks were meant to challenge theatre artists to look beyond an imitation of life to the conscious creation of visual images that would convey the spirit, the essence of a moment, not just a mere facsimile of it. Craig believed this would lead theatre artists in the direction that other modern artists were exploring – making the invisible visible through abstraction and stylization. But this task was particularly difficult in theatre because the human body and human activity are the basic material of theatre, and these are not easy to abstract successfully. Craig, however, believed that artists could overcome this problem and offered the marionette as an example of the power of an abstracted image over realistic detail. Kurbas took up Craig’s challenge; he used the conventions of the puppet theatre, but then staged his production of Vertep with actors rather than puppets. The costumes for the actors were built with materials used for dressing the puppets: dyed cheesecloth, coloured paper, and tin foil. The set designer, Anatol Petrytsky, built a large two-storey wooden structure that resembled an eighteenth-century puppet house. It was framed on both sides by church choir stalls in which sat the student choir that usually accompanied the puppet show. Kurbas wanted the actors who played the biblical characters to intone the text in the traditional monotone style used by the puppeteers. These characters actually had very few spoken lines because the narrative burden was carried by the lyrics the choir sang. The biblical characters functioned primarily on a visual level. Kurbas told his actors that the conventions of the puppet theatre were to be used to inform their movements: ‘You must grasp the essential movement of the puppet, the

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mechanics, not the logic of a character’s behavior … Imagine yourself as the puppet; transform yourself into the puppet … Stop being, living, acting like a person – move like the puppet … actors should experience the essence of movement.’77 The vertep puppets were usually carved out of wood. They could not move their limbs and had one frozen gesture. Now, Kurbas had each actor find a single gesture that would convey the essence of his character. The characters of the vertep were static in the sense that they did not change, or learn, or grow because of their experiences. It was impossible to motivate their actions psychologically, so one gesture could be found to describe the essence of a character. This was, after all, what the puppet masters had done. The actors who portrayed the puppet characters in Kurbas’s production had consciously to create a visual image with their body that would represent their character rather than play a character through identification. The process of distillation required to find a single essential gesture for a character was very different from acting based on the emotional experiencing of a role moment-to-moment. The actors, who were primarily used to relying on their temperament and liked to display their voice and emotional range, were terrified of these new demands and rebelled. The struggle in the collective of the Young Theatre became so bitter during the rehearsals of the Vertep that Kurbas had to resign as artistic director in order to finish the production.78 However, other actors blossomed within the frame of this production. The press praised Ryta Neshchadymenko, who played Rachel in the Vertep,79 and Vasylko mentioned that Kurbas commended her on her work in the show.80 It seems that Neshchadymenko best understood Kurbas’s new concerns. Creating the image of Rachel, the grieving mother, she perhaps discovered the seed of the transformed gesture she would create several years later in Kurbas’s production of Gas. In Gas she again played the lamenting mother, and her gesture of tearing out her flaming heart was so powerful that it is mentioned in almost every account of the production. On the other hand, Kurbas urged the actors of the second part of the Vertep to create stock characters and play them very broadly. Like the characters in the first part, these did not change with their experiences and their physical aspects dominated. But their essences were expressed through their movement to the folk songs that formed the text of the second part. The third group of actors on stage did not impersonate puppets, but were dressed as seminary students and were outside the actual two-storey puppet house. They sat in the side choirs and sang the carols that formed the main text in the first half, and the folk songs that developed the action in the second. Reacting to the events inside the puppet house,81 this group functioned as a mediator between the events on stage and the audience. The reactions of the chorus observing the events also provided the audience with a sense of distance from the traditional story. Throughout the second season Kurbas was becoming increasingly interested in the chorus and was exploring the different ways it could be used in a production. In Oedipus Rex the chorus reflected the inner life of the main character. In the Vertep the members of the chorus delivered the narrative by singing the songs that formed the main part of the text, while the puppet-like characters spoke little and were used primarily visually. In Kurbas’s next production, An Evening of Shevchenko’s Poetry, the chorus would become the centre of the production.

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The chorus was also a major theatrical device in the newest European dramas – the German Expressionist plays. Kurbas noted this in his article ‘The New German Drama,’ which was published early in 1919 while he was staging Shevchenko’s poetry. In this article Kurbas quotes the German critic Alfred Polgar on the importance of the chorus in the new Expressionist drama: ‘Perhaps the chorus, which is the root of classical tragedy, will open for this new drama the way to renewal. The impression is that this device is somehow a step towards [the presentation of] a fourth dimension on stage, which would allow us to grasp several spiritual components at once.’82 Kurbas, like many other modern artists, was very interested in finding a way for art to sharpen our perceptions, to allow us to grasp at once a whole complex of things as they are in their essence. Later, Kurbas would write that this indeed is the purpose of art. Kurbas wrote enthusiastically about Expressionism in his article, and an Expressionist sense of line and dynamic construction was evident in the dramatic poems that formed the first part of the Evening of Shevchenko’s Poetry, at which he presented several lyrical poems staged with movement and music. Reviewing the event, the critic for Teatr wrote: For me the highlight was the beautiful staging of two small poems ‘The Sky’s Unwashed …’ and ‘On Sunday and So Early in the Morning …’ Here everything is presented in well-thought-through refined movements, flowing with deep experiences. The tragedy of the great poet’s lonely soul passes before our eyes in what I would call a totally abstract linear artistic image.83

During the rehearsal for the lyrical poems, Kurbas first started using The sky’s unwashed and the waves are sleepy, the term ‘transformed gesture,’ And on the edges of the shore, way out there, which would become a central idea The rushes, as if drunk, in his later work. As Vasyl Vasylko, Sway without wind … Lord have mercy! Kurbas’s long-time assistant, noted: How long am I to languish here, ‘The history of Kurbas’s transformIn this open prison, ations starts with the poem ‘I nebo On this useless sea? nevmyte’ [The Sky’s Unwashed] … No answer from On stage we had no sea, no waves, The grass that’s yellowed in the steppe. no reeds. There were only five or six It’s silent and bows as if alive. actors in long linen robes. Their It will not speak honestly … wigs blended with the colours of And I’ve no one else to ask. the costumes. Individual and group Taras Shevchenko, 1848 movements to the words of the poet Translated from the Ukrainian provoked in the audience the necesby Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipps sary associations.’84 The actors’ gestures and sounds transformed them into the elements of the desolate landscape described by the poet, then into the poet’s own outburst against his stifling surroundings, and finally into nature’s silent movements which highlight the poet’s loneliness in exile. Later, Kurbas explained the transformed gesture in the following way: ‘In its essence it is a theatrical technique The Sky’s Unwashed

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10.15 Ryta Neshchadymenko

that uncovers a certain essence of the depicted reality (psychological, social etc.) and evokes in the spectator that quantity of associational and general psycho-physical processes which cause an elevation of the level of perception.’85 How similar this sounds to Kurbas’s citation of Polgar, who saw the chorus as a step towards a presentation that would allow us to grasp several spiritual components at once, making the invisible visible. Kurbas felt that a transformed gesture must relate to the concept of the production and express the essence of a moment of its interpretation through an image. In his early experiments with transformed gestures in 1919 it was clearly Kurbas, the director, who was the artist creating the images, although a few actors, such as Ryta Neshchadymenko, who understood his modernist concerns and sought to create these images with him. Some critics recognized Kurbas’s achievement. Reviewing the restaging of Shevchenko’s lyrical poems the following year, the critic for Borotba wrote:

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In his staging of Shevchenko’s poems Kurbas shows himself – and I say this without any exaggeration – as a sculpturally perfect artist-director. Kurbas’s work now … is on an incomparably higher level than in all of his previous productions. This is no longer simply exploration or research, but a completed creative act that has depth; it is an artistic work. This is especially true of his staging of the lyric poems … The images live in time and space.86

Writing in 1923, Yona Shevchenko called Kurbas’s staging of Shevchenko’s lyrical poetry and Tychyna’s new poems as the first attempts at abstract theatre.87 These productions can be related to Bronislava Nijinska’s subjectless ballets, which are considered to be some of the earliest examples of abstract dance. Nijinska came to Kyiv the same year as Kurbas.88 She was the sister of Vaclav Nijinsky and assisted her brother as he choreographed his first ballets for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, including the revolutionary Le Sacre du printemps, which introduced a new language of movement to classical ballet. Nijinska moved to Kyiv in 1916, when her husband became ballet master at the Kyiv Opera, and at first she danced and taught at several institutions.89 She left Kyiv briefly in the winter of 1917–18 for Moscow in an attempt to try to join Vaclav, who was then abroad. In Moscow she met Alexandra Exter, who had opened a studio in Kyiv in 1918. (Exter’s work is discussed in this volume by Dmytro Horbachov, Nijinska’s by Maria Ratanova.) The following winter, in February 1919, Nijinska opened her own studio in Kyiv which she called the École de Mouvement, and offered a unique training for dancers. Although École de Mouvement existed under Nijinska’s direction for little more than two years, its importance to her artistic development cannot be overestimated. Under its aegis she emerged from the shadow cast by her brother and created the first ballets that bore her choreographic signature. Although these initial works built upon Nijinsky’s breakthroughs, at the same time they went far beyond them. Drawing on constructivist ideas of functionality and non-representation, she created her first plotless compositions in 1919 and 1920 – Mephisto Valse and Twelfth Rhapsody – which may well stand in the history of twentieth-century dance as the first abstract ballets.90

Just as Kurbas was moving towards abstraction in theatre pieces, so Nijinska was moving towards abstraction in ballet. This coincidence is hardly surprising. Nijinska shared a studio space with the Young Theatre, and also conducted movement classes with the group. Her École de Mouvement opened in Kyiv only weeks before the premiere of Kurbas’s Evening of Shevchenko’s Poetry. Several of Nijinska’s students, including Valentyna Chystiakova, who would soon become Kurbas’s wife, also appeared in the Young Theatre shows. The connections between Kurbas and Nijinska were both complementary and deep. After Nijinska left Kyiv a number of her students joined Kurbas’s theatre. One of her students, Nadia Shuvarska, became Kurbas’s choreographer on his breakthrough production of Gas in 1923. She was particularly close to her teacher, and in Nijinska’s archives there is a copy of Bronislava’s letter to Shuvarska from 1922 advising her student to try to understand Kurbas and his ideas, since she could learn much about theatre from him.91

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10.16 Les Kurbas and his bride, Valentyna Chystiakova, a student of Bronislava Nijinska

10.17 Bronislava Nijinska, letter to Nadia Shuvarska (BNA; with the permission of Gibbs Raetz, Pacific Palisades)

Kurbas and Nijinska would also share a designer – Vadym Meller, who designed and documented Nijinska’s dances in Kyiv. (See colour plates 10 and 11.) Soon Meller would become the person closest to Kurbas and the artist most responsible for the visual elements of his work at the Berezil. Meller’s designs for Kurbas, much like his work for Nijinska, would foreground constructivist ideas on functionality and non-representation. They would also allow Kurbas to envision ways to transform space through the action of his performers into an abstract space that would permit them to portray the thoughts inside a character’s mind. (These ideas are developed in my essay ‘The Invisible Made Visible’ in this volume.) The tendency towards the abstract in the work of Kurbas and Nijinska also reflected a more general phenomenon among artists in Kyiv. Kurbas himself suggested that his staging of Shevchenko’s poems, his most extreme experiments with volume in space, had a connection to the visual avant-garde. He compared his

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10.18 The Chorus as ‘Ten Words of the Poet’ in Kurbas’s restaging of a Shevchenko poem

work on the poems to the works of the Suprematists, the pioneers of abstract painting who focused on geometric shapes in space. (The most famous Supermatist was Kazimir Malevich, whose work is discussed in the essay by Myroslav Shkandrij in this volume.) As Kurbas summarized it: So, the Young Theatre arrived at the moment of volume, and the volume of an object, the feeling for volume is reflected in the orientation towards the plastic in theatre. This was displayed in such a stylized work as Oedipus Rex and later in the staged poems of Tychyna and Shevchenko and is characteristic of Suprematists, who do not recognize depicting the subject of the object – in those poems there were composed masses of bodies and composed sequences of movement, that did not depict anything, but first of all expressed the body as such, presented the body as a body, the group as a group of bodies, plus a certain aesthetic idea.92

In the lyrical poems the movement of the bodies in space created an abstract action, action without a real subject, which was driven by the words and the music of the piece. Kurbas’s experiments with performance of poetry on stage were taking him very far away from traditional play texts into the fields of experimental theatre, modern dance, and abstract art. The Evening of Shevchenko’s Poetry was the last production Kurbas would direct at the Young Theatre. At the time, however, no one realized it. The members of the Young Theatre continued to work and plan their future. On 23 March 1919, the following notice appeared in the papers: Les Kurbas has been chosen, almost unanimously, as the director who will be responsible for all the productions and the profile of the theatre. This, of course, will change the direction of the theatre. The Young Theatre, formerly half dedicated to a

Les Kurbas’s Work at the Young Theatre in Kyiv 301 literary repertoire and half to theatrical experimentation, now becomes exclusively a theatre of experimentation.93

It seemed that Kurbas was finally to have his own theatre of experimentation. He even announced the repertoire for the next season.94 But in February the Bolsheviks took Kyiv and, in March, took control of the theatres. A month later the Young Theatre was instructed to merge with the State Dramatic Theatre, which had been recently organized by Aleksandr Zaharov, a student of Stanislavsky. Kurbas and Zaharov were named co-directors of the new Shevchenko Theatre. In creating the new hybrid company, the Bolshevik government also dissolved the Young Theatre, the source of most of the innovation in Ukrainian theatre. At the Young Theatre, Kurbas had become a modern theatre artist. As he grew as an artist, he reshaped his company. Although the Young Theatre existed for only two seasons and presented merely fifteen productions, it redefined Ukrainian theatre from one that only focused on individual star turns to a literary theatre that could present an urbane play text by an ensemble. Then Kurbas led his company even further to re-envision itself as a director’s theatre capable of presenting a conceptual interpretation and dedicated to experimentation. With this shift in definition, Kurbas was poised to develop into a major innovative theatre artist. As we have seen, Kurbas himself attested to the influence of the visual avantgarde, especially the Supermatists, on his work. But Kurbas also shared many concerns with two of the most important figures in dance in Kyiv: Mikhail Mordkin and Bronislava Nijinska. Mordkin worked with the Young Theatre actors on movement and his studio rented the foyer of the theatre as rehearsal space. The Young Theatre presented an Evening of Choreography by Mikhail Mordkin on 24 January 1919.95 Mordkin even staged one of his ballets with members of Kurbas’s company,96 and in the summer of 1919 Kurbas himself performed a role in Mordkin’s ballet Azaide.97 Kurbas’s relationship with Nijinska was perhaps the more important one, even though no evidence has come to light that they worked together directly on a production. They arrived in Kyiv on the cusp of great changes in 1916. In Kyiv they shared a space, performers, students, and a designer. They also seemed to have left deep impressions of each other before they both left Kyiv.98 In 1921 Nijinska travelled to the West, and eventually settled in Paris. Her first important work in Paris would be Les Noces, with the Ballets Russes, in 1923. The most stunning moment of that production would be the way in which she used the corps de ballet or chorus in the braiding scene.99 We know Nijinska rejected the colourful stylized folk costumes and designs originally proposed by Natalia Goncharova, and instead chose monochromatic costumes for the chorus, which formed the centre of the ballet. Researchers of Nijinska point to ‘Russian Constructivist’ influences. But actually Les Noces also shares many similarities with the description of Kurbas’s staging of Shevchenko’s lyrical poems. Kurbas left Kyiv in June of 1920, journeying south and east through the villages and provinces of Ukraine.100 His first important work back in Kyiv in 1923 would be a production of Gas, designed by Vadym Meller. It would reveal the similar

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paths Nijinska and Kurbas had travelled while geographically moving in opposite directions. (See Tkacz’s ‘The Invisible Made Visible’ in this volume.)

NOTES 1 Oleksander Stepanovych (Les’) Kurbas was born on 25 February 1887 in Sambir, Western Ukraine. His father, Stepan Kurbas (1862–1908), had been one of the most respected actors of Western Ukraine, playing under the stage name Stepan Ianovych. Les’ himself had studied at the University of Vienna, where he was able to see some of the best theatre of Europe and discover the exciting ideas of the new art theatre. In Europe he also had come into contact with influential thinkers on the spiritual impact of art. Returning to Western Ukraine, Les’ Kurbas had become a leading actor in the same theatre in which his father had worked, earning praise for many of the same roles. Kurbas had also started earning a name for himself as a director. 2 Yosyp Hirniak, ‘Birth and Death of the Modern Ukrainian Theatre,’ in Soviet Theatre: 1917–1941, ed. Martha Bradshaw (New York: Research Program on the USSR, 1954) 258. 3 Les’ Kurbas, ‘Na temy dnia [On the Themes of the Day],’ in Filosofia teatru [Philosophy of Theatre], compiled by Mykola Labins’kyi (Kyiv: Vydavnytstvo Solomii Pavlychko OSNOVY, 2001) 8. All translations from Ukrainian and Russian are mine. 4 In the spring of 1917, the members of the studio suspended their studies, hastily threw together a production of Vynnychenko’s Bazar (Bazaar), a contemporary play about revolutionaries, and performed it at several locations in Kyiv. Labins’kyi, Molodyi teatr: Heneza, zavdannia, shliakhy [Young Theatre: Genesis, Tasks, Directions] ed. Mykola Labins’kyi (Kyiv: Mystetstvo Spilka teatral’nykh diiachiv Ukrainy, 1991) 248. 5 Les’ Kurbas, ‘“Molodyi teatr” (Heneza–zavdannia–shliakhy) [Young theatre (Genesis– Tasks–Directions),’ Robitnycha hazeta (Kyiv), 23 September 1917: 2–3. 6 ‘Molodyi teatr [Young theatre],’ first poster announcing the formation of the theatre, quoted in Vasyl’ Vasyl’ko, ‘Narodnyi artyst URSR O. S. Kurbas [People’s Artist of the Republic O. S. Kurbas],’ in Les’ Kurbas: Spohady suchasnykiv [Les’ Kurbas: Recollections of Contemporaries], ed. Vasyl’ Vasyl’ko (Kyiv: Mystetstvo, 1969) 7. 7 Kurbas, ‘Molodyi teatr’ 3. 8 Ibid. 9 The members of the Young Theatre were in charge of the repertoire and all the major decisions in the theatre were to be made collectively. Since at this point all the members, including Kurbas, saw themselves primarily as actors, they agreed to place ‘strict limitations on the rights of the director and designer in order to allow total freedom of activity for the individual and the collective, to allow for total freedom of initiative.’ Kurbas, ‘Molodyi teatr’ 6. In practice, however, Kurbas proved to be the leading force and actually selected the plays, many of which were projects in which he had previously shown interest. 10 During its first season the Young Theatre did not have its own theatre space, and at first presented its productions once a week, on Mondays, at a theatre that housed a Russian company. Pioneer theatrical groups often have to limit their performances to customarily ‘dark’ days. The German Freie Bühne (1889) and the English Independent

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11 12 13 14

15

16

17

18 19

20 21

Theatre (1891) performed only on Sundays, while today New Yorkers interested in the newest avant-garde work often have to venture downtown on Monday nights. D[mytro] A[ntonovych], ‘Teatralni zamitky [Theatrical Notes],’ Robitnycha hazeta (Kyiv) 143 (26 September 1917), in Labins’kyi, Molodyi teatr 251. Ibid. M. B., ‘M. Halbe “Molodist,”’ Robitnycha hazeta (Kyiv) 274 (19 May 1918), in Labins’kyi, Molodyi teatr 252. In early November the administrators of the Bergonier Theatre started scheduling the Young Theatre on coveted Friday nights, so the shows were obviously attracting good houses. The Young Theatre responded with a public letter of thanks that was published in the local paper. Robitnycha hazeta (Kyiv) 180 (9 November 1917), in Labins’kyi, Molodyi teatr 253. Oleksander Oles’ was the pen name of Oleksander Kandyba (1878–1944), a popular writer, whose poetry structurally resembled folk songs. Full of beautiful images of nature, his language sensitively portrayed shifts in mood. In 1913 Sadovs’kyi had staged several études, with disastrous results. The Dance of Life was removed from the repertoire after a single performance. D[mytro] Antonovych, Trysta rokiv ukrains’koho teatru (1619–1919) [Three Hundred Years of Ukrainian Theatre (1619–1919)] (Prague: Ukrains’kyi hromads’kyi vydavnychyi fond, 1925) 205. Stepan Bondarchuk, however, mentions that Sadovs’kyi’s production of Autumn continued to be a popular show and that Les’ Kurbas performed the male lead in the show after Ivan Mar’ianenko left Sadovs’kyi’s troupe. S.K. Bondarchuk, ‘Molodyi teatr: Chomu ia vziavsia za pero?’ [Young Theatre: Why Did I Pick Up the Pen?], in Labins’kyi, Molodyi teatr 126. For the premiere on 17 November 1917, Kurbas directed the études Autumn, The Dance of Life, and In the Light of the Bonfire. One of the études, A Quiet Evening, marked Hnat Iura’s directing debut at the Young Theatre. Ibid. 129. Polina Samiilenko, Nezabutni dni horin [Unforgettable Days of Burning] (Kyiv: Mystetstvo, 1970) 40. Les’ Kurbas, ‘Pro symvolichnyi teatr i teatr Oleksandra Olesia [About Symbolist Theatre and the Theatre of Oleksander Oles’],’ first published in Labins’kyi, Molodyi teatr 36, from a copy in the Les’ Kurbas Museum in Staryi Skalat, Ternopil Region. Original in the archive of Iu. M. Rozumovska-Vasyl’ko. Ibid. 36–7. Anatol (born Anatolii) Petryts’kyi, born in Kyiv in 1895, studied at the Kyiv Art Institute. As a painter, he was first influenced by Impressionism and Post-Impressionism (John E. Bowlt, Stage Designs and the Russian Avant-Garde (1911–1929) [New Haven: International Exhibitions Foundation, 1976] 81) and later by Futurism and the Ukrainian Baroque fresco style (V[asyl’] Khmuryi, Anatol’ Petryts’kyi: Teatral’ni stroi [Kharkiv, 1929] 9). He first became involved with theatre design in 1915, when he painted the backdrops for a Ukrainian Baroque intermediia that Sadovs’kyi staged as a benefit for wounded soldiers (Ivan Ivanovych Vrona, Anatol’ Petryts’kyi: Al’bom [Kyiv, 1968] 10). In 1916–17 Petryts’kyi designed sets for several small theatres in Kyiv, and then joined the Young Theatre in the autumn of 1917. He designed most of the productions of the Young Theatre’s second season and was considered the theatre’s main designer. Later

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31 32 33 34 35 36 37

38 39 40

Virlana Tkacz Kurbas would write that the designer appeared as a creative force in Ukrainian theatre only when Petryts’kyi joined the Young Theatre (Kurbas, ‘Shliakhy Berezolia,’ VAPLITE: Literaturno-Khudozhii zhurnal 3 [Kharkiv, 1927] 151). While working with the Young Theatre, Petryts’kyi became closely associated with Aleksandra Exter, who then lived in Kyiv. Exter was the designer of a number of sets for Aleksandr Tairov’s Kamerny Theatre in Moscow and was known for her ‘lyrical adaptations of Cubism and Constructivism’ (Bowlt 8–9). Exter’s influence is evident in Petryts’kyi’s later work, an excellent discussion of which appears in Myroslava M. Mudrak, ‘Modern Expression and Folk Tradition in the Theatrical Art of Anatol’ Petryts’kyi,’ in Cross Currents: A Yearbook of Central European Culture 3 (Ann Arbor: Dept. of Slavic Languages and Literatures, U of Michigan, 1984) 385–95. Petryts’kyi also designed sets for opera and ballet, including the set for Mikhail Mordkin’s Nur and Anitra, which travelled to New York in 1923. See designs for Nur and Anitra in Bowlt 49–50. Samiilenko 40. Vasyl’ Vasyl’ko, Teatru viddane zhyttia [A Life Dedicated to the Theatre] (Kyiv: Mystetstvo, 1984) 115–16. D[mytro] A[ntonovych], ‘Molodyi teatr,’ Robitnycha hazeta (Kyiv), 20 November 1917: 4. Samiilenko 23–4. The quote is condensed and the bracketed description of Los Caprichos in the cited passage is mine. The journal Teatral’ni visti had noted in September 1917 that Kurbas translated the play from Polish. In Labins’kyi, Molodyi teatr 251. Valentyna Chystiakova (Valentina Chistiakova), Letter to V.V. Hakkebush, 24 September 1972, in Labins’kyi, Molodyi teatr 245 Samiilenko 25. Bondarchuk, ‘Molodyi teatr,’ in Labins’kyi, Molodyi teatr, 133. The set for Ijola was designed by Mykhailo Boichuk, who had previously designed the set for the Young Theatre’s production of Youth. Neither set was marked by experimentation. The medieval rooms for Ijola were painted in a romantic style. D[mytro] A[ntonovych], ‘Molodyi teatr’ [Young Theatre], Robitnycha hazeta (Kyiv) 249 (14 April 1918). In Labins’kyi, Molodyi teatr 257. Vasyl’ Vasyl’ko, Shchodennyk [Diary], vol. 1, 14 April 1918, Archive of State Museum of Theatre, Music, and Film Arts (Kyiv), inv. 10369. Vasyl’ko, ‘Narodnyi artyst,’ in Vasyl’ko, Les’ Kurbas 7. Ibid. 8. B-iy (pseud.), ‘Molodyi teatr,’ Volia 4 (26 July 1919) 16. The author’s identity is hidden under the abbreviation. François Delsarte (1811–71), French artist, who created one of the first systematic actor training methods based on his own observations of how people used gestures. Émile Jaques-Dalcroze (1865–1960) was a Swiss musician who developed a system called ‘eurythmics,’ in which the participants were directed to physically respond to musical works. Edward Gordon Craig (1872–1966), English actor, director, and designer, best known for his innovations in light design and writings such as On the Art of the Theatre (1911). Les’ Kurbas, ‘Teatral’nyi lyst,’ Literaturno-krytychnyi al’manakh 1 (1918): 67, 71. Edward Gordon Craig, On the Art of the Theatre (London, 1911; rpt New York, 1956) 89.

Les Kurbas’s Work at the Young Theatre in Kyiv 305 41 Quoted in Edward Gordon Craig, Gordon Craig: The Story of His Life (New York: Victor Gollancz, 1968) 219–20. 42 Craig, On the Art of the Theatre 62–3 and 61. Emphasis in the original. 43 Kurbas, quoted in M.T. Ryl’s’kyi, ed., Ukrains’kyi dramatychnyi teatr [Ukrainian Dramatic Theatre], 2 vols. (Kyiv: Naukova dumka, 1967) 2: 52. 44 Kurbas, ‘Teatral’nyi lyst’ 71. Kurbas’s term literaturshchyna is rendered as ‘the tyranny of literature’ in the translation. 45 Kurbas, ‘Teatral’nyi lyst’ 72. 46 Ibid. 73. 47 Kurbas also called for the reform of theatrical design, harshly criticizing contemporary stage decoration: ‘Two-dimensional decorations next to the three-dimensional actor, stage and props, real yellow leaves falling from the hideous painted ‘forest’ [border], against the obvious and conspicuously painted perspective of the backdrop … Add to this a production crammed with details, an unintelligible chaos of gestures, at best only typical, the ‘real,’ green light of a moon – and then you understand the despair’ (Kurbas, ‘Teatral’nyi lyst’ 67–8). Kurbas’s point about the clash of conventions between the flat, ‘realistically’ painted elements of the set and the three-dimensional reality of the actor, is similar to views voiced by the proponents of the new art theatre movement such as Adolphe Appia, the Swiss designer (1862–1928), who had initiated the movement for reforming design in theatre. For instance, Appia had written: ‘Our modern staging is totally enslaved to painting – the painting of sets – which purports to give us the illusion of reality. Now, this illusion is itself an illusion – the presence of the actor contradicts it. The principle of illusion produced by painting on vertical flats and the principle of illusion produced by the plastic, living body of the actor are, quite simply, in contradiction. Therefore, working out the operation of these two types of illusion separately – as is done on all our stages – will not enable us to obtain a homogeneous and artistic production’ (Appia, ‘How to Reform Our Stage Directing,’ in Adolphe Appia 1862–1928, Actor – Space – Light [New York: Riverrun Press, 1982] 42.) Kurbas’s protest against productions overladen with detail is reminiscent of Georg Fuchs’s opposition to naturalism’s clutter. The motto for Fuchs (1868–1949), a German director and critic, was ‘Re-theatricalize the theatre!’ He felt that ‘every artistic solution of a theatre problem should lead to a drastic reduction of scenic paraphernalia and make use of the minimum of representation. See Georg Fuchs, Revolution in the Theatre: Conclusions Concerning the Munich Artists’ Theatre, trans. Constance Connor Kühn (1909; Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1959, 1972) 103, 90, and 88. 48 Kurbas, ‘Teatral’nyi lyst’ 73. 49 Ibid. 73–4. 50 ‘V “Molodomu teatri” [At the Young Theatre],’ Komunist, 23 March 1919, quoted in Labins’kyi, Molodyi teatr 279–80, mentions that the production of Romeo and Juliet had been ready for a month, but could not open because of lack of funds for the set. 51 Kurbas ‘Teatral’nyi lyst’ 74. 52 Ibid. 75. 53 Vasyl’ko, Zhyttia 122. 54 In 1924 Vasyl’ko, Kurbas’s assistant, wrote: ‘Yesterday, I saw Isadora Duncan. It left a strange impression on me: At 50 she is doing – and that means also used to do and

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Virlana Tkacz became famous for this – what we are doing in our workshops (Kurbas’s system [of actor training] mimodramas). In her pantomime, there is the clarity, expressiveness, motivation, and economy of devices. It is true her expressiveness does not satisfy us now, we want something more …; this of course is a correction, our art reflects our time.’ Vasyl’ko, Diary, entry for 29 February 1924, vol. 5, Archive of State Museum of Theatre, Music, and Film Arts (Kyiv), inv. 10374. Bondarchuk, ‘Molodyi teatr’ 143. Mikhail Mordkin (1881–1944), Russian ballet dancer, performed with the Bolshoi Ballet and then in 1909 joined Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, where he was a leading dancer. He formed his own company with Anna Pavlova and toured America in 1909–12. Reviewing their performance the New York Times raved: ‘It is doubtful if such dancing has ever been seen on the Metropolitan stage’ (16 October 1910). Mordkin returned to the United States in 1923 with his own ballet, Nur and Anitra, eventually settling there and forming the Mordkin Ballet, the forerunner of the American Ballet Theatre. He was also known for teaching such stars as Judy Garland and Katherine Hepburn. Bondarchuk, ‘Molodyi teatr’ 143. After the season opened with Oedipus Rex, there was the premiere of Lesia Ukrainka’s In the Wilderness, which was followed by productions of George Bernard Shaw’s Candida and an Austrian comedy, Woe to the Liar! by Franz Grillparzer. These were followed by productions Hauptmann’s Sunken Bell, Ibsen’s Enemy of the People, Molière’s Tartuffe, and a contemporary Ukrainian play, Vynnychenko’s Sin. Kurbas also staged two experimental pieces: one used a traditional puppet play, the Vertep, and the other, Shevchenko’s poetry. Christopher Innes, Edward Gordon Craig (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983) 119. Marjorie Raffe, Cecil Harwood, and Marguerite Lundgren, Eurythmy and the Impulse of Dance (Dornach: Rudolf Steiner Press) 6. Stepan Bondarchuk, ‘Molodyi teatr,’ in Labins’kyi, Molodyi teatr 145. Oleksandr Deich, ‘Liudyna, iaka bula teatrom [A Person Who Was Theatre],’ Zhovten (Lviv) 6 (June 1982) 97. Antonovych, Trysta rokiv 213. Iakiv Savchenko, ‘Tsar Edip v Molodomu teatri’ [Oedipus Rex at the Young Theatre],’ quoted in Iurii Blokhyn, ‘Molodyi teatr [Young Theatre],’ Zhyttia i Revoliutsiia (June 1930) 166. Ibid. Antonovych, Trysta rokiv 213. Vasyl’ko, Teatry viddane zhyttia 136. Bondarchuk, ‘Molodyi teatr’ 153. The commedia dell’arte was an Italian improvisational theatre popular in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries with stock masked characters such as the Harlequin. Ol. Metlens’kyi, ‘Molodyi teatr: Hore brekhunovi,’ Vidrodzennia 202 (6 December 1918), in Labins’kyi, Molodyi teatr 273. Shevchenko, ‘Molodyi teatr: Ioho rol’ i robota [Young Theatre: Its Role and Work],’ Barykady teatru (Kyiv) 2–3 (December 1923): 8–10, in Labins’kyi, Molodyi teatr 77. First references to vertep performances date back to the late sixteenth century, but the form was most popular in the mid-eighteenth century among students of the Kyiv

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Mohyla Academy. The text used by the Young Theatre was one of the oldest extant variants, the Sokyryns’kyi vertep, which had been reissued earlier that year by Oleksandr Kysil’. The ‘Sokyryns’kyi vertep,’ originally published by Hryhorii Halahan in the Kyivskaia staryna journal in 1882, was based on a handwritten text from 1770. Hryhorii Halahan, ‘Malorusskii vertep [Little Russian Nativity Puppet Play],’ intro. P. Zhytets’kii, Kyivskaia starina (Kyiv) 10 (October 1882) 12. Ibid. 16. The Russian soldier also mentions Herod at the beginning of the second part. Halahan 36. Edward Gordon Craig, On the Art of the Theatre [London, 1911] (rpt. New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1956) 62–3. Les’ Kurbas, ‘Pro Rizdvianyi vertep [About the Nativity Play],’ in Labins’kyi, Molodyi teatr 47. Les’ Kurbas, ‘Vidkrytyi lyst [Open letter],’ Robitnycha hazeta (Kyiv) 435 (17 January 1919), in Labins’kyi, Molodyi teatr 277. Iu. Boboshko, Rezhyser Les’ Kurbas [Director Les’ Kurbas] (Kyiv: Mystetstvo, 1987) 49. Vasyl’ Vasyl’ko, ‘U Molodomu teatri [At the Young Theatre],’ in Labins’kyi, Molodyi teatr 224. Ryls’kyi 1:452. Polgar quoted in Les’ Kurbas, ‘Nova nimets’ka drama [New German Drama],’ in Labins’kyi, Molodyi teatr 54. B. Kovdra, ‘Nashe sviato (Shevchenkovi instsenivky v “Molodomu teatri”) [Our Celebration (Staging Shevchenko at the Young Theatre)],’ Teatr 8 (1–3 May 1919). Vasyl’ko, ‘Narodnyi artyst’ 20. Les’ Kurbas, ‘Berezil’ i teperishni ioho dosiahnennia shcho do teatralnoi formy [Berezil and Its Present Achievements in Theatrical Form],’ Hlobus (Kyiv) 5 (March 1925) 119. Iakiv Savchenko, ‘Instsenizatsiia tvoriv T. Shevchenka [The Staging of T. Shevchenko’s Works],’ Borotba, 14 March 1920: 2 (page number of handwritten copy of article in my archive). Shevchenko, ‘Molodyi teatr: ioho rol’ i robota’ 77. Bronislava Nijinska was born in 1891 in Minsk to itinerant Polish dancers and started performing at the age of four. In 1908 she and her brother Vaclav Nijinsky, soon to become an international star, were accepted into the Imperial Theatrical School in St Petersburg, where they were trained by such great ballet masters as Michel (Mikhail) Fokine. Both of them danced in Serge Diaghilev’s first sensational Paris season in 1909. In 1914 Nijinska returned to Russia, where she worked at the Petrograd Private Opera, and presented her first choreographed solos in 1915. Nijinska’s archive includes a handwritten note by her second husband, Nicholas Singaevsky, who had studied with her in Kyiv, which lists all the places where she taught. In Kyiv (1917–21) these included the State Conservatory of Music, the Central State Studio of Ballet, Studio of Drama– Yiddish Kultur-Lige, Drama School of Ukraine (where Kurbas taught) and Nijinska’s own École de Mouvement. Memorandum of the activity of Mme B. Nijinska as Professor and Director in the Schools of Ballet, Bronislava Nijinska archives, private archive. With the permission of Gibbs Raetz, Pacific Palisades, California (archive now in Library of Congress). The note is in English and the names of the institutions are retained here as listed in it.

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89 In Kyiv Nijinska trained her most famous student, Serge Lifar (Ukrainian: Serhii Mykhailovych Lyfar). A dancer and a choreographer, Lifar was born in Kyiv in 1905 and died in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1986. He became a dancer of international acclaim with the Ballets Russes and eventually the director of the Paris Opera Ballet for twenty years. See ‘Paris Opera Ballet: A Tribute to Serge Lifar,’ at http://www .culturekiosque.com/dance/features/serge_lifar.html and ‘100th Anniversary of the Birth of Serge Lifar: UNESCO,’ at http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL _ID=18531&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html. 90 Nancy Van Norman Baer, Bronislava Nijinska: A Dancer’s Legacy (San Francisco: Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, 1986) 16–19. 91 The undated letter, later pencilled in as 1922, includes the following: ‘You write about your grief in theatre – Nadia, you received a choreographic education, but do not fully know the theatre. In terms of composition, knowledge of the theatre is the first step which you cannot omit. Maybe this prevents you from grasping Kurbas’s ideas and viewing them as savage. You could undoubtedly learn from Kurbas, if you were more mature in terms of theatre [crossed out: truly, Kurbas did not expect that] so maybe it is better for you that you left and started working on your own. If it is true that Kurbas said to you – I want ‘this’ and ‘not that’ – then he was the creator of the piece, and your role was to understand his ideas.’ Letter to Nadia Shuvarska, 1922. ‘Pisma k Nadi Shuvarskoi i stat’i o Shkoly, 1922–1926–1928–1937.’ Bronislava Nijinska archives, private archive. With the permission of Gibbs Raetz, Pacific Palisades, California (archive now in Library of Congress). 92 Les’ Kurbas, ‘Suspil’ne pryznachennia mystets’koho tvoru i etapy rozvytku suchasnykh teatriv. Molodyi teatr [The Social Task of an Artistic Work and the Stages of Development of Contemporary Theatre. Young Theatre],’ lecture on directing, 25 February 1926, in Labins’kyi, Filosofiia teatru 128. 93 Komunist (Kyiv), 23 March 1919, quoted in Labins’kyi, ‘Materialy,’ in Vasyl’ko, Les’ Kurbas 333. 94 Kurbas intended to work on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Macbeth, Midsummer Night’s Dream, Kalidasa’s Shakuntala, Beaumarchais’s Marriage of Figaro, Strindberg’s Samum, and Oles’s On the Way to a Tale. Hnat Iura was thinking of staging Friedrich Schiller’s Love and Intrigue, Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra, Maurice Maeterlinck’s The Miracle of St Antony, Edmond Rostand’s The Two Pierrots, Alfred de Musset’s Lorenzaccio, and Goethe’s Faust. 95 Announcement in Robitnycha hazeta (Kyiv) 440 (24 January 1919), in Labins’kyi, Molodyi teatr 227. 96 Vasyl’ko, ‘Teatru viddane zhyttia’ 142. 97 Labins’kyi, Molodyi teatr 284 98 When, in 1927, Kurbas was called on to defend the work of the Young Theatre, he summarized some of the influences on his work of this period. In the article he also mentioned the important mark Bronislava Nijinska left on dance in Ukraine, and regretted that she left no choreographers who could carry on her work. Les’ Kurbas, ‘S’ohodni ukrains’koho teatru i Berezil [The Present Moment in Ukrainian Theatre and the Berezil’],’ (Biblioteka VAPLITE: Kharkiv, 1927) 28. 99 ‘It has been pointed out that an echo of Russian constructivism exists in these human assemblages, in the ‘constructed’ pyramids and poses and the uniformity of the simple

Les Kurbas’s Work at the Young Theatre in Kyiv 309 monochromatic costumes.’ Van Norman Baer 35. Kurbas mentioned neither Michael Mordkin, who at that point was an émigré in America, nor Aleksandra Exter, the mentor of two of his designers, Anatolii Petryts’kyi and Vadym Meller, who was then living in Paris. 100 In the spring of 1920 Kurbas created a new troupe, the Kyidramte, to tour the countryside, choosing not to return to Kyiv till the late fall of 1921. Bronislava Nijinska left Kyiv in May 1921.

Movement is the first expression of life; it is life itself. Serge Lifar, Le manifeste du choréographe1

Translated by Irena R. Makaryk. 1 ‘Le mouvement est l’expression première de la vie, c’est la vie elle-même’. Serge Lifar, Le manifeste du choréographe (Paris: Imp. ‘Cooperative Étoile,’ 1935). Lifar (1905–86; born Serhii Mykhailovych Lyfar), dancer and choreographer, was one of Bronislava Nijinska’s most successful and famous students.

11 The Choreographic Avant-garde in Kyiv, 1916–1921: Bronislava Nijinska and Her École de Mouvement maria ratanova

Among the main modernist artistic concepts that circulated in Kyiv in the 1910s, the idea of dynamic movement and the rhythmical organization of the human body gained considerable authority, in no small measure owing to the influence of Émile Jaques-Dalcroze’s system of rhythmic education. The obsession with this idea in the visual arts and theatre prepared the way for a similar ‘fermentation’ in ballet and for the appearance of a new figure in the Kyivan avant-garde: Bronislava Nijinska. In January 1919 Nijinska organized her innovative École de Mouvement, a true laboratory of the new language of dance and a strong alternative to the classical ballet academy. Before that moment the choreographic avant-garde in Ukraine had neither a permanent base nor a system. While, by the 1910s, Kyiv and Kharkiv had already belonged to significant centres of the visual arts avant-garde movement in the Russian Empire, the situation of choreographic art in Ukraine in the early 1910s was far less positive. The Opera House in Kyiv had a small ballet troupe, numbering fewer than twenty people who performed folkloric dances in operas. Putting serious ballets on stage was hardly possible because of the shortage of ballet dancers as well as the absence of a more or less professional ballet master. Any intellectual choreographer who might have come to Kyiv at that time would probably subscribe to Les Kurbas’s words written in 1919 referring to the Ukrainian dramatic theatre: ‘When I consider the achievements in other arts – in poetry, fine arts, music – I feel ashamed that the sphere I love most, this ‘art of arts,’ still remains a fallow and unsown field.’1 In the mid-1910s, however, the situation at the Kyiv Opera began to change for the better thanks to the arrival of some prominent ballet dancers from Moscow and Petrograd. Mikhail Mordkin,2 a soloist of the Moscow Bolshoi Theatre, was one of the first guest artists to begin visiting Kyiv annually with a small troupe. Well known for his work with the Moscow reformer-choreographer Aleksandr Gorsky, Mordkin was a brilliant representative of the Art Nouveau style of earlytwentieth-century ballet dancing. In Kyiv Mordkin presented exotic ballets in the style of silent movies on Spanish or Oriental subjects in which he himself acted as the main hero; he also successfully staged dances in Konstantin Mardzhanov’s production of Lope de Vega’s Fuente Ovejuna (1919), and won the reputation of a first-class dance teacher. Invited by Kurbas to teach at the Young Theatre between 1916 and 1919, Mordkin taught movement to the actors three times a week,

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11.1 Mikhail Mordkin in Aziade. Newspaper cutting in scrapbook (PALM)

11.2 Bronislava Nijinska in Papillon costume, Le Carnival (BNA; BNA; with the permission of Gibbs Raetz, Pacific Palisades)

emphasizing rhythm and plasticity.3 Nevertheless, Mordkin did not found his own school in Kyiv. He was a ‘missionary’ per se who disseminated the latest innovations of Moscow choreography in Ukraine. It was Bronislava Nijinska, invited to the Kyiv Opera House in 1915, who was to play a far more decisive role in the city’s artistic life. The sister of the legendary dancer Vaclav Nijinsky and a soloist with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, Nijinska came from Paris to St Petersburg in the summer of 1914, but found herself unable to return to Western Europe when the war broke out. Together with her husband Aleksandr Kochetovsky (also a former Diaghilev dancer) she staged a few ballets from Diaghilev’s repertoire at the Kyiv Opera: most importantly, Cleopatra and Carnival by the chief modernist of the early-twentieth-century ballet Mikhail Fokine.4 Thus, Kyiv became acquainted at first hand with the latest achievements of the European and Russian ballet. It would, however, be incorrect to assert that the radical dance avant-garde, which appeared and developed in Kyiv within a very short period of time, was no more than an imported product, a reflection of the triumphs of Moscow, St Petersburg, or Diaghilev’s ballet. The whole artistic context in Kyiv does not permit such a claim. What matters is not only the fact that gifted dancers from two of Russia’s largest cities were much in demand among the Ukrainian theatre innovators, but that the acute interest in the expressiveness of the human body and in the new system of movement formed one of the bases of the new Ukrainian art. Therefore, paradoxically as it may seem, it was the visual artists which triggered major choreographic innovations in Kyiv in the five-year period under consideration. The theoretical basis for these innovations was contained both in the manifestos and the practice of the Ukrainian visual avant-garde. Nijinska’s achievement, however, lay in the attention that she, like Kurbas, paid to various avant-garde manifestos (Kurbas had issued his own in 1917) and in her ability to implement them in her own area, dance.

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The theory of rhythmical gymnastics of the Swiss music teacher and theoretician Émile Jaques-Dalcroze took on special significance in the artistic circles of Kyiv and Kharkiv already since the beginning of the 1910s. Dalcroze’s method rested on the idea of using body rhythm to mirror the changing pace of modern life, which, in turn, had been influenced by developments in technology, including high speed, as well as various technical mechanisms. Dalcroze’s rhythmical gymnastics (or eurhythmics) served primarily as an instrument for analysing musical structure: even the most complicated musical rhythm could be communicated through harmonious movements of groups of specially trained people. This system gave impetus to experiments in different spheres of art. It had an obvious impact on Vsevolod Meyerhold’s theory of biomechanics. It is also well known that Vaclav Nijinsky used Dalcroze’s method in staging his Le Sacre du Printemps to the music of Igor Stravinsky. Vaclav’s sister, Bronislava, who participated in the rehearsals for this legendary performance in 1913 and who, at that time, looked down on Dalcroze’s system, nevertheless came to know it very well. Ukrainian modernists took a serious interest in this system. For example, the Kharkiv Art Guild, which was established about 1916 and which included many constructivist-oriented artists, was closely interested in the methods that Dalcroze was using in his school in Hellerau, Germany. The very fact that the Guild’s magazine Tvorchestvo published, in April 1919, Aleksandr Smirnov’s article on rhythm and dance indicates the importance of Dalcroze’s ideas of musical rhythm visualization for Ukrainian artists.5 Similar ideas (although from the vantage point of a theatre designer) were advocated by another radical Ukrainian artist, Alexandra Exter,6 whose studio was founded in Kyiv in 1918. Here, Exter taught her innovative methods of painting and scenic design, based on the idea of rhythmic movement and of an abstract dynamic interaction of volumes and planes. Exter’s scenery and costumes for the performances of Aleksandr Tairov’s Moscow Kamerny Theatre made her world famous. These stage designs were charged with kinetic energy and built on the masterly development of a particular rhythm. The organization of movement in theatre performances was one of Exter’s major spheres of interest. It was that interest that brought together two avant-garde female artists – the painter Exter and the choreographer Nijinska – and resulted in their close cooperation. Serious attention to dance and movement onstage was also paid in the experimental Young Theatre, founded in Kyiv in 1916, as well as in subsequent troupes also established by Les Kurbas: Kyidramte and, most importantly, the Berezil. Valentyna Chystiakova, one of the actresses of the theatre and a former student of Nijinska, later recollected that the movements of the witches in Macbeth (staged in 1919–20, then again in 1924) ‘resembled the rhythmical figures of Dalcroze.’7 In fact, the Ukrainian avant-gardists and the choreographer Nijinska were moving towards the same goal. Nijinska aimed at bridging the gap between the static conventionality of classical ballet and modern ways of movement, including the new choreographic aesthetics discovered by Diaghilev’s choreographers. This transition to a new system of movement she put into practice in her École de Mouvement in Kyiv. One of the greatest ballet innovators of the twentieth century, Nijinska achieved European fame in the 1920s as a choreographer for Diaghilev’s troupe after she left

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Kyiv for Paris in 1921. In Paris, in 1923, she staged her famous Les Noces to music by Stravinsky, with set and costumes by Natalia Goncharova. The constructivist Les Noces astonished Parisian audience by the novelty of its choreographic form (rugged ‘peasant’ movements as though cut out of wood were, at the same time, refined to abstraction). No less amazing was Nijinska’s uncommon approach to the Russian theme. Instead of picturing the atmosphere of the Russian wedding ceremony in the aesthetics of ‘lubok’ (a cheap popular print), as Diaghilev had intended to stage it, Nijinska produced a rigorous abstract ritual, with the leading part belonging not to the Bride and the Bridegroom, but to the corps de ballet dressed in brown-and-white ‘peasant’ uniforms. The abstraction of Les Noces’s choreography, combined with the vigorous expression of Stravinsky’s music, resulted in the creation of a metaphoric image of revolutionary Russia living through its ‘cursed days.’ Les Noces is now ranked among the best choreographic creations of the twentieth century. The origins of this ballet have always proved a mystery for researchers. American scholars Lynn Garafola, Nancy Van Norman Baer, and Robert Johnson have pointed out that the ballet must have accumulated the multiple influences of the sociocultural and artistic life of the Russian Empire of the 1910s.8 To this day, the influence of the artistic life of Kyiv on Nijinska’s views, her choreographic approach, and her theory of movement have not been an object of profound study; however, it seems obvious that Nijinska’s Kyiv period played a decisive role in her future European career as a choreographer. In this regard, one should first mention Nijinska’s cooperation with Alexandra Exter and the artists of her studio.9 Nijinska’s École de Mouvement, which opened in Kyiv in January 1919 during continuous artillery barrages, was unprecedented not only within Russia, but also throughout Europe. She set herself the task of grooming modern dancers who would be equally proficient in classical dancing and in alternative techniques developed in the sphere of dance since the beginning of the century. Her students, whom she originally intended to train so that they could join Vaclav Nijinsky’s troupe in London (something that actually never transpired), would have been aware of Dalcroze’s system of rhythmic movement, as well as of Diaghilev’s choreographers’ achievements in the previous decade. Independent of any ballet institutions, Nijinska’s school was more like an art studio. Dancing lessons alternated with classes in visual arts and stage design. The school’s system of education reflected the influences that formed Nijinska as a ballet master. Thanks to Exter, she became familiar with the latest artistic trends and the experiments of the leading Russian theatre directors, Meyerhold and Tairov. The artist (Exter) and the choreographer met in Moscow, where Nijinska spent a few months in 1917. In October 1917, at Tairov’s Kamerny Theatre, a premiere of Oscar Wilde’s Salome, with Exter’s sets and costumes, took place. Apart from Salome, Nijinska could also have seen an earlier Tairov-Exter production, Famira Kifared (based on Innokenty Annensky’s tragedy), which was called by one critic ‘a magnificent parade of Cubism.’10 Famira’s Cubist style no doubt was Exter’s accomplishment, and caused a revolution in theatre art. Instead of the traditional flat stage, she used mobile geometrical volumes that ‘participated’ in the performance along with the actors. Later, this principle was developed in Salome. Theatre Cubo-Futurism (the Russian variant of

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11.3 Bronislava Nijinska’s draft sketch for a poster announcing her École de Mouvement. Her different coloured versions of this poster – red (Bolshevik), blue and gold (Ukrainian nationalist) – suggest the political uncertainty of the times (BNA; with the permission of Gibbs Raetz, Pacific Palisades)

the French trend) became the artist’s real forte, and she started teaching its techniques in her Kyiv studio. Exter educated a brilliant assemblage of young Ukrainian avant-garde artists. One of her pupils, Anatol Petrytsky, designed for Les Kurbas’s Young Theatre and for the Moscow Kamerny Ballet of Kasian Goleizovsky. Exter’s dynamic stage designs were always charged with motion. Her scenery set its own rhythm for every mise en scène and for movement on stage, and turned the stage from a naturalistic studio into a multilevel technical device for an actor. This prompted Tairov to assert that ‘what theatre really needs is not just an artistdecorator but a designer-architect.’11 Taking up Tairov’s idea, we might describe Nijinska’s work on Les Noces as the work of a ‘choreographer-architect.’ She persuaded Natalia Goncharova to give up the idea of imitating a peasant interior and to turn the stage into a place for demonstrating her constructivist ideas in choreography. Surely it was the intensive contact with Exter and the artists of her studio that developed Nijinska’s constructivist views. Thanks to Exter, Nijinska (whose early years had been influenced by members of the ‘World of Art,’ the Neo-Romantic movement in early-twentieth-century

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11.4 Bronislava Nijinska’s draft sketch of her announcement of the École de Mouvement, for ‘artists of opera and drama.’ Torn fragment from inside her 1919 notebook (BNA; with the permission of Gibbs Raetz, Pacific Palisades)

Russia that promoted traditional folk art and the art of previous epochs) was introduced to non-figurative art and became a proponent of abstract geometry and non-figurativeness in ballet. Nijinska’s theory of choreography was built upon the expressiveness of lines and abstract figures. No wonder it was in Kyiv that Nijinska staged her very first abstract ballets. The sketches of the costumes for these ballets were created by Exter and Vadym Meller, another prominent Kyivan artist, who later worked with the Berezil theatre, designing constructivist sets for Les Kurbas’s productions.12 (See colour plates 10, 11.) Nijinska’s choreographic theory took shape in a completed essay, ‘On Movement and the École de Mouvement.’ She was preparing the essay for publication, but the Civil War prevented it from being printed. Its English translation now exists in a catalogue for an exhibition on Nijinska’s legacy.13 This document shows Nijinska’s formation as a radical choreographer. The essay first deals with the problems of the ballet academy. Classical dance for Nijinska was much more than just a means for expressing romantic emotions; rather, it was something more practical: ‘the basics of dance mechanics’ of the human body. Such a view once again reveals the impact of Dalcroze’s system on Nijinska’s creative mind, as well as the influence on her of Exter’s ‘constructed’ scenery for Tairov’s productions. This approach also carries the germ of Nijinska’s future discoveries in choreographic constructivism.

11.5 Bronislava Nijinska choreographic sketch, ca. 1920 (BNA; with the permission of Gibbs Raetz, Pacific Palisades)

11.6 Bronislava Nijinska, six choreographic diagrams (BNA; with the permission of Gibbs Raetz, Pacific Palisades)

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11.7 Bronislava Nijinska, excerpt from diary, Kyiv, 27 December 1919 (Old Style): ‘They say a ‘New Young Theatre’ is opening today, where everything will be new, fresh.’ (BNA; with the permission of Gibbs Raetz, Pacific Palisades)

Second, in the essay, to revive the stagnating old school of dance Nijinska suggests combining it with modern trends in dancing. This synthesis she takes as a basis for her innovative theory of movement. The analysis of movement as the prime element of dance language becomes the most important task of her essay. As colour was for Kandinsky, line and volume for Malevich, and sound for Stravinsky, so movement in dance became for Nijinska an object of artistic analysis and obsession, as well as the ‘material’ for constructing a work of art. Having absorbed ideas about contemporary painting and theatre design, Nijinska finally came to analyse dance from the point of view of the aesthetics and philosophy of constructivism: ‘Designed for a specific task – action – every machine has its particular form, she wrote, the result of the complex totality of its mechanism. So too, in choreography, the form, the plastique, the position of the body must be the result created by movement.’14 No less important was the influence on Nijinska of the outstanding avant-garde director Les Kurbas. An actor, theatre and film director, teacher and theoretician, founder of the Ukrainian twentieth-century modern theatre, Kurbas truly belonged to European culture. Educated in Vienna in philosophy and languages, and having experienced European theatre, Kurbas aimed at raising Ukrainian theatre to an international artistic level. He oriented himself on the technique of a brilliant Austrian actor, Jozef Kainz, the theories of Georg Fuchs, Adolphe Appia, and Edward Gordon Craig, Max Reinhardt’s productions, and German Expressionist drama. These influences determined the rejection of the imitation of ‘real life’ in Kurbas’s own theatre work, and an indefatigable search for formal innovation, including new forms of movement on stage. At this point, Kurbas’s creative line intersected with Nijinska’s approach to new forms in choreography. Both artists believed movement to be the core element of theatre art; both saw it as a symbolic language that had nothing in common with everyday realism; both aspired to discover new opportunities for the rhythmic organization of a theatre performance. Unfortunately, their collaboration on an opera they were to present in Kyiv in 1921 did not take place because Nijinska suddenly departed for western Europe. However, in 1919, the choreographer shared a studio with Kurbas, teaching movement to his actors. And Nijinska’s students were much welcomed in Kurbas’s Young Theatre, among them, Valentyna Chystiakova, the woman Kurbas married

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11.8 Birthday greetings to Bronislava Nijinska from her students at the École de Mouvement (BNA; with the permission of Gibbs Raetz, Pacific Palisades)

in 1919. No less important is the fact that both Kurbas and Nijinska chose to work with the same theatre designers – Anatol Petrytsky and Vadym Meller. For Kurbas, who strove to astonish the world, contacts with Nijinska implied one more link to European culture, to progressive experiments in theatre art. However, when the Bolsheviks came to power in Ukraine in 1919, Nijinska’s experiments came under ever greater suspicion. It is possible to predict Nijinska’s future, had she stayed in Kyiv, by looking at Kurbas’s tragic lot. He was deprived of his theatre in 1933 and executed in 1937. Although Nijinska was unwilling to leave her Kyiv school and her beloved students, the official pressure upon her studio was mounting. At the same time, in Switzerland, her brother’s mental disease was growing worse. At the beginning of 1921, after painful hesitation, Nijinska decided to leave Kyiv and escape over the Polish border. Despite her students’ endeavour to keep the École functioning, it was soon abandoned. For Nijinska, however, the invaluable artistic experience acquired in Kyiv both helped her towards a brilliant European career and provided the springboard to world fame.

NOTES 1 Les’ Kurbas, ‘Na hrani (pro Molodyi teatr),’ Mystetstvo (Kyiv) 1 (1919) 18. 2 Editors’ note: Michel/Michael/Mikhail Mordkin (1880–1944) finally settled in the USA in 1924, where he founded a ballet school (Mordkin Ballet, 1926; later the New Mordkin Ballet, 1937, the forerunner of the Ballet Theatre, now the American Ballet Theatre). 3 Editors’ note: Actor Stepan Bondarchuk recalled that Mordkin ‘sang’ with his body; in turn, the actors attempted to imitate that expressiveness. While this was difficult for some of the actors, their director, Kurbas, seemed to achieve it with a considerable level of skill, as he danced the part of the sheik in Aziade, a ballet composed by I. Hiutel with Mordkin’s choreography. Stepan Bondarchuk, ’Molodyi teatr,’ in Berezil: Les’ Kurbas iz tvorchoi spadshchyny, ed. M.H. Labins’kyi (Kyiv: Dnipro, 1988) 143, 165.

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4 Michel/Mikhail Fokin/Fokine (1880–1942) was a groundbreaking Russian dancer and choreographer. He was accepted in the Imperial Mariinskii Theatre in St Petersburg in 1898 and joined Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in Paris in 1909. He remained the main choreographer of the Diaghilev troupe till 1912 and collaborated with Ballets Russes again in 1914. He moved to Sweden in 1918, then to the USA in 1921. He had a dancing studio in New York 1924–42 and continued to appear on stage till 1933. 5 A.A. Smirnov, ‘Ritm i tanets,’ Tvorchestvo (Kharkiv) 3 (1919) 32–5. 6 Editors’ note: Alexandra Exter (1882–1949) travelled between Moscow, Kyiv, and Paris, where she finally settled in 1924, and where she continued to work on stage and interior design. Among her famous works are the costumes for the silent film Aelita (1924). 7 V. Chistiakova [Chystiakova], ‘Glavy iz vospominanii [Letters to V. Gakkebush (V. Hakkebush)],’ Teatr 4 (1992) 82. 8 See Lynn Garafola and Nancy Van Norman Baer, eds, The Ballets Russes and Its World (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1999); Robert Johnson, ‘Ritual and Abstraction in Nijinska’s Les Noces,’ Dance Chronicle 10:2 (1987) 147–69. 9 For a detailed discussion of the choreography of Les Noces (1924), the process of its creation, and its Kyivan origins, see Maria Ratanova’s introduction to the Russian edition of Nijinska’s Early Memoirs: ‘Bronislava Nijinskaia: V teni legendy o brate,’ in B. Nijinskaia Ranniie vospominaniia, vol. 1 (Moscow: Artist. Rezhissior. Teatr, 1999) 5–61. 10 A. Efros, ‘Vvedenie [Introduction],’ in Kamerny Teatr i ego khudozhniki (Moscow: Izdanie Vserossiiskogo teatral’nogo obshchestva, 1934) xxiv. 11 A. Tairov, Zapiski rezhissiora. Stat’i. Besedy. Rechi. Pis’ma (Moscow: Vserossiiskoe teatral’noe obshchestvo, 1970) 172. 12 Editors’ note: Nina Vetrova, granddaughter of Vadym Meller, insists that Meller’s striking paintings of Bronislava Nijinska dancing (‘Mephisto,’ ‘Fear’) were not images revealing costume design, but rather notations for choreographic movement. Telephone conversation with Irena R. Makaryk, 5 May 2007. The editors are grateful for this insight into Meller’s work. 13 Bronislava Nijinska, ‘On Movement and the School of Movement,’ in Nancy Van Norman Baer, A Dancer’s Legacy (San Francisco: Fine Arts Museums of San Fransisco, 1986) 85–8. 14 Ibid.

The Highest Power ‘Get dressed for the execution!’ – someone shouted and pounded on the door. I awoke. The wind had opened a window. Everything was green and the sky looked kinder. And above the city a giant piano played … I understood – it was Resurrection Day.

antistrophe I’ll never fall in love with a woman who doesn’t have a musical ear. I pray not to the Spirit itself – nor to Matter. The point: without the spirit of music socialism cannot be established even with the most powerful guns. Pavlo Tychyna, Instead of Sonnets or Octaves, 1920

Translated from the Ukrainian by Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipps

12 Kyiv, the 1920s, and Modernism in Music dagmara turchyn-duvirak

In his essay ‘The Generation of 1914 and Modernism,’ Robert Wohl offers the concept of the succession of historical generations as an effective ‘explanation for social and cultural change.’1 It would be hard to find a more convincing confirmation of Wohl’s theory of generational succession than the example of Ukrainian music of the 1920s. Indeed, between January 1921 and April 1922 the three most notable Ukrainian composers of the middle generation – Mykola Leontovych, Yakiv Stepovy, and Kyrylo Stetsenko – died under tragic circumstances,2 leaving many ambitious plans unfinished. At the same time, many musicians, including the prominent composer and choir conductor Oleksander Koshyts and the highly talented composer, pianist, and musicologist Fedir Yakymenko, fled the country after the defeat of the Ukrainian Revolution and the Ukrainian National Republic. Thus, the music created in Ukraine in the 1920s was represented almost exclusively by a new young generation born in the late 1880s and early 1890s – Mykhailo Verykivsky, Pylyp Kozytsky, Levko Revutsky, Borys Liatoshynsky, Viktor Kosenko, and others. Thanks to their furious activity, musical life in the early years of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic became extremely intense, rich, and diverse. The best achievements of the talented representatives of this ambitious generation not only reflected the most advanced ideas of the Western modern music of those years; they also offered original and unique variants of modernism, with distinct Ukrainian traits deeply rooted in the national traditions. In earlier studies on Ukrainian art and music of the 1920s, scholars acknowledged and, sometimes, overestimated the positive role that the Communist government – at least during the NEP period – played in the rapid development in music. Indeed, it is hard not to agree with the historian Orest Subtelny that the ‘multifaceted outburst of creative energy was possible because the Communist party, concerned primarily with maintaining its political hegemony, had not attempted yet to control cultural development.’3 It also helped, especially in the early 1920s, that the cultural policy in Soviet Ukraine was formulated and directed by such prominent ‘national communists’ as Oleksander Shumsky, Mykola Skrypnyk, and Hryhory Hrynko. Thanks to their personal involvement and promotion of the processes of Ukrainianization (officially accepted in 1923 at the Twelfth Party Congress), Ukrainian culture of that period could count on state support.

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12.1 Mykola Leontovych, in the 1910s (YHOD)

Nevertheless, other factors also greatly contributed to the phenomenal cultural achievements of the 1920s. First of all, in previous decades, Ukrainian culture had reached a high level of artistic maturity. During the period between 1900 and 1916, Ukrainian music, like other branches of Ukrainian artistic creativity – literature, painting, theatre, and architecture – became involved with the radical movements and currents of contemporary Western art. For instance, the vocal and instrumental compositions of the Ukrainians Fedir Yakymenko and Vasyl Barvinsky, written between 1907 and 1915, include quite original interpretations of musical Impressionism that became extremely influential and were vigorously discussed in most European countries in the pre-war years. The various works of Stanyslav Liudkevych of the same period manifested the strong influence of the Austrian Secession. The vocal miniatures of Yakiv Stepovy (a younger brother of Fedir Yakymenko) set to the poems of Oleksander Oles had a distinctive Symbolist flavour. The operas of Borys Yanovsky (two of which, Madadzhara and Two Pierrots, were performed at the Kyiv City Opera in 1907–8) displayed the young composer’s wide range of innovative Western influences – from Maurice Maeterlinck’s Symbolism and Oscar Wilde’s Decadence to Richard Strauss’s Expressionism. Even the patriarch of the Ukrainian national Romantic style, Mykola Lysenko, in his last operatic works, such as Eneida (The Aeneid, 1910) and Nocturne (1912), caught the ‘modernist bug,’ expressing the strong influence of the fashionable Western trends – Secession and early Neoclassical (or, more strictly speaking, NeoBaroque) tendencies.

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Moreover, Ukrainian musical development in the decade directly preceding the twenties was enormously stimulated by the opening of long-awaited institutions of higher education: music conservatories in Kyiv and Odesa in 1913, and in Kharkiv in 1917.4 In previous years, musically gifted Ukrainians, especially those with aspirations of becoming composers, had been forced to complete their education far from their native land. While Western Ukrainians under Austria-Hungary travelled to Prague for their studies (Vasyl Barvinsky, Nestor Nyzhankivsky, Roman Savytsky, Mykola Kolessa), Vienna (Stanyslav Liudkevych, later Stefania TurkevychLukiianovych), or Berlin (Antin Rudnytsky), Eastern Ukrainians in the Russian Empire traditionally received their education in St Petersburg (both brothers Yakymenko), or Moscow (Mykola Roslavets). Some, such as Barvinsky, Yakymenko, and Stepovy, maintained strong links with Ukraine while working in Prague, Paris, or St Petersburg. Others, such as Yanovsky, shared their time and creative energy between Ukrainian and Russian musical centres. Many, unfortunately for Ukrainian music, completely assimilated into other cultures, thus contributing to the foreign, mainly Russian, artistic heritages. With the opening of conservatories in major Ukrainian centres, the situation changed in a positive way. Many prominent musicians, especially those of Ukrainian origin or with strong Ukrainian connections, came to work in Ukraine, educating and training talented Ukrainian youth. Among the most influential pedagogues were the composer and conductor Reinhold Glière, pianists Hryhory Beklemishev, Volodymyr Pukhalsky, Hryhory Khodorovsky, and Marian Dombrovsky; violinists Mykhailo Erdenko, Pavlo Kokhansky, and Oleksy Kolakovsky; musicologists Boleslav Yavorsky and Yevhen Ryb (Kyiv); composer Semen Bohatyriov, conductor Illia Slatin, pianists Oleksander Horovits and Vladimir Drozdov, and violinists Oleksander Mohylevsky and Oleksander Metner (Kharkiv); and composers Porfyry Molchanov and Vasyly Zolotariov (Odesa). Thus, the new generation of Ukrainian composers that became responsible for the brilliant achievements of the 1920s had been the first in the twentieth century to have been brought up and professionally trained in their homeland. Finally, the Revolution and establishment of the independent Ukrainian National Republic in November 1917 had created a tremendous stimulus that inspired and defined the vigorous trajectory of Ukrainian music. Despite extreme political instability, harsh economic conditions, famine, and war, it was during the brief period of Ukrainian independence that the most ambitious plans and projects were conceived. Kyiv, the capital of the UNR (Ukrainian National Republic), turned into an exuberant centre of Ukrainian cultural activity. Such prominent Ukrainian musicians as Kyrylo Stetsenko and Mykola Leontovych returned to Kyiv from the obscure provincial towns where they had been forced to live because of the hostility of the tsarist regime. They were joined by Yakiv Stepovy, who came to Kyiv from St Petersburg.5 Together with other prominent musicians who were already living and working in Kyiv – Boleslav Yavorsky, Hryhory Beklemishev, Klyment Kvitka, and Oleksander Koshyts – they actively engaged in the creation of new music projects. The ambitious projects of those years included the reformation of the Ukrainian music educational system, and the reorganization of most musical institutions such as music theatres, choruses, and orchestras. Kyrylo Stetsenko, as a tireless member of the Music Department of the General Secretariat (part of the first government of

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the independent UNR), worked on the plans for the transformation of the infrastructure of the musical educational system in Ukraine, which included everything from a wide net of elementary music schools to the music institutes and music faculties at the Kyiv and Kamianets-Podilsky Universities. Both Stetsenko and Leontovych prepared for publication textbooks for music schools. The prominent ethnomusicologist Klyment Kvitka recorded and published two volumes of Ukrainian folk melodies sung by his wife, the renowned Ukrainian poet Lesia Ukrainka. Boleslav Yavorsky founded the People’s Conservatory, with the goal of bringing the best achievements of world music to the broadest circles of the general public in Ukraine. Among other important initiatives of 1917–19 were the organization of the First National Choir (artistic director and conductor Kyrylo Stetsenko),6 the Republican Choral Kapelle (conductor Oleksander Koshyts),7 the Banduryst Kapelle, the State Republican Symphonic Orchestra (conductor Oleksander Horily), and the State Ukrainian Music Drama Theatre (stage and film director Les Kurbas, composer Yakiv Stepovy, stage designer Anatol Petrytsky).8 Perhaps, the most significant cultural outcome of the short and dramatic years of Ukrainian independence was found not in actual ‘material’ results, but in the grand perspectives that opened up before the Ukrainian artistic intelligentsia: for the first time, Ukrainian culture could view itself, in Oleh Ilnytzkyj’s words, ‘not as a subsystem or a complement, but as a complete world in its own right.’9 For the young musicians Mykhailo Verykivsky, Pylyp Kozytsky, Levko Revutsky, Borys Liatoshynsky, who in 1917–20 studied in the classes of such active organizers of musical life as Reinhold Glière and Boleslav Yavorsky, the vision of a new Ukrainian music that in the nearest future would rival the highest achievements of European musical culture became a decisive idea that inspired and guided their activity during the next decade.10 Therefore, though from the political point of view the year 1921 marked the beginning of a completely different, Bolshevik, period for Ukraine (and, as later events revealed, perhaps, the most tragic one in Ukraine’s history), in actual culture-making, the Ukrainian music intelligentsia of the twenties continued to pursue agendas formulated in previous years, especially those of national independence. Pursuing a Ukrainian musical cultural revival, talented youth consciously oriented themselves on the newest Western modernist trends. The alliance of national ideas with modernist aesthetics became one of the most characteristic traits of Ukrainian musical modernism of the innovative 1920s. As was indicated at the beginning of the essay, the new phase in Ukrainian musical culture coincided with a dramatic change of generations. The merciless murder of Mykola Leontovych in January 1921 immediately triggered a process of consolidation of Ukrainian musical forces. The Leontovych Memorial Citizens’ Committee, formed in Kyiv in February 1921, was reorganized in 1922 into the Leontovych Music Society (Muzychne Tovarystvo im. Leontovycha), and became the main creative musical association of those years. Centred in Kyiv, the Society opened branches in all the major cities of Soviet Ukraine and, at its height, included more than three hundred members and thirty ensembles. From 1921 to 1927 the Society, whose goal was, as its statute proclaimed, ‘the growth and development of musical culture in Ukraine in the wide sense of the term,’11 defined, integrated, and coordinated music politics in Ukraine through its various sections

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12.2 Book cover by Vasyl Krychevsky of Dmytro Revutsky’s collection of Ukrainian Dumas and Historical Songs

and chapters. The Society’s vigorous organizational activity resulted in the founding of numerous musical performing ensembles – about nine hundred (!) choirs (the most acclaimed were the Leontovych Kapelle-Studio, the Chorans – the students’ choir that performed without a conductor – and, in particular, Dumka, directed by Nestor Horodovenko);12 various chamber instrumental and vocal ensembles (among others – the Leontovych and Tchaikovsky string quartets and the Stetsenko and Stepovy vocal quartets); the revitalization of the repertoire of the leading symphonic orchestras; and the reformation of musical theatre and opera. The Ethnographic Section, headed by prominent musical folklorists Klyment Kvitka and Dmytro Revutsky (the older brother of the composer Levko Revutsky), took an active part in organizing and directing the activity of the Bureau of Musical

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Ethnography within VUAN – Vseukrainskoi Akademii Nauk (All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences), and of the Faculty of Musicology at the Lysenko Music and Drama Institute in Kyiv. Kvitka’s impressive collection of 743 Ukrainian folk melodies (1922), and Revutsky’s three-volume collection Zoloti kliuchi (The Golden Keys), published in 1926–9, became irreplaceable sources for the new wave of Ukrainian composers, who found in old folk melodies fresh modal, structural, and rhythmic ideas for their own innovative compositions. The Pedagogical Section of the Leontovych Society brought together the brightest intellectuals, who participated in the reorganization of institutions of higher education – the Lysenko Music and Drama Institute and the Kyiv Musical College (formed out of the Lysenko Music and Drama School and the Kyiv Conservatory), and in the opening and expansion of a wide net of music schools and various instructional courses. At the Society’s weekly Tuesday meetings (the so-called Vivtorky) philosophers, art theorists, historians, and practitioners discussed the most pressing problems of modern art.13 Among the brilliant music thinkers in the arts who generated the unique ferment that had impact on the creativity of many in the 1920s were such prominent personalities as Fedir Shmit, Boleslav Yavorsky, Hryhory Beklemishev, Mykola Hrinchenko, and Les Kurbas. Fedir Shmit, a VUAN academic who led the Faculty of Musicology at the Lysenko Music and Drama Institute, elaborated an original concept of the cyclic succession of art styles, in which the modernist period was considered as an inevitable stage predetermined by the natural evolution of art development.14 Boleslav Yavorsky, the outstanding musicologist and pedagogue, created a fundamental theory of ‘modal rhythm,’ in which he not only offered a universal classification of the modal structures of European music, but also developed a unique system of symmetrical scales as a modern alternative to the traditional major-minor tonal system.15 Yavorsky’s ‘symmetrical scales’ predated almost by forty years Olivier Messiaen’s similar theory of the ‘modes of limited transposition.’16 His innovative ideas had an enormous impact on his students in Ukraine: in the 1910s, on Mykola Leontovych, who took private lessons with Yavorsky; in the early 1920s, on Mykhailo Verykivsky and Pylyp Kozytsky, who used Yavorsky’s scales directly in their works. Hryhory Beklemishev was a prominent pianist and educator who had studied with Vasily Safonov in Moscow (his fellow student and close friend was Aleksandr Scriabin) and the famous Ferruccio Busoni in Berlin. From 1924 to 1928 Beklemishev performed at the Lysenko Music and Drama Institute a course of open concertslectures, Muzychno-Istorychni Demonstratsii (Musical-Historical Demonstrations), in which he encompassed practically the entire history of European music. Since the music recording industry was in its infancy then, these ‘historical concerts’ were a popular and necessary form of familiarizing the audience with the achievements of music culture. The gigantic cycle of 177 concerts, which included about 2000 works performed by Beklemishev throughout four years in Kyiv, did not have an analogue in world practice. A distinct feature (typical for those years) was that the historic perspective of Beklemishev’s ‘Demonstrations’ was directed both towards the present and the future: approximately one-third of his repertoire consisted of contemporary music, and practically all modern movements and currents were

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12.3 Pylyp Kozytsky. Portrait by Anatol Petrytsky (NAMU)

introduced in his programs. Many works of Busoni, Karol Szymanowski, Paul Hindemith, Arthur Honegger, Francis Poulenc, Darius Milhaud, Georges Auric, and other leaders of Western modern music were known in Kyiv before their first performances in Moscow or Petrograd (Leningrad). The bustling musical scene of Kyiv in the 1920s was also inspired by Les Kurbas’s innovative work in theatre. From its founding, the Leontovych Society involved, in addition to musicians, poets (Pavlo Tychyna), writers (Stepan Vasylchenko, Hnat Khotkevych), literary and art historians (Serhy Yefremov, Danylo Shcherbakivsky), artists (Mykola Burachek, Vasyl Krychevsky, Yukhym Mykhailiv, Anatol Petrytsky), and actors (Ivan Marianenko).17 Les Kurbas, whose acquaintance with Kyivan musical circles started during his involvement with the Ukrainian State Music Drama Theatre in 1919 (he had staged operas in Western Ukraine),

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became one of the founders and an active member of the Leontovych Society. Together with his fellow teachers Anatoly Butsky, Pylyp Kozytsky, and Fedir Shmit, Kurbas organized a seminar at the Lysenko Music and Drama Institute that studied the interactions of the arts.18 At the musical-scientific faculty (MuzychnoNaukovyi Fakultet), the students studied, besides the various music disciplines, the history of drama, dance, and fine arts.19 The training of the young vocalists and choral conductors included courses in rhythmic movement, gymnastics, and the art of oratory and rhetoric,20 a program similar to the courses provided for young actors at Kurbas’s Berezil. Special attention was paid to Émile Jaques-Dalcroze’s eurhythmics system of musical instruction, which was taught at the Institute and discussed in the press.21 After the Society’s meeting on 26 June 1923, Kurbas’s students gave an impressive performance based on the works of Pavlo Tychyna, accompanying his poetry with dramatic choreography. The choral works of Stetsenko, Kozytsky, Verykivsky, and Verkhovynets, performed by the Leontovych KapelleStudio, were also included in the program. Kurbas’s revolutionary ideas on theatre and his active promotion of collaboration among the arts revitalized various performing arts and stimulated young Ukrainian musicians, especially Verykivsky and Kozytsky, in their experimentation with new musical-theatrical forms. Among the experiments directly influenced by Kurbas were efforts to bring theatrical elements into traditional choral performances. For instance, at the premieres of the choral compositions Koval (The Blacksmith) by Mykhailo Verykivsky and Ryiemo, ryiemo (Digging, Digging) by Pylyp Kozytsky, the members of the choir not only sang but also expressed the poetic images in the music with gestures and rhythmical body movements. Also, Kurbas’s incorporation of cinematic techniques, as well as the actual use of film in his production of Dzhimmi Higginz (Jimmie Higgins), in 1923, had a strong impact on the composers of new Ukrainian operas. Borys Yanovsky used similar means in his opera Vybukh (The Explosion, 1927), as did Volodymyr Yorysh in his Poema pro stal (Poem about Steel, 1932). The Leontovych Society was also a music publishing house as part of the DVU – Derzhavne Vydavnytstvo Ukrainy (the Ukrainian State Publishing House) – and the publisher of the periodical Muzyka. Mykola Hrinchenko, a young Ukrainian music historian and the author of the first history of Ukrainian music (1922), became an editor of this foremost professional music periodical, which was published in 1923–5 as a monthly and from 1927 on as a bi-monthly journal. Muzyka attracted the best art historians and musicologists (Boleslav Yavorsky, Fedir Shmit, Fedir Ernst, Danylo Shcherbakivsky, Arnold Alshvang, and Anatoly Butsky), music critics (Yury Masiutyn, who published under the pen name of Ya. Yurmas), pianists (Hryhory Kohan), and composers (Pylyp Kozytsky, Mykhailo Verykivsky, Borys Yanovsky, and Leonid Lisovsky), becoming the special publication of the Leontovych Society. The diverse musical issues debated in its pages ranged from general concepts of music aesthetics, philosophy, psychology, theory, history, and ethnomusicology to critical analysis of the newest works of contemporary composers and to chronicling musical life in Ukraine and abroad. But the greatest efforts of the members of the Leontovych Society were put into actual music-making. The Society’s kompozytorska maisternia (composers’ workshop) brought together talented young musicians, who at the famous Saturday

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12.4 Mykhailo Verykivsky

meetings (analogous to the Tuesday debates) performed and discussed their new music scores. The best works were recommended for performance and publication, and were reviewed in the press. To promote and popularize the latest achievements of Ukrainian composers, the Society organized an exhibition, ‘Seven Years of Musical Culture in Ukraine,’ in 1925 and, in 1926, the ‘All-Ukrainian Day of Music.’ Perhaps the most productive initiative was the All-Ukrainian Competition for creating the best music compositions that took place in 1927. As a result, Ukrainian music was enriched by such masterpieces as Symphony no.2 by Levko Revutsky; Overture on Four Ukrainian Folk Themes by Liatoshynsky; and the choral dyptych Dyvnyi flot (The Miraculous Fleet) by Kozytsky. The conscious effort of Ukrainian composers to connect their creative efforts with those of the leaders of the Western European and, even more broadly speaking, world musical culture was reflected in various documents of those times. The archives of the Leontovych Music Society have preserved correspondence with British, Austrian, Italian, German, French, Polish, Czechoslovakian, Chinese, American, and Canadian editors of major music periodicals and music publishing houses on the topic of the mutual exchange of music publications.22 Special attention was paid to the activity of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM), which had been founded in 1922 and had, since then, promoted the works of the harbingers of the world musical avant-garde at annual festivals. As early as the summer of 1923, the journal Muzyka published the statutes of ISCM,23 and in subsequent years continued to review its activities.24 In 1926, the most radical group of composers, led by Borys Liatoshynsky (other members included Levko Revutsky, Mykhailo Verykivsky, Ihor Belza, Mykola Radzievsky, Fedir Nadenenko, and Matvy Gozenpud), founded within the Leontovych Society the Asotsiiatsiia Suchasnoi Muzyky (Association of Contemporary Music). At their regular gatherings (twenty such meetings took place 1926–8), the members of ASM performed, analysed, and discussed, among others, the latest works of Western modernists Maurice Ravel, Arthur Honegger, Alfredo Casella, Arnold Schönberg, Paul Hindemith, Cyril Scott, Béla Bartók, and Igor Stravinsky, as well as the compositions of Kyiv musical radicals Borys Liatoshynsky, Levko Revutsky, Mykhailo Verykivsky, and Ihor Belza. Considering ASM as, in actuality, the Ukrainian branch

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of ISCM, the executive committee of the association officially petitioned the Soviet authorities for membership in the International Society. Although, in the darkening political atmosphere of the late twenties, these intentions were never realized,25 the vigorous activity of ASM had played a vital role in promoting the newest musical ideas of Western culture as well as supporting and encouraging the boldest experiments of Ukrainian musical modernists. The musical heritage of the 1920s is quite impressive for its variety of genres and forms, juxtaposition of ideas and themes, and diversity of aesthetic tendencies and stylistic currents. In the choral, symphonic, operatic, chamber instrumental, and vocal works of the Ukrainian composers of those years, the characteristic traits of practically all the main modernist trends of contemporary Europe found a convincing and highly original embodiment. Constructivism26 and Urbanism,27 Neoclassicism,28 Expressionism,29 and Neofolklorism30 were stylistic trends that whimsically interlaced compositions, often written at the same time by the same authors. Although the experts of Ukrainian culture have explained such a juxtaposition of styles as an indication of some weakness or ‘underdevelopment’ of the Ukrainian modernist movement, in the case of the music of the twenties, it was rather a common characteristic: a similar interplay of styles, techniques, and aesthetics may be found in the works of Sergei Prokofiev, Béla Bartók, Paul Hindemith, and the French group Les Six of the respective time period. Impressionism continued to play an important role in the music of the twenties. In the works of Mykola Koliada and Levko Revutsky, impressionistic means are often integrated with Ukrainian folkloric sources, bringing to life unexpectedly original and nationally coloured results. The best examples of such a style are the works of Levko Revutsky, especially his Symphony no. 2, Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, the choral-symphonic poem Shchoroku (Every Year), and Piano Preludes op. 7 and 11. The organic synthesis of original folklore motifs with the luminous tones of a delicate impressionistic palette in his individual composer’s style resembles the similar achievements of his contemporaries Manuel de Falla in Spain and Karol Szymanowski in Poland. By contrast, in the compositions of Borys Liatoshynsky– art songs to the lyrics of Konstantin Balmont and the vocal cycle Misiachni tini (Moon Shadows)– subtly shaped impressionistic harmonic verticals combined with deliberately high ‘glassy’ timbres and refined transparent texture became the characteristic means for his individual expression of images of unattainable dreams and illusory, inaccessible ideals. One of the most fashionable trends of the twenties, Urbanism, brought into Ukrainian music a vision of the contemporary industrial city with all the attributes of a new urban epoch – airplanes, trains, and sports cars, factories and skyscrapers. The titles of various compositions of the twenties reflected the fascination of Ukrainian composers with the urban theme: Opera pro stal (Opera about Steel) by Volodymyr Yorysh, Industrialnyi moment (Industrial Moment) by Pylyp Kozytsky, Try Hymny industriialnoi doby (Three Hymns of the Industrial Epoch) by Antin Rudnytsky, Na Dniprobudi (At the Dnipro Hydroelectric Station) by Yuly Meitus, Avto (Automobile), and Carousel by Vsevolod Zaderatsky.31 The modern subject prompted an active experimentation with the means of musical expression – from the incorporation of the non-musical sounds and noises of contemporary industrial

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12.5 A page from Levko Revutsky’s Symphony no. 2, first movement, mm. 5–10

machinery, planes, and cars, to the introduction within traditional musical forms of the rhythms and motifs of the modern popular urban music of the café, circus, and cabaret. For example, Borys Yanovsky used both the naturalistic ‘music of noises’ and popular cabaret tunes in his opera Vybukh (The Explosion). The innovative 1927 stage production (directed by Volodymyr Manzy) combined live action scenes with rapidly changing cinematographic episodes that depicted the ‘industrial process’ at a coal mine.32 The fusion of classical genres with American jazz was another typical manifestation of musical Urbanism of the twenties.33 In the works of Mykola Koliada, Yuly Meitus, and Levko Revutsky, jazz elements often actively interacted with folk music. One of the most successful examples of such interplay can be found in

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12.6 Levko Revutsky (CSPA)

Revutsky’s vocal cycle Halytski pisni (Galician Songs), where the popular folk song melody of Oy, susidko (O, Neighbour) is accompanied by typical harsh jazz harmonies and exuberant syncopated rhythms. There were also strong influences of Constructivism, the aesthetic movement that affected mostly Ukrainian architecture and visual arts. In the composers’ activity of the 1920s, constructivist tendencies provoked active experimentation with the elementary entities of music – chords, scales, modes, intervals – that were treated as the unitary building material for a musical structure. For instance, Pylyp Kozytsky found a cementing element for his choral cycle Voloshky (The Cornflowers) in the musical transcription of the name of his friend and poet Vasyl Ellan-Blakytny, by building on various combinations of the tones B-a-si-l E-l-la(n) the contrasting pieces of the cycle. Experimentation with unusual modal structures defined the works of Mykhailo Verykivsky, the talented disciple and follower of Boleslav Yavorsky. His Three Piano Preludes, written in the mid-twenties, test the various constructive principles of Yavorsky’s modes. In the First Prelude a tritone interval becomes a centralizing element of the composition. The formative basis of the Second Prelude is Yavorsky’s characteristic ‘natural major scale,’ which in C-major includes D-sharp and A-flat. The building material for the Third Prelude contains the tones of the augmented scale. Strict ‘constructivist’ principles of composition became a trademark of Verykivsky’s individual style. Later, especially in the 1950s, he continued working both theoretically and practically on the development of Yavorsky’s principles, and devised his own, original modal system. Verykivsky defined his system as a 49-tone diatonic ‘super-modality,’ where seven seven-note modes (Ionian, Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, Mixolydian, Aeolian, Locrian) are integrated into one ‘polymodal’ scale.34 Neoclassicism, the musical movement that, owing mainly to the inspiring success of Igor Stravinsky, became the dominant musical current in Western Europe during 1920s and 1930s, found its representation in Ukrainian music mostly in the compositions of Viktor Kosenko. In the piano cycle of 1928–30, Odynadtsiat etudiv u formi starovynnyh tantsiv (Eleven Études in the Forms of Old Dances), the author used a wide range of Baroque and early-classical formal patterns. The Courante in

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12.7 Mykhailo Verykivsky. Portrait by Anatol Petrytsky (NAMU)

E minor refers to the music of the suites of Johann Sebastian Bach; the Gavotte in B minor resembles the melodic formulas of Christoph Willibald Gluck; the Bourrée in A major is based on the clavier style of Domenico Scarlatti; the Minuet in E-flat major brings to mind analogous minuets of Jean-Philippe Rameau; and the Passacaglia in G minor combines the traditions of Bach’s monumental organ improvisations with the grandiose style of the late-Romantic variation cycles of Johannes Brahms, Franz Liszt, and Sergei Rachmaninov. Notably, Kosenko found the prototypes for his cycle not only in contemporary Western composers’ practice, but also in the national Ukrainian musical treasury: the analogous piano cycle Ukrainian Suite (in the Form of Old Dances) was written by Mykola Lysenko in 1869. Among the movements that contributed the most to the brilliant achievements of Ukrainian music in the twenties was Neofolklorism. In their neofolkloric

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12.8 Victor Kosenko (CSPA)

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12.9 Borys Liatoshynsky

tendencies, young Ukrainian composers envisaged the very spirit of their time: the search for new pathways of musical development by revisiting and re-exploring their own ancient roots. Like their contemporary Béla Bartók in Hungary,35 they discovered revolutionary ideas for modern tone, rhythmic, metric, and textural organization in national folk sources. Practically all Ukrainian composers of that time paid tribute to Neofolklorism, finding their own individual solutions to interaction with folklore. For Levko Revutsky, such important characteristics of Ukrainian folk songs as chromatic variance of modal tones and irregularity of metro-rhythmic patterns became the vital impulses for creating his own highly original stylistic manner with expressively exalted melodic themes, intricate chromatic harmonic-polyphonic texture, and constantly changing contours of whimsical rhythmic structures (Halytski pisni, Symphony no. 2). For Borys Liatoshynsky, the ‘discovery’ of ancient ‘layers’ of Ukrainian calendric ritual folk songs, with their hidden ‘barbaric’ energy and ‘primitive’ scale organization limited to the repetition of three to four tones within an interval no wider than a fourth, resulted in the devising of harsh, sharply dissonant, harmonic complexes, where the logic of linear succession of the tones of the folk tune shaped the vertical structure of quartal chords (Overture on Four Ukrainian Folk Themes, opera Zolotyi obruch [The Golden Ring]). For Mykola Koliada, the active study of Ukrainian folklore brought to his compositions such fresh and innovative devices as polytonality, polymodality, the simultaneous combinations of various metric and rhythmic patterns, and so on (choral arrangements of Ukrainian folk songs, Sonata for Violin and Piano). Another significant manifestation of neofolkloric tendencies can be found in experimentation with musical genres and forms, in which the composers tried to fuse the traits of Western European forms with traditional Ukrainian music. The most successful genre ‘centaurs’ of this kind were the opera-duma Duma Chornomorska (Black Sea Duma) by Borys Yanovsky and the oratorio-duma Duma pro divku-branku Marusiu Bohuslavku (Duma about Marusia Bohuslavka) by Mykhailo Verykivsky. In both works, the composers embarked upon the task of enriching the classical musical forms of opera and oratorio with the specific characteristics of the duma, the Ukrainian folk-epic genre.36

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Finally, the vigorous development of music in the 1920s was highly influenced and prompted by Expressionism, a movement that, in the heated discussions in Ukrainian artistic and literary circles, was identified with the most advanced, radical wings of Western modernism. In music, Expressionism affected the works of Ukrainian composers in various ways. In Pylyp Kozytsky’s choral miniature Holod (The Famine), set to the lyrics of Maik Yohansen, the distinct expressionistic means –sharply dissonant melodic lines, combined into a dark, thick polyphonic choral texture – embodied the tragic images of famished Ukrainian villages of 1919. In Mykhailo Verykivsky’s vocal cycle Hymny sv. Terezi (Hymns to St Teresa), set to poems by Mykhail Semenko, the tonally ambiguous vocal part, complemented by deliberately distorted splashes of piano accompaniment, created a mystical atmosphere of spiritual and, at the same time, sexually charged exaltation, analogous to that of the Ognennyi angel (The Fiery Angel) of Sergei Prokofiev. Perhaps the deepest impact of Expressionism can be found in the works of Borys Liatoshynsky. Like other fellow-composers of his generation, in the early 1920s he had tried out various modern stylistic manners – from Impressionism, closely linked with symbolist poetic images (art songs to poems by Friedrich Hebbel and Konstantin Balmont, the vocal cycle Misiachni Tini), to Neoclassicism (String Quartet no. 2), and Neofolklorism (Overture on Four Ukrainian Folk Themes, the opera Zolotyi obruch). However, by 1925 he had formed his own original expressive musical language: nervous, highly agitated, and sharply dissonant, often openly atonal, and charged with an extreme intensity of conflicting emotions. Among the best achievements of Liatoshynsky’s expressionist style of the twenties are the piano cycle Vidobrazhennia (Reflections), an astonishingly mature composition that demonstrates the author’s virtuosity in using various means of polyphonic and variational transformations of a central thesis; and his String Quartet no. 3, which combines a high concentration of polar psychological states with an extremely brief, aphoristic form of musical expression (analogous to the chamber works of Arnold Schönberg and Anton Webern). By the late 1920s, the period of relative political tolerance and artistic pluralism had come to an abrupt end. In 1928, under severe criticism from the Soviet authorities and the newly formed, ideologically ‘correct,’ mass-oriented music associations (ARKU – Association of the Revolutionary Composers of Ukraine, and APMU – Association of Proletarian Composers of Ukraine), the Leontovych Society was forced to reorganize itself into VUTORM – Vseukrainske Tovarystvo Revoliutsiinykh Muzyk (All-Ukrainian Society of Revolutionary Musicians) – but to no avail. The periodical Muzyka was replaced by the monthly Muzyka masam (Music for the Masses), which in 1931 was renamed Muzyka mas (Music of the Masses), and its contents changed accordingly. Finally, in 1932, all Ukrainian music associations were dissolved, and Ukrainian composers became the subjects of the single Union of Soviet Composers, centred in Moscow and controlled by the Communist Party. Stalin’s repressions of the Ukrainian intelligentsia, which had started as early as 1930 (the first trial of Ukrainian intellectuals was held in the Kharkiv Opera House in March–April 1930), silenced music in Ukraine for the next three decades. All modernist experiments were abolished, condemned, and forbidden. Yanovsky died in 1933, Koliada in 1935, Kosenko in 1938. Dmytro Revutsky was murdered by the

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12.10 A page from Borys Liatoshynsky’s Otrazheniia (Ukrainian: Vidobrazhennia [Reflections]), no.1, mm.1–8

NKVD in 1941; Levko Revutsky stopped writing music after 1935. In order to survive in the 1930s and 1940s, Pylyp Kozytsky and Mykhailo Verykivsky significantly simplified the musical language of their works, which were thereafter dedicated to the glorification of the Stalinist epoch. (Only in the late 1950s did Verykivsky resume the modal experiments that had marked his compositions of the 1920s.) The only composer who retained the aesthetic ideals of his youth was Borys Liatoshynsky: despite unbearable political pressure, endless accusations, and condemnation of his works as ‘bourgeois,’ ‘formalist,’ and ‘cacophonous,’ he continued composing music of high expressiveness, deep pain, and tragic explosiveness. Liatoshynsky’s symphonic and chamber works, especially his Second and Third

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Symphonies, have been acknowledged by post-Soviet scholars as perhaps the only truthful musical ‘documents’ of his time, embodying the composer’s personal reflections on tragic events in Ukraine under the Stalinist regime: the artificial famine of 1933, the Second World War, and Stalin’s execution of the Ukrainian intelligentsia.37 Liatoshynsky’s uncompromising aesthetic position inspired a new generation of talented innovators of Ukrainian music in the 1960s. Once again, capitalizing on a moment of cultural liberalization during the Khrushchev period of political ‘thaw,’ a gifted young cohort – Valentyn Sylvestrov, Leonid Hrabovsky, Yevhen Stankovych, Ivan Karabyts, Vitaly Hodziatsky, and Volodymyr Zahortsev (all trained in Liatoshynsky’s composition class at the Kyiv Conservatory) – took up the task of rejuvenating Ukrainian music, which had been brutally suppressed some thirty years earlier.

NOTES 1 According to Wohl, there were four generations of modernists ‘separated by intervals of about fifteen years and increasingly conscious of themselves as constituting generational unities.’ The ‘historical uniqueness’ of the fourth generation, born in the late 1880s and early 1890s (the creative activity of the Ukrainian composers of the generation that will be discussed in this essay), in Wohl’s scheme was defined by the First World War: ‘They had been adolescents before the war; they were young adults between 1914 and 1918; and they had come into the full force of mature life after the war ended.’ See Robert Wohl, ‘The Generation of 1914 and Modernism,’ in Modernism: Challenges and Perspectives, ed. M. Chefdor, R.Quinones, and A.Wachtel (Urbana and Chicago: U of Illinois P: 1986) 66–78. 2 The latest publications of the archival documents, which have only recently become accessible to scholars, have confirmed that Mykola Leontovych was shot by a Cheka (predecessor of the KGB) agent on the night of 23 January 1921 in his father’s house. See Valentyna Kuzyk, ‘Iak zahynuv Leontovych,’ in Ukrains’kyi Muzychnyi Arkhiv, vol. 2 (Kyiv: Tsentrmuzinform, 1999) 17–18. K. Stetsenko and I. Stepovyi died of typhus in 1922. 3 Orest Subtelny, Ukraine: A History (Toronto, Buffalo, London: U of Toronto P, 1988) 394. 4 Even earlier, in 1904, the Lysenko Music and Drama School (Muzychno-dramatychna shkola im. M. Lysenka) was established in Kyiv. The school did not have a composers’ department; nevertheless, it played an important role in training such prominent musicians as Stetsenko and Koshyts’. 5 Approximately at the same time, Borys Ianovs’kyi and Mykola (Nikolai) Roslavets’ came to Kharkiv from St Petersburg and Moscow, committing themselves to the innovative processes of Ukrainian musical revival. 6 Stetsenko’s choir, touring Ukraine, actively promoted the ideas of Ukrainian independence. Pavlo Tychyna, a renowned poet, who toured with Stetsenko in 1920, wrote the fascinating novel-diary Podorozh z kapeloiu Stetsenka. See also Pavlo Tychyna, Iz shchodennykovyh zapysiv (Kyiv: Radians’kyi pys’mennyk, 1981). 7 Koshyts’s choir was initiated and sent abroad in 1919 by Petliura’s government, with the mission of propagating the musical culture of the independent Ukrainian state. From 1919 to 1924 the kapelle toured the countries of Europe and North and South

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America, with great success. See Oleksander Koshyts’, Z pisneiu cherez svit, 3 vols. (Winnipeg: Kul’tura i osvita, 1952–74). The first production, Lysenko’s opera Utoplena (The Drowned Maiden), opened the season on 28 July 1919, followed by the premiere of I. Hiutel’s ballet Aziade on 19 August. The productions of Moniuszko’s opera Halka and Lysenko’s operatic masterpiece Taras Bulba, personally directed by Kurbas, were ready to be shown to the Kyiv audience. However, on 30 August, the very day of the Halka’s premiere, Denikin’s army invaded Kyiv. His soldiers destroyed everything connected with Ukrainian culture, including the costumes and sets designed by Petryts’kyi for Moniuszko’s and Lysenko’s operas, as well as the musical scores. After this devastation, the State Ukrainian Music Drama Theatre did not resume its activity. See Vasyl’ Vasyl’ko, ‘U molodomu teatri,’ in Molodyi Teatr (Kyiv: Mystetstvo, 1991) 234. Oleh S. Ilnytzkyj, ‘Modeling Culture in the Empire: Ukrainian Modernism and the Death of the All-Russian Idea,’ in A. Kappeler, Z.E. Kohut, F.E. Sysyn, and M. von Hagen, eds, Culture, Nation, and Identity (Edmonton, Toronto: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, 2003) 314. The National Revolution, with its high hopes for the revival of Ukrainian culture, had a decisive effect on the formative years of the Ukrainian artistic generation of the 1920s. This explains some important differences between Ukrainian intellectuals and their Western contemporaries. In comparison with the disillusioned and sober art of the Western post-war generation, the works of the Ukrainian ‘generation of 1914’ manifest much more optimism and romantic vitality. The project of the Statute of the Leontovych Music Society was published in Ukrains’kyi Muzychnyi Arkhiv, vol. 2 (Kyiv: Tsentrmuzinform, 1999) 12. Dumka’s outstanding vocal qualities, virtuoso technique, and high artistry earned international recognition during its European concert tour in 1929. In Paris Dumka’s concerts were conducted by the renowned Russian émigré composer Aleksandr Glazunov and Ernest Ansermet, a Swiss conductor and the music director of Diaghilev’s famous Ballets Russes. See Dmytro Hrudyna, ‘Z “Dumkoiu” po Evropi,’ Visti VUTsVK 12 (1929). The archives of the Leontovych Music Society have preserved the project of the Society’s activity for 1922–7 (NBUV, Instytut Rukopysu, fond 50, no. 298–302). The project included the organization of musical-scientific debates (‘muzychno-naukovykh dysputiv’), the so-called Tuesdays (Vivtorky). For the period of 1924–5 alone, 24 such debates were planned. See Fedor Shmit, Iskusstvo, ego psihologiia, ego stilistika, ego evolutsia (Kharkov: KnigoIzdatel’stvo Soiuz, 1919). Iavors’kyi elaborated his theory in two major works: Stroenie muzykal’noi rechi (1908) and Struktura melodii (1929). See Iurii Kholopov, ‘Simmetrichnye lady v teoreticheskikh sistemakh Iavorskogo i Messiana,’ in Muzyka i sovremennost’, vol. 7 (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Muzyka, 1971) 247–93. In 1920 Pylyp Kozyts’kyi composed Seven Piano Preludes – portraits of his close friends and collaborators; among them were miniatures dedicated to Pavlo Tychyna, Mykhail Semenko, Iukhym Mykhailiv, and Les’ Kurbas. Today these are regarded as a vivid musical ‘document’ of the artistic brotherhood of that time.

340 Dagmara Turchyn-Duvirak 18 See Liu. Parkhomenko, ed., Istoriia ukrains’koi muzyky, vol. 4 (Kyiv: Naukova Dumka, 1992) 493. 19 See Muzyka (Kyiv) 2 (1923) 35. 20 See H. Tkachenko, ‘Z istorii stanovlennia kafedry khorovoho dyryhuvannia Kyivs’koi konservatorii,’ in Ukrains’ke muzykoznavstvo, vol. 25 (Kyiv: Muzychna Ukraina, 1990) 19–26. 21 See L. Kulakovs’kyi, ‘Rytmichna himnastyka Zh.Dal’kroza ta ii znachinnia,’ in Muzyka (Kyiv) 5–6 (1925) 209–214; and 7–8: 261–6. 22 NBUV, Instytut Rukopysu, fond 50, nos. 442, 443, 443a, 446, 450, 452, 454, 455, 456, 461, 464, and 465. 23 See Muzyka (Kyiv) 6–7 (1923): 29–32. 24 See ‘Mizhnarodnii Muzychnyi Festyval’ 1925 roku,’ in Muzyka (Kyiv) 9–10 (1925) 339–48. 25 The activity of ASM became a target of severe criticism by the members of the newly formed ARKU (Association of Revolutionary Composers of Ukraine), led by Valentyn Kostenko. See a summary of these polemics in Muzyka (Kharkiv) 1 (1927) 24–39. 26 Constructivism, the artistic and architectural movement of the 1920s–30s, mainly associated with artists Vladimir Tatlin and Aleksandr Rodchenko, and the activity of the German Bauhaus. In music, the term has been used in connection with compositions ‘displaying a high degree of evident structure, such as Webern.’ See Paul Griffiths, Encyclopedia of 20th-Century Music (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1986) 53. 27 The term Urbanism has reflected one of the distinct tendencies of the post-war European art – the fascination with the rapid growth of a modern city, its pace, machinery, transportation, and new urban cultural phenomena, such as the circus, music hall, and sports stadium. In Western music, Urbanistic trends can be found in the works of the French group Les Six, the early compositions of Paul Hindemith, George Antheil, and others. See Stefaniia Pavlyshyn, Muzyka dvadtsiatoho stolittia (Lviv: Vydavnytstvo BaK, 2005) 61. 28 Neoclassicism was one of the most influential aesthetic movements in European music between the two world wars. Among its chief stylistic characteristics are ‘objectivity and expressive restraint, … motivic clarity, textural transparency, formal balance, and reliance upon stylistic models.’ See Don Michael Randel, The Harvard Dictionary of Music, 4th ed. (Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London: Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 2003) 557. Stylistic models cover a wide range – from the general traits of the chosen period style (mostly of the pre-Romantic era – early Classical or Baroque) to individual composers’ styles, or even the specific compositions of the past centuries. Although Igor Stravinsky has been most commonly identified as the instigator of Neoclassicism, the movement was first theoretically manifested by Ferruccio Busoni, and was introduced in the works of many composers of that time – from Sergei Prokofiev and Maurice Ravel to Paul Hindemith, Alfredo Casella, and Aaron Copland. 29 Expressionism was the artistic current that dominated in German visual art, literature, and music between 1910 and 1925. Such distinctive traits of Expressionism in music as extreme subjectivism, distortion, exaggeration of emotions, and often desperate or violent, unreal, and nightmarish atmosphere, are most commonly associated with the atonal works of Arnold Schönberg, especially his monodrama Erwartung (Awaiting). Schönberg’s Erwartung, ‘with its fragmented text depicting the extremes of psychic

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disintegration, eerie forest setting, and violently evocative music shorn of virtually all traces of traditional tonal, thematic, and formal conventions, is perhaps the purest embodiment of the expressionist aesthetic in music’ (ibid. 303). Neofolklorism, the term used by musicologists to define the important trend in the work of some composers of the first third of the twentieth century that deliberately incorporated peasant folk music into a modern musical idiom. Béla Bartók was the most passionate advocate of Neofolklorism, proving by his brilliant scores that in the epoch of ‘international’ Modernism it was possible to remain ‘decisively Hungarian and yet European and cosmopolitan’ (Leon Botstein, ‘Out of Hungary: Bartók, Modernism and the Cultural Politics of Twentieth-Century Music,’ in Bartók and His World, ed. Peter Laki (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1995) 4. Other prominent representatives of Neofolklorism were Igor Stravinsky during his early ‘Russian’ period, Karol Szymanowski, and Manuel de Falla. Similar ‘urban’ compositions of Western composers of the same period included Pacific and Rugby by Arthur Honegger, Mouvements perpetuelles by Francis Poulenc, Airplane Sonata and Ballet mécanique by George Antheil, Energy by Carlos Chavez, Skyscrapers by John A. Carpenter, and many others. The direct influence of Les’ Kurbas’s Jimmie Higgins on the stage production of Vybukh seems to be undeniable, though it has never been acknowledged by the music scholars of Ianovs’kyi’s opera. See L. Lisovs’kyi, ‘Opera Vybukh Borysa Ianovs’koho,’ in Muzyka (Kharkiv) 5–6 (1927) 55–60. See also L. Arkhimovych, ‘Nova liudyna v umovah novoho zhyttia (Z istoriii ukrains’koi opery 20–30 rokiv),’ in Ukrains’ke muzykoznavstvo, vol.3 (Kyiv: Muzychna Ukraina, 1968) 3–17. The jazz ‘invasion’ in Ukraine partially owed to its success to Ernst Krenek’s opera Johnny spielt auf, which was staged in Kyiv and Odesa in 1929, as well to Kurbas’s production of Allo na khvyliakh 477 (Hello, on Radio 477), which had jazz numbers in a score by Meitus. These were inspired by Kurbas’s trip to the West in 1927. See Viktor Samokhvalov, ‘Mykhailo Ivanovych Verykivs’kyi iak prodovzhuvach teorii ladovoho rytmu B. Iavors’koho ta avtor samostiinoi kontseptsii ladovyh uiavlen’,’ in Mykhailo Ivanovych Verykivs’kyi: Pohliad z 90-h, ed. O. Torba (Kyiv, 1997) 40–6. Ukrainian musicians maintained close contacts with Béla Bartók. Bartók, who was interested in Ukrainian folklore, corresponded with the Western-Ukrainian ethnomusicologist Filaret Kolessa; he also visited Soviet Ukraine in 1929 and Western Ukraine in 1936, giving solo recitals in Kharkiv, Odesa, and Lviv. Dumas were the lyrico-epic works of folk origin that developed during the Cossack period of the sixteenth–seventeenth centuries. The dumas were performed in a special recitative manner and accompanied by a bandura, kobza, or lira, the traditional folk Ukrainian instruments. The poetic and musical characteristics of the duma include a dramatic and deeply engaging unfolding of a story that depicts the Cossacks’ struggle with the Tatars and Turks, as well as a non-strophic structure consisting of irregular phrases, richly complemented with instrumental interludes. These works fascinated many European intellectuals. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the poetic texts of the dumas were translated into Polish, English, German, and French. In this respect, Liatoshyns’kyi’s position in Ukrainian music of the Soviet period is similar to that of Shostakovich in Russian music culture.

Lull (exerpt) I sleep – I stir. I fulfill a will. Fill. Suddenly full to the brim! Lullaby … lull Roosters (in the window) and a flood of green beer (through the window) – all ring with O. – ‘I don’t understand. ‘Marcel, Étienne! Marcel, Étienne!’1 they shouted with banners. And now they rot in the ground. You say – so will I?’ Through life resounds a legato (a factory whistle). Enough! Resonate over my fate. Lullaby … lull Only a bird in the window: triolet, triolet! – ‘And what about beauty? And immortality? – I remember (isn’t it funny): with you forever! – she swore. – It’s obvious: people are enharmonic only in spirit. Because all tragedies and dramas – are finally consonances. – ‘Get up! – a new government has taken the town!’ I open my eyes (‘consonances’). On the wall the thick-framed window has been cast by the sun as a musical sharp sign on fire … Pavlo Tychyna, Instead of Sonnets and Octaves, 1920

Translated from the Ukrainian by Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipps 1 Étienne Marcel (died 1358) played a major role in the Paris Revolution of 1355–8.

13 Music in the Theatre of Les Kurbas yana leonenko

As we have seen in other chapters in this book, once severe tsarist prohibitions and harsh censorship were finally lifted, Ukrainian theatre entered a new and exciting era of its existence. It could finally respond to various broader European currents, synthesizing, reinterpreting, and reshaping them in its own unique way. As in other parts of Europe, so in Ukraine, theatre served as the epicentre of the modernist ‘gravitational pull’ that, at that time, seemed to be exerted upon all of the arts, drawing them together into a special new unity and resulting in their fruitful interpenetration. Both necessarily and by inclination, Les Kurbas’s innovations in the theatre touched upon the whole spectrum of the arts. Music, however, occupied a dominant position in his artistic world view and he approached it in a new way. It formed a significant constituent of all his bold experiments, from simple studies of rhythm to attempts at creating a synthetic musical-dramatic production. As he observed in his director’s diary, ‘Everything in art that moves through time must strive towards the ideal and music. It seems absolutely impossible to separate theatre from music, because music [is] the basis and the model for perception in time.’1 As for many of his modernist contemporaries, such as Edward Gordon Craig and Adolphe Appia, so for Kurbas music and its rhythms directed the theatre audience away from a facsimile surface towards a hidden, inner reality. In conceiving of his productions, Kurbas intuitively seemed to think and express himself in musical terms. Musically gifted, he had also received a good education and was a fine pianist who enjoyed playing the works of such composers as Frédéric Chopin, Aleksandr Scriabin, Sergei Rachmaninov, Piotr Tchaikovsky, and Mykola Lysenko. His sight reading and improvisational abilities were highly developed and served him well during those times when he needed to create his own music for a production or when he had to step in as the orchestra conductor or choirmaster. Kurbas longed to fill theatrical action with music from the ‘inside,’ not simply as a way of punctuating the action. In his articles, lectures, and his director’s diary, he frequently employed musical principles in discussing the theatre, finding much in common between both art forms in terms of intonation and their rhythmicmelodic structure: ‘A true theatrical production is closely related to a work of music; its development and composition are similar to the composition and development of musical works. Gesture, for example, is like a musical phrase; it should likewise have a beginning, development, and end.’2

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13.1 Les Kurbas, 1920 (VT)

13.2 Yuly Meitus in his later years (CSPA)

Everyone who worked with Kurbas remarked upon the important role which he attributed to music in the theatre production. ‘Following the principles of the musical structure of a show,’ recounted the composer Yuly Meitus, who created works for the Berezil, Kurbas ‘rarely used music in order to duplicate what was happening on stage. Most frequently, he used music as a kind of counterpoint, as an additional ‘colour,’ or as a component of the show with its own special function.’3 This claim is corroborated and extended by the Berezil actor Borys Balaban,

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who noted in his memoirs that ‘Kurbas had a higher level of expectation concerning the musicality of the show; it was achieved not at the price of the obvious use of music in the production, but rather by a true musicality of the structure of each act achieved through rhythm.’4 Kurbas was the first in Ukraine to draw attention to the rhythmic development of the theatrical production. Music was a way to organize stage space and time, and thus became a meaningful element of the conception of the production. Vasyl Vasylko recalled that Kurbas ‘taught that everything could be perceived in different rhythms; that every event in relation to another had its own objective rhythm; that is, there was a characteristic accent for each event. Rhythm should completely penetrate the work in each and every one of its parts, both in time and in space.’5 Kurbas wrote in his diary: ‘The greater the artist of the future, the more he will pay attention in his play or production to making all significant accents of the action follow each other in such a rhythmic succession that they will elicit an analogous rhythm in the spectator and will force his heart to beat more evenly, more quickly, or more irregularly.’6 The actor and director Mykola Stanislavsky also remarked upon the same characteristics of Kurbas’s method, noting that ‘the musicality of all of Kurbas’s productions was expressed first and foremost as an internal ‘atmosphere’ that was filled with clearly delineated and diverse rhythms, plasticity of movement, clarity of actors’ speeches, and a rhythmically created mise-en-scène.’7 Hence, we may speak of the polyphonic structure and compositional clarity of Kurbas’s shows. He effectively developed a single musical-rhythmic idea into the organizing principle of his each of his productions. Kurbas believed that, together, the stage director and the composer’s work was aimed at developing a unified conception of the production (a Gesamtkunstwerk) which was to be mutually enriching. Such convictions led him to ever more daring experiments in which he transferred exclusively musical conventions and methods into the sphere of the dramatic theatre. Meitus recalled Kurbas saying, ‘For the most effective revelation of a scene or episode one may employ a variety of musical means.’8 Kurbas also transferred these convictions to his actors, who not only were required to study theatrical arts but who also received a broad cultural and aesthetic education in the Berezil Artistic Association. Kurbas also consistently emphasized the importance of the development of both the actor’s intellectual and physical abilities. Actors were taught to strive to make the body more receptive and flexible by working on it on a daily basis. With this aim, Mikhail Mordkin, choreographer for the Moscow Bolshoi Theatre, and Georg Lange, ballet-master of the Kyiv Opera House, were hired. The student-actors worked on their speech, perfecting their articulation and breathing techniques, as well as the suppleness and clarity of their voices. Opera singer and vocal teacher Yosyf Kunin led exercises in timbre and was untiring in his search for news ways by which to master the clarity of song and stage voice. Actors enthusiastically recalled their practical lessons with him aimed at a perfect command of voice. According to Kunin’s system, in order to convey a particular emotion with exactitude, the actor consciously had to direct his voice in a specific way:

346 Yana Leonenko In keeping with this system, one had to know how to send the voice into seven spheres, or ‘centres,’ of the body, giving it a particular quality. Sending sound into the forehead gave it a ‘cerebral intonation’; this was the first sphere. Second, into the nose: tedium, ill temper, annoyance. Third, into the throat: lyricism, billing and cooing, naivety. Fourth, into the bronchi: captivating romanticism. Fifth, into the lungs and heart: cheerful, sincere, affirming, frank optimism. Sixth, into the diaphragm; this is the voice of indignation, suffering, and anxiety. And finally, the seventh sphere, where the voice should be sent into the very pit of the stomach: the tragic sound of passion, hatred, anger, unbearable pain.9

Musical activities formed a separate part of the actors’ educational process. Lecturers were invited for voice training, sight reading, playing musical instruments, and music history. Actress Iryna Avdiieva recalled that the actors were particularly captivated by the music lessons of Anatoly Butsky (also known in Russian as Anatoly Butskoi),10 the author of articles on contemporary musical issues and one of the composers who worked with Kurbas.11 His lectures were marked by their originality and by the innovativeness of their approach, as suggested by some of their titles: ‘Vital Sources of Music’ and ‘Scientific Foundations of Technical Performance’ (presented at the Mykola Lysenko Musical and Theatrical Institute). Because of their fine musical preparedness, the actors were able to sing and play musical instruments in the productions and easily make the transition from speech to music and back again, and thus maintain the immediacy of the creative moment. Nor did Kurbas limit his pedagogical work to the complex training of the actor. From its very inception, musical studies were part and parcel of the experimental First Studio of the Berezil Artistic Association. We get a glimpse of some of the main trends in the educational process from the report of the director of the studio, Savely Futoriansky: There were various activities involving choral singing and music literacy. Lessons in choral singing included learning folk songs such as ‘Oy verbo, verbo’ (Oh Willow, Willow), ‘Dudaryk’ (The Piper), ‘Prialia’ (The Spinner), ‘Oy, u horodi’ (Oh, in the Garden), and ‘Oi hore, hore’ (Oh, What Grief). Music literacy activities covered material up to the concept of intervals (consonance, dissonance). Students analysed Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera Christmas Eve and listened to Chopin’s Prelude no. 20, Scriabin’s Prelude Op. 11, no. 10 and his Prelude Op. 39, no. 2. As to music history, a short history of world music was offered; right now we are taking a special look at folk music (our own).12

Even during rehearsal time – a particularly ‘sacred’ moment in the birth of a production – Kurbas continued to teach the students. The Maestro inspired the actors by improvising on the piano, which acted as a catalyst for creative thought: Les Stepanovych [Kurbas], coming in for the lecture from the studio, immediately sat down at the piano. Then, he began to play for hours while we improvised to the music. We enjoyed this very much. More than anything else, these hours [of improvisation]

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elicited by the music helped us to express our emotions, to cross the threshold of that restraint which we have in front of strangers and which so often holds back that which is most valuable to the actor – his spontaneity.13

When something did not work out for the actors or they could not find the right mood for their character, Kurbas, according to Vasyl Vasylko’s recollection, would rely on music: ‘Interrupting the rehearsal, he would sit down at the piano and begin to improvise something that would tune us actors to that order which was necessary for the upcoming performance. With his associational playing, Kurbas would be able to elicit in us the necessary emotions. After playing for ten to fifteen minutes, he would suddenly leave the piano and paint a picture before us of the action we were supposed to recreate on the stage.’14 Not only rehearsal time but also the actors’ break time was filled with music. Stepan Bondarchuk’s memoirs tell us that ‘during intermissions Kurbas played Scriabin or familiarized us with Galician songs, and we would begin to sing ‘Chuiesh, brate mii’ (Do You Hear, Brother?) , ‘Hey, vydno selo’ (Hey, There’s the Village) …’15 Another actor, Semen Svashenko, noted that ‘often in the evenings, after lectures and rehearsals, he [Kurbas] would come into the studio and play for a long time – mostly works by Rachmaninov, Scriabin, Chopin’s mazurkas, Lysenko’s études and nocturnes, but especially often Tchaikovsky’s The Seasons. Of course, these were his favourite composers. Holding our breath as if spellbound, we listened to his playing and conceived our own études. As he continued to play, it seemed to us that he was accompanying our thoughts. How wonderful this was, how it moved us, how we prided ourselves in our director – a person of the noblest soul!’16 Kurbas particularly enjoyed the music of Aleksandr Scriabin. Scriabin attracted the attention of many artists of that generation by his holistic aesthetic directness; to a certain extent, he was a cult figure of European art. Kurbas liked to play his works and in a significant moment for the ‘Young Theatre’ – its final farewell evening – he even invited a student of Scriabin to play the works of his teacher: The Young Theatre collective gathered together one more time for its farewell evening. With little lighting, the empty hall was sad and uninviting. Oleksander Stepanovych [Kurbas] brought with him a pianist whom he introduced as a student of the composer Alexander Scriabin. A person of about forty, humbly dressed in quasi-military garb, quiet, not chatty, inwardly focused … He sat down at the piano and, as if sharing in our sorrowful mood, began to play the works of Scriabin. Sometimes he would quietly explain which work he was playing. We heard most of these [works] for the first time.17

In the most dramatic years for Ukraine following the October Revolution, when power was quickly handed over from one side to another and the military and political situation was not favourable to the arts, Kurbas did not let up on his intensive work. In 1919 he participated in the creation of the State Ukrainian Musical Drama Theatre,18 which he then headed, together with Mykhailo BonchTomashevsky and Yury Stepovy. Mikhail Mordkin and Margarita Frohman were invited to participate as choreographers, Mykhailo Bahrynovsky as conductor,

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13.3 Aleksandr Scriabin (CSPA)

Anatol Petrytsky as designer. Lysenko’s operas Utoplena (The Drowned Maiden) and Taras Bulba, as well as Stanislaw Moniuszko’s Halka were prepared. Sadly, the premieres of the last two works never took place, nor were the footlights ever lit because Denikin’s forces had temporarily occupied Kyiv. Some memoirs, however, provide us with a tiny glimpse of Kurbas’s work on the opera Taras Bulba. Yukhym Lishansky, for example, wrote, ‘I recall how somehow the two of us ended up sitting together by the piano, flipping through Lysenko’s Taras Bulba. Improvising, Kurbas expressed his thoughts about the way he imagined staging this opera. It was a cascade of brilliant directorial decisions, although they never materialized on the opera stage.’19 At the same time as he was working on opera, Kurbas was simultaneously preparing productions at the Young Theatre. Mykola Lysenko’s children’s opera KozaDereza (The Billy Goat) was produced, as well as a workshop version of the opera Zyma i vesna (Winter and Spring). Kurbas continued to develop the traditions of the dramatic theatre, in whose bosom Ukrainian opera had been fostered, bringing the genre of the musical theatre both into the repertoire and into the experimental work in the studio. These productions also had a pedagogical aim: the director gave future actors the opportunity to get used to a sense of rhythm, melodic line, and the ‘intonation’ of the production’s score. ‘It is characteristic of Les Kurbas that he staged specifically musical shows with future actors. This was not by accident. Les Stepanovych endowed music, an organic element of the theatrical arts (especially those of Ukraine), with great meaning. This is clearly evident when one carefully studies this aspect of his research into the field of the actor’s mastery as well as in his own directorial work.’20 The musical theatre provided invaluable experience for Kurbas. He regarded every theatrical show, even when it lacked music, as a synthetic work. Kurbas and his theatre attracted the most powerful artistic forces of the time. Notable figures who naturally gravitated towards the Berezil included the composers Kyrylo Stetsenko, Reinhold Glière, Anatoly Butsky, Naum Pruslin, Mykhailo Verykivsky, Pylyp Kozytsky, and Yuly Meitus. Kurbas was able to sense which artists had great theatrical potential and was able to make the composers fall in love

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13.4 Kyrylo Stetsenko (CSPA)

with the theatre, to captivate them with the stage, and to influence the future direction of their theatrical creativity. Pruslin and Butsky dedicated themselves to the dramatic theatre, creating music for productions of theatres in Ukraine and Russia. For almost his entire life, Butsky wrote for the Bolshoi Drama Theatre in Leningrad, and left behind theoretical notes on the role of conceptual music in the theatrical arts.21 For his part, Reinhold Glière’s creative collaboration with Les Kurbas served as a strong motivation to compose many works for both the musical and theatrical stages. He continued to compose music for leading Moscow theatres, including pieces for Vsevolod Meyerhold. Having achieved some fame for his symphonic music, Glière turned to creating works for the theatre, including the ballets Chervonyi mak (Red Poppy) and Midny vershnyk (The Bronze Horseman). Mykhailo Verykivsky and Pylyp Kozytsky also learned a great deal from Kurbas’s theatre, and this important theatrical education led them towards success in creating contemporary opera. Even as socialist realism was being imposed upon all the arts, Mykhailo Verykivsky boldly and actively experimented with the genre in order to create a contemporary Ukrainian operatic repertoire. Another young composer working with the Berezil, Yuly Meitus, became, with time, one of the great composers of musical theatre in Ukraine in the twentieth century. The author of almost twenty operas and numerous musical arrangements of productions, he worked creatively and in unity of mind with Kurbas for eight years. According to Kozytsky, the collaboration between director and composer was very successful: ‘The theatre educated its own composer, Yuly Meitus, for [its needs] today … [He] understood how to respond to the creativity of the theatre.’22 The arrival of this new generation of composers destined to change the face of Ukrainian music was marked by a broadening of musical horizons and the influx of fresh new currents from the musical arts of Europe. Ukrainian music’s entrance into the context of modernist aesthetics coincided with the general renewal and rise of professionalism in Ukrainian musical life, a process that was speeded up by the formation of a national school for composers and performers. This was a period of great artistic achievements and expectations, as Dagmara Turchyn-Duvirak

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13.5 Dmitry Shostakovich and Yuly Meitus (CSPA)

suggests in her essay in this volume. A prevalent idea within all of Ukrainian modernist music at the time was the creation of a new art form that was nonetheless in constant ‘dialogue’ with previous artistic developments. Young composers received a thorough professional education at the newly opened Kyiv Conservatory, headed by Glière from 1913 who had returned to his native Kyiv. Because of his energy and clarity of purpose, this educational institution quickly became a significant musical centre. Its first graduates – composers Lev Revutsky, Borys Liatoshynsky, Pylyp Kozytsky, and Mykhailo Verykivsky – were soon to create the foundations for new Ukrainian music. The formation of these new graduates’ compositional style is connected with their instruction provided by Boleslaw Yavorsky, a brilliant musicologist of European measure. At the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, Yavorsky created his own system: the study of harmonic pressure and harmonic rhythm and the construction of a new musical language. The basic principles of these studies provided the impetus for the development of musical thought in the twentieth century and deeply influenced the creations of the young generation of composers who experimented with new harmonic effects. Yavorsky’s system served as the theoretical foundation of the majority of the complicated works of his students Kozytsky and Verykivsky. Later, Yavorsky’s influence could also be seen as laying the foundation for Verykivsky’s own harmonic system. (Between the 1940s and 1960s the composer arrived at his own scientific-methodical studies on micro-harmony.)

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Parallel discoveries of new possibilities directed at rupturing conventional harmonic thought became a sign of the times, as suggested by the work of composers such as Béla Bartók, Dmitry Shostakovich, and Carl Orff. The Mykola Leontovych Memorial Committee (1921, later the Mykola Leontovych Society) became a strong channel through which contemporary musical ideas made their way to Kyiv, and as a result became the meeting point of the city’s young composers. The Society played a significant role in the consolidation of Ukraine’s musical forces: in the publication and criticism of music, the formation of various musical institutions, the development of performance, and the familiarization of artists and the larger community with music ‘news’ from abroad by way of the journal Muzyka (Music). The Society’s archive, which contains correspondence with some of Europe’s leading publishers, shows Ukrainian music’s openness to the European centres of new music. The Society’s Association of Contemporary Music held music nights at which the works of Arnold Schönberg, Darius Milhaud, Arthur Honegger, Francis Poulenc, Béla Bartók, and Alfredo Casella were performed. The Society, however, did not limit itself to purely musical problems; it also assisted in forming the principles for the creation of a national art and promoting the works of masterly artists such as Kurbas. Thanks to the Leontovych Society, the score of one of Kurbas’s best productions – Haidamaky by Taras Shevchenko – was preserved. (The Berezil music archive was destroyed, probably burned during the Second World War, and thus it is difficult to speak of the extensive music created for Kurbas’s productions.) Haidamaky was the result of collaboration between Kurbas and Glière. Glière developed the production’s musical plan using, in addition to his own creations, fragments of works by Lysenko and Stetsenko. Director Vasyl Vasylko recalled Glière enthusiastically commenting, ‘Kurbas thought in terms of musical images and was well versed in the rules of composition.’23 The production of Haidamaky had a great internal musical potential. In the first scene, the director brought out the chorus, the ‘Ten Words of the Poet,’ which personified the voice of the author. As in antiquity, so here the chorus served a variety of functions. Sometimes it was ‘a nervous organism, subtly reacting to every movement of the soul; at others, it coldly and dispassionately judged; it served as a prophet predicting the future of the country and the nation. Still at other times, it acted as a storyteller explaining the distant past, or voiced the malice of contemporary, biting polemics.’24 The vocal work of the chorus was developed in conjunction with the plasticity of its movement and reflected changes in the general tempo and rhythm of the production. Indeed, the composer treated the text as if it were a musical score, establishing the rhythmic and textual intonations of the production. Kurbas consistently applied the principle of musical scoring, more particularly of choral polyphony, to his directorial practice, beginning with Oedipus Rex: ‘Using a rhythmic recitative, someone in the choir conveys the fears of king Oedipus before the inevitable, then two pick up the tone, then four, then half of the choir, and then, finally, the whole choir. The rhythm’s musical expression grows in strength and tempo, rising to a great spontaneous power, then harmonically fades to delicate melodies, to distant, dying chords. Meanwhile, the chorus harmoniously joins every rhythm with an appropriate gesture, that is to say, every musical note has a musical gesture.’25

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13.6 From the score for Haidamaky

During those years, the genre of melodic recitation was undergoing active development. In the theatre, polytonal recitative was given much attention. The performers – solo or ensemble – recited the poems of contemporary poets such as Mykola Bazhan, Mykhail Semenko, Pavlo Tychyna, and Maksym Rylsky, bringing the language of the poem as close to music as possible. Kurbas continued to introduce methods of choral technique into theatrical compositions such as Shevchenko’s Lirychni virshi (Lyric Poems) and Tychyna’s Soniashni klarnety (Clarinets of the Sun). Vasyl Vasylko remembered that, ‘Using solos and uniting this collective recitation with rhythmic-plastic movements and with theatrical action, he [Kurbas] created very interesting and complex works.’26 Relying on the musical nature of Ukrainian poems, particularly ‘U nedilenku ta ranesenko’ (On Sunday and So Early in the Morning), ‘Nebo nevmyte’ (The Sky’s Unwashed), ‘Velyky liokh’ (The

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Great Cellar), ‘Ne spalosia – a nich, iak more’ (I Couldn’t Sleep, the Night Was Like the Sea), and Taras Shevchenko’s ‘Na Velykden, na solomi’ (On Easter, on Straw) in the production of Lirychni virshi (Lyric Poems), Kurbas sought to achieve an organic interpenetration of the melos of poetry and music. Actress Sofia Manuilovych described the moment of creating the score of the melodic recitative ‘U nedilenku ta ranesenko’ (On Sunday and So Early in the Morning): ‘[Kurbas] tells the girls to continue singing only two words – ‘U nedilenku’ (On Sunday) – while I read on: ‘A ia, molodenka, na shliakh, na dorohu neveselaia vykhodyla’ (But I, young, unhappy, walked out onto the path, the road). With music in the background, the girls’ words, ‘na shliakh … na shliakh …’ (on the path … on the path), were repeated, once in a minor, then in a major key, giving the impression that their bare feet hardly touched the dew-covered grass and the warm dust of the road.’27 This melodic recitation was created as the arrangement of a folk song and was a first for artistic circles in those days, influencing the formation of musical genres. The turn to the genre of arrangement was almost obligatory for Ukrainian composers. Leontovych (1877–1921) had achieved the highest form of artistry in his ‘translation’ of folk songs into the language of high art, and was the reference point for the next generation of musical creators. For his part, Kurbas introduced the musical principles of the arrangement of folk songs into the theatre in an organic way, thus creating unique arrangements of sung Ukrainian poetry. Directors of various European theatres had been captivated by such ‘scoring experiments’ following Max Reinhardt. Arising out of the particularities of the development of the Ukrainian song, Kurbas’s compositions created new, independent ways of embodying scoring conventions. Yet another European trend, Expressionism, also received a sensitive reception from Kurbas. The Berezil’s first triumph in this area was the production of Georg Kaiser’s Gas (1923), which artistically interpreted the government’s challenging call for rapid industrialization and collectivization. To express the tragedy of the ‘human cog,’ Kurbas used a new expressive theatricality based on the imagistic transformation of the rhythm and movement of human bodies on the stage. This was arguably the first musically structured production of a show in Ukraine that responded to the stylistics of urbanism. It is noteworthy that European music also attempted to embody urban themes at this time in the 1920s, as for example, Poulenc’s ‘Movements’ (1918), ‘Excursions’ (1921), Milhaud’s ‘Catalogue of Farm Machines’ (1919), Honegger’s Pacific 231 (1924), and George Antheil’s Ballet mécanique (1926). Urbanism and industrial themes continued to permeate Ukrainian art. One of its characteristics was the search for inspiration in everyday life, the life of the city, and the creation of components of a ‘new beauty’ from these sources. The recreation of the movement of a variety of mechanisms and of the street life of modern cities acquired widespread popularity. The ideal was an ‘energetic primitive’ person who lived immersed in the rapid tempo of the contemporary city. The dynamics of the building of socialism, the enthusiasm of the masses, the actions and efforts of thousands of people on the streets and in squares were consonant with the urban mood of art. Many new pieces of Soviet Ukrainian music were written with urban motifs intertwined with ideas of political engagement: Meitus’s

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‘Na Dniprobudi’ (At the Dnipro Hydroelectric Station, 1929), Kozytsky’s ‘Industrialny moment’ (The Industrial Moment, 1929), Vsevolod Rybalchenko’s ‘Sviato mas’ (Festival of the Masses, 1930), and Mykola Koliada’s ‘Shturm Traktornoho partyzanamy’ (Assault on Traktorny by the Partisans, 1932). Composing within this context, Butsky created music for Gas that was not notable for its melodic qualities; rather, it recreated the ‘din of machines in innumerable inflections’: ‘On a background of stringed instruments – small parts of machines grew ever stronger and stronger, their monotonous noise flowing together into life, becoming the rhythmic blows of copper levers. Their movements become ever more rapid as the factory grows to gigantic proportions.’28 The music created the sound image of a enormous factory with its noise and mechanical, rhythmic movements. Several reviewers considered Butsky’s music as a character in the production, thus emphasizing its special role: ‘Butsky’s interesting music reveals itself as an integral part of the play, part of the dramatis personae. It not only stimulates, guides, and completes the action, but it also acts completely independently at those times when the dynamic basis of the new art performs without words. If gestures reveal the industrial processes of the factory, then the din, disharmony, and characteristic rhythms of the factory are revealed by the orchestra.’29 The director sought an absolute synchronicity of music with movement – only under this condition could the machine be ‘started’ by the human body. Mass scenes were created with mathematical precision as Iryna Avdiieva, who acted in this production, recalled: kurbas: ‘For the first six (measures), listen to the music. Then comes the curtain – five measures. At the sixth measure you enter from the left construction, hands out before you, horizontally straight, with a bouncy step, and at the stroke of every note push off from the ground. At the tenth measure, start jumping off the construction, jumping at every low note, staying in sync with the music. Tra-ta-ta-hup, tra-ta-ta-hup. Like that for six measures. Go!’ Each group attempted the defined rhythmic movements in small sections until they heard the long-awaited whistle, ‘All together.’ It was a miracle. No one bumped into each other: the groups of six worked together as if they were the single giant wing of a flywheel, the groups of four spun around following the plan, and the whole mass turned into a unified mechanical organism. This was an enormous factory of complex machinery that swallowed up a person and made it a soulless bit. And that was how Kurbas resolved the first grand scene in the production. Further development of the dramatic line was defined by the actions of the masses. Sometimes the masses expressed certain emotions. In such scenes, the tragic chorus played a part.30

The image of the machine created by Kurbas from human bodies, music, and rhythm impressed the audience. ‘On stage,’ recalled Vasyl Vasylko, ‘there was no flywheel, no screw-jack, the people remained people – the workers of a gas refinery – but their movements caused the audience to associate their actions with the work of a gigantic machine. This was a theatrical transformation which did not pretend to copy life, but rather created an impression of reality. It was a conceptual symbol expressed by means of the theatre.’31

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A leading innovation introduced into European theatrical arts was the use of ‘filmic texture,’ particularly that of silent film. Among the first to use these techniques successfully were Vsevolod Meyerhold, Sergei Eisenstein, and Les Kurbas. Kurbas not only boldly experimented with the method of montage, but also used film scenes in the production of Jimmie Higgins, and also drew upon the technique of montage at the architectonic level of the production. The Berezil stage director Borys Tiahno observed that in a show ‘nearly twenty dramatic genres’ were connected. Kurbas explained that this was made possible due to the ‘traditional method of film montage: montage was a very flexible and contemporary method.’32 (On Kurbas and film, see Virlana Tkacz’s ‘Les Kurbas’s Early Work’ and Irena Makaryk’s ‘Dissecting Time,’ elsewhere in this volume.) In Kurbas’s notes concerning the dramatization of Upton Sinclair’s novel, we find hints about the musical arrangement of individual scenes. The popular music of classical composers was usually employed, and music was played during the showing of film sequences in accordance with the generally accepted form of musical accompaniment for silent film. Nelli Kornienko has characterized the music in the production of Jimmie Higgins as a chain of ‘assembled fragments onto which concrete functional noise was applied (as a type of musical concretism).’33 The requirement to respond immediately to a series of visual actions when a change suddenly occurred called forth a montage-like combination of musical images. This filmic principle influenced the formation of many composers’ musical language, especially that of Igor Stravinsky and Sergei Prokofiev. The Berezil’s last season in Kyiv was marked by the theatre’s collaboration with Mykhailo Verykivsky, one of the most brilliant composers of the younger generation. He wrote music for the productions Proklamatsia sezonu (Proclamation of the Season), Zhakeria (Jacquerie), and Naperedodni (On the Eve). The press also noted one other production in preparation during that season: ‘The Berezil Theatre is intensively working on preparing Eneida [The Aeneid], an opera based on Kotliarevsky’s work. The composer Verykivsky is working on the musical arrangement for The Aeneid. Rehearsals for voice, individual parts, and dance have already begun.’34 A folder discovered in Verykivsky’s music archive and titled The Aeneid in his own handwriting35 confirms his work on this production. Now empty, it probably once contained the score for the ultimately unrealized production of The Aeneid. What did survive, however, is an overture for the festive season opening of the Berezil entitled ‘Proclamation of the Season.’ The production was created in the spirit of the mass festival popular at that time. Musical ‘portraits-characteristics’ of socialist heroes were presented in the form of a medley: a string of well-known melodies and musical quotations. Ethnographic and traditional, nearly banal, means of musical expression were simplified, responding perfectly to the show’s humorous character. Over time, these were to become the main indicators of socialist realism that led to the undermining of the stylistic system of modern Ukrainian music, the destruction of established links with general European artistic movements and processes, and, finally, the isolation of Ukraine from world cultural contexts.

356 Yana Leonenko

13.7 Mykhailo Verykivsky (CSPA)

In his quest to create modern theatrical culture, Kurbas was at the forefront of artistic tendencies prevalent throughout the world. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the creation of the professional director progressively made the connections between the constituent parts of the dramatic production more complicated. The aesthetics of modern art created a new awareness of the theatrical production’s artistic unity and, particularly, of the role of music. As a result of music’s influence on other art forms, their musicality was strengthened: the musical quality of language and the plasticity of the actor, the musicality of poetry, and so forth. The originality of the aims of the creative projects of musically inclined directors (Max Reinhardt and Bertold Brecht in Germany; Evgeny Vakhtangov, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Konstantin Stanislavsky, and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko in Russia; and Les Kurbas in Ukraine) allows one to speak, with only slight exaggeration, of the phenomenon of a ‘composer’s’ dramatic theatre in the early twentieth century. The friendship between the stage director and composer within the framework of the modernist aesthetic brought about a special stage imagery that synthesized the expressive possibilities of music and theatre. Conceptual music entered into the very system of dramatic communication, carrying out, to a significant extent, a constructive function and serving not only as tone and colour, but also as a form-creating element of the whole image of the production created by the director. Kurbas and the composers with whom he worked created within the artistic space of the moderne which functioned and had been developed on the foundations of ‘cultural internationalism’ and ‘cultural technology,’ and which further stimulated and developed the dissemination of European modernism. Kurbas’s experimental directorial work, his musical skills and knowledge, and his fruitful collaboration with composers held out the promise of the creation of unprecedented new works and great achievements, especially in the genre of opera. Sadly, because of the severe limitations soon to be imposed upon on the arts by the Soviet regime, this openness to creative dialogue with the world was stopped in its tracks and Ukrainian culture was condemned to isolation. Translated by Daniel Galadza and Irena R. Makaryk

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NOTES 1 Les’ Kurbas, ‘Z rezhysers’koho shchodennyka,’ 27 June 1920, 32. Ts. Kurbas papers, IMFE, Institute of Art, Folklore, and Ethnography, f. 42/49. 2 Mykhailo Verkhats’kyi, ‘Skarby velykoho maistra,’ in Les’ Kurbas: Spohady suchasnykiv, ed. Vasyl’ Vasyl’ko (Kyiv: Mystetstvo, 1969) 319. 3 Iu. Meitus, ‘Spohady pro Lesia Kurbasa,’ Muzyka 2 (Kyiv) (March 1972) 14–19. 4 Borys Balaban, ‘Na nauku teatralnomu potomstvu,’ in Les’ Kurbas, ed. Vasyl’ko, 205. 5 Vasyl’ Vasyl’ko, ‘U molodomu teatri,’ in Molodyi teatr: Geneza, zavdannia, shliakhy, ed. M.H. Labins’kyi (Kyiv: Mystetstvo, 1991) 221. 6 Les’ Kurbas, ‘Rezhysers’kyi shchodennyk,’ in Les’ Kurbas: Filosofiia teatru, ed. Mykola Labins’kyi (Kyiv: Osnova, 2001) 49. 7 Mykola Stanislavs’kyi, ‘Ostannia robota Kurbasa,’ in Les’ Kurbas, ed. Vasyl’ko, 290. 8 Meitus 14. 9 Iryna Avdiieva, ‘Pro naikrashchu liudyny, iaku ia znala v iunatski roky,’ in Les’ Kurbas, ed. Vasyl’ko, 149–50. 10 Iryna Avdiieva, ‘Kratkii mig prazdnika,’ in Les’ Kurbas: Stat’i i vospominaniia o L. Kurbase. Literaturnoe nasledie, ed. M.H. Labins’kyi and L. Taniuk (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1988) 86–104. 11 Cf. Anatoliy Buts’kyi, ‘Muzyka v tvorchosty zhyttia,’ Muzyka 1 (1923), ‘Pokhodzhennia muzychnoi materii,’ Muzyka 6–7 (1923), and ‘Muzychna osvita na Ukraini,’ Muzyka 2 (1925). 12 Zvit pro pratsiu studii muzychnoho vykhovannia na berezen’ misiats’ 1923 r. Kerivnyk studii, S. Futorians’kyi, State Museum of Theatre, Music, and Film Arts (Kyiv), no. 20940. 13 Hnat Ihnatovych, ‘Pro futuro,’ in Les’ Kurbas, ed. Vasyl’ko, 124. 14 Vasyl’ko, ‘U Molodomu teatri’ 223. 15 S. Bondarchuk, ‘Molodyi teatr,’ in Molodyi teatr, ed. Labins’kyi , 116. 16 S. Svashenko, ‘Uchytel’ iunosti moiei,’ in Les’ Kurbas, ed. Vasyl’ko, 159. 17 Vasyl’ko, ‘U molodomu teatri’ 233–4. 18 Iu. Stanishevs’kyi, ‘Shliakhamy stvorennia ukrains’koho radians’koho baletu,’ Ukrainske muzykoznavstvo 12 (1977) 39–40. 19 Iukhym Lishans’kyi, ‘Kurbas i Vakhtangov,’ in Les’ Kurbas, ed. Vasyl’ko, 297. 20 Hnat Ihnatovych, ‘Pro futuro,’ in Les’ Kurbas, ed. Vasyl’ko, 124. 21 A. Butskoi (Buts’kyi), ‘Muzyka v dramaticheskom teatre,’ in Bolshoi dramaticheskii teatr (Leningrad, 1935) n. p. See also his ‘Samodeiatel’noe muzykal’noe tvorchestvo v massovoi rabote,’ Muzyka i Revoliutsiia 5 (Moscow, 1929) 9–12. 22 P. Kozyts’kyi, ‘Muzyka v “Berezoli,”’ Institute of Art, Folklore, and Ethnography of the Academy of Sciences (Kyiv), f. 42, op. 16, 22. 23 Les’ Kurbas, ed. Vasyl’ko, 34. 24 Svidchennia L. Dubovyka [Testimony of L. Dubovyk]. Cited from Na stseni Haidamaky, ed. H. Dovbyshchenko and M. Labins’kyi (Kyiv: Mystetstvo, 1989) 60. 25 Iu. Blokhyn, ‘Molodyi teatr,’ Zhyttia i revolutsiia (Kyiv) 6 (1930). 26 Vasyl’ko, ‘U Molodomu teatri’ 228. 27 S. Manuilovych, ‘U nedilen’ku ta ranesen’ko,’ in Les’ Kurbas, ed. Vasyl’ko, 99–103.

358 Yana Leonenko 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

Oleksii Lazorshak, Proletarskaia pravda (Kyiv, Russian edition) 93 (27 April 1923) 6. A. Verkhoturs’kyi, Proletarska pravda (Kyiv, Ukrainian edition) 103 (10 October 1923). Avdiieva, ‘Pro naikrashchu liudynu’ 151–2. Vasyl’ Vasyl’ko, ‘Narodnyi artyst URSR O. S. Kurbas,’ in Les Kurbas, ed. Vasyl’ko, 20. B. Tianho, ‘Liudynoiu vin buv u vsiomu,’ in Les Kurbas, ed. Vasyl’ko, 198. Nelli Kornienko, Les Kurbas: Repetytsiia maibutn’ioho (Kyiv: Fakt, 1998) 201. Proletars’ka pravda (Kyiv, Ukrainian edition) (21 November1925) 5. Private archive of Olena Verykivs’ka.

PART FOUR The Invisible Made Visible

KIEV/KYIV/KɂÏB/KɂEB/KIJÓW/ʥʥʲʩ ʷ

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Above all, the theatre must not be mere entertainment. It must be based on the enlightenment of the soul. Bronislava Nijinska, Notebook, 19181

Translated from the Russian by Irena R. Makaryk 1 Bronislava Nijinska Archives, Pacific Palisades, California (now in the Library of Congress). Courtesy of Gibbs Raetz.

14 Les Kurbas’s Early Work at the Berezil: From Bodies in Motion to Performing the Invisible virlana tkacz

In the late fall of 1921 a group of actors paraded into Kyiv to the steady beat of a single drum. They had spent a year and a half in the provinces. They had survived the hunger and chaos of the times. Now they followed a lone figure – Les Kurbas was leading his actors back to Kyiv and into the forefront of the renaissance of Ukrainian cultural life.1 In less than two years Kurbas would head the boldest experimental theatre. His productions would develop from mass movement set to music to explorations that peered into the inner workings of the mind on stage. After his return to Kyiv, Kurbas concentrated on training his actors.2 The training focused on movement, since Kurbas believed that the basis of theatre [is] movement, not words. Without movement there can be no theatre, just as without words there can be no literature. Movement should be of primary importance for an actor, because the material of his art is the living human body in motion. Acting involves the play of the entire body, not of just one of its parts. Words and language are only a partial expression of this total movement, this total play of the body is on an equal level to gesture, mime, or motion. Because of this, the ideal actor is the one who acts with his entire body; and the one who excels only in speech, in the art of verbal expression, without expressive movement – he is merely a declaimer.3

Most classes in movement naturally included music. The previous year Kurbas had arrived at the conclusion that music was the basis of all art.4 In his diary he had also noted that ‘everything in art that moves through time must strive towards the ideal and towards music. It seems absolutely impossible to separate theatre from music because music [is] the basis and the model for perception in time.’5 Music also made the actors aware of the rhythmic aspects of their movement. Kurbas was keenly aware of rhythm and felt that ‘beauty is a vivid rhythm.’6 Eventually, he would become convinced that an awareness of the variety of rhythm, the ability to reproduce the desired rhythm, and sustain it in an imagined space, was the key definition of acting. An actor’s talent, Kurbas said, depended on his ability to sense all the nuances in the world of rhythm, recognize the particular complexities of the desired rhythm, and be able to enter into it. Alexander Zaporozhets, a young actor and later an eminent Soviet psychologist, wrote that

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14.1 Movement class at the Berezil

Kurbas frequently returned to the problem of rhythm, to the importance of the rhythmic composition of stage action for the transmission of the inner, moral idea of the depicted events, the inner dynamic of human passions and experiences. He would speak about this, [and about the fact] that there are no voids in the world, that silence and pauses are especially full of rhythm, that there is a rhythm in colour, in light, in a line … Imagine how the magic of these words awoke in us our fantasy.7

The movement of actors to music, which employed a complex rhythmic structure, had already become the signature form of Kurbas’s expression. The previous year a reviewer had written: [Kurbas] introduced a new form of theatrical performance to the Ukrainian stage – the choral presentation of poetic texts with movement which unites almost all the branches of art: acting, movement, music, language, voice, set design and costumes … Kurbas wishes to give us a pure, true art, which would be appropriate to today’s great experiences and great revolutionary aspirations. In his experimentations he is trying to part the curtain on the future of art.8

Kurbas had first introduced this genre in Ukraine with his staging of Shevchenko’s lyrical poems. (This production is discussed in Tkacz’s essay in part 3 of this book.) Soon all the theatrical companies of Ukraine that aspired towards a revolutionary pedigree took up this form. At the time, the most celebrated was a group led by

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14.2 Berezil Artistic Association

Marko Tereshchenko, Kurbas’s colleague at the Young Theatre. The Tsentrostudio (Central Studio), as Tereshchenko’s theatre was initially called, presented mass spectacles to lyric poetry and music with hundreds of amateur participants.9 (For more on Tereshchenko see Hanna Veselovska’s essay.) Kurbas, on the other hand, wanted to work with a new, highly trained actor. Returning to Kyiv, he realized that he would have to create a new theatre company that would allow him to train a new generation of actors. The Formation of the Berezil Artistic Association Towards the end of March Kurbas announced the formation of the Berezil Artistic Association. He envisioned the Berezil as an organization that would unite all theatre artists. It would produce plays, but also develop theatre research, conduct experiments, and study all the related arts. It was to be the universal Ukrainian theatre centre which would create the new theatre, the laboratory that would develop new forms and bring them to life.10 Later, when Kurbas was asked about the choice of the name ‘Berezil,’ he answered: Why Berezil? When Berezil was founded we were all very young, very romantically disposed towards the Revolution, so we poeticized it … At the time we were reading poetry written by the Norwegian poet Bjørnson. There was a contest and the bourgeois writers were asked to name their favourite month. Bjørnson chose March, a month of great change, hence the name.11

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Kurbas’s translation of Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson’s poem became the Berezil’s credo: I choose March It smashes everything old Clearing a space for the new It stirs up great turbulence It aspires I choose March Because it is a storm Because it is laughter Because it is the turning point Which gives birth to the summer.12

Iryna Avdiieva remembers Kurbas’s explanation of the name after he read the statutes of the Berezil Artistic Association to the actors: ‘Berezil [March] is the beginning of change in nature, which is reborn for a new period of flowering. Having picked this name we should evolve. Always change ourselves. Berezil [March] is the symbol of innovation. Innovation in science or art joins the present with the future.’13 The first productions at the Berezil were closely tied to the actors’ training program and were developed collectively by the actors in Kurbas’s program. They became known as members of the First Studio of the Berezil Theatre. October A half-year after they started work, the First Studio performed October, which presented the Revolution in mimed mass movement set to music. Kurbas directed the piece, which opened on the fifth anniversary of the October Revolution. Since words were not used, the narrative of the forty-minute piece was conveyed through gestures and movements set to music. In the first scene of October a crowd demonstrated in a city square. The actor Yosyp Hirniak describes it: Everything is [set] in rhythm to the music which had a noticeable element of dissonance and disturbed the unaccustomed ears of the listeners. The hungry, unemployed men, women, and children searched for bread, pleaded for it, demanded it, and finally smashed the imaginary windows and doors. The revolution began. Scene two – a royal palace. The Grand Ballroom. Ministers, generals, ladies-in-waiting danced the popular ‘Pas d’Espagne.’ All this nobility was coiffured, powdered, and lavishly dressed, but resembled figures in a wax museum. [They] danced enthusiastically for a long time. When the crowned figure appeared, they all froze in a deep bow. After the royal promenade, the God-anointed one chose a partner and began to dance. The revolutionary mass rushed on stage with flags and rifles and smashed the aristocracy. A muscular revolutionary lifted up the anointed one like a baby and smashed him down against the marble floor. So ended the feudal era and the new history of the land began.14

The third scene involved a counter-revolutionary plot. A worker became involved,

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because he was in love with a lady. However, at a crucial moment he saw his betrayal for what it was. The workers triumphed; he confessed and was forgiven. The piece ended with a joyous return to work to the sounds of the ‘Internationale.’15 The schematic plot of October was similar to other allegorical mass spectacles of the time.16 But the performances by the group of October delighted the audience and drew praise from the critics.17 The critic for Proletarskaia pravda, wrote: ‘It is music which stirs the depths of the soul, it is the sculpture of a great master which draws our attention, it is a colourful painting which gives birth to bold, creative ideas. October is a symphony of sounds, movements, colours, and lines.’18 The two groups of characters in October were clearly delineated through their contrasting movements. These contrasts were further augmented by physical images which were built with a heightened sense of reality. The aristocracy, as Hirniak put it, ‘resembled figures in a wax museum.’19 They were outlined in a static state, as archetypal frozen images that moved without changing. In contrast, the audience saw the hungry crowd in the first scene transform itself into a revolutionary mass. In the production of October, Kurbas completed his move away from the traditional play text by totally abandoning language and transferring the narrative responsibilities to movement, music, image, rhythm, and gesture. The action in October was presented through movements to music in contrasting rhythms that came into conflict in several instances throughout the piece and were finally resolved in the sounds of the ‘Internationale.’ The success of October led to the sponsorship of the Berezil by the 45th Division of the Army.20 That winter, a number of additional actors joined the company and were assigned to the Second Studio of the Berezil. Among them was Vasyl Vasylko (born Vasyl Mylaiv), who reported that they were required to attend classes in philosophy, gymnastics, acrobatics, and Kurbas’s system of actor training.21 Kurbas wanted his new actors to be thinking artists and encouraged them to grow intellectually. The actors were expected to attend artistic events, listen to seminars on the history of philosophy and art, and read the newest books and journals. Kurbas believed that only thinking artists could rise to Craig’s challenge and ‘create for themselves a new form of acting, consisting for the main part of symbolic gesture.’22 Vasylko noted: ‘From early morning till 4 we sit in the cold and study the history of philosophy … We are seriously learning … Although we do not earn anything, the desire to learn is so great that we will continue to starve.’23 In February one of the local cooperatives provided Berezil’s Second Studio with one meal a day for thirty actors. ‘This is our first important support from the outside because some of the studio members are literally starving,’24 wrote Vasylko in his diary. Ruhr The First Studio presented its second theatre piece, entitled Ruhr, in February of 1923. It was based on a recent political event: during the winter the French had occupied the Ruhr valley, the industrial section of Germany, and there was world opposition to this takeover. Under Kurbas’s guidance, the First Studio composed a four-act agit-play, using newspaper accounts, political speeches, and popular anti-war slogans. Words were used in Ruhr because at this point they were also

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14.3 Scene from Ruhr (Death)

being reintroduced into the actor training program. However, gestures and mass movement to music remained the primary forms of expression available to the young actors. In Ruhr, as Hirniak describes it, ‘plasticity and gestures dominated, often becoming a whirling storm of movement that reminded one of the pantomimes in ballet in which words are replaced with gestures. In Ruhr gestures transformed into words and words into movements, and this created the action.’25 The response in the press was again very favourable. The critic for the Kyiv newspaper Bilshovyk heralded the production as a new achievement and added, ‘Ruhr [consists of] tense scenes of class struggle, not illustrations but images – live, compressed [and] real, but which through their persuasive power are heightened to [the level of] symbols.’26 Ruhr also made use of allegorical characters and obviously symbolic action. Capital was personified as an aged, rapacious gentleman who played cards with Death, which also was a character in the show. Capital’s soldiers went into battle blindfolded as a sign of their lack of political insight. It is evident from the few pictures available from the production that some of the allegorical characters in Ruhr bore strong resemblances to figures from the vertep, the traditional Nativity puppet play. The figure of Death was in fact taken directly from the traditional source.27 Kurbas believed that ‘puppet theatre, in its essence, is best suited for expressing archetypal, mass, or collective figures.’28As mentioned previously, Kurbas had staged a traditional Nativity puppet play with live actors in 1918 at the Young Theatre. (See Tkacz’s essay in part 3 of this volume.) In fact, the 1918 production can be seen as Kurbas’s first step away from the traditional play text.

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After abandoning language completely in October, Kurbas reintroduced it in Ruhr. But he used only ‘found’ pieces of its most prosaic forms: newspaper accounts, political speeches, and slogans. And these ‘found’ pieces did not form the core of the narrative element. Rather, as Hirniak notes, the movement in Ruhr was in the transformation of gestures into words and words into movement. These moments of transformation from one medium into the next created the action of the piece; these were connected to the mass. In contrast to the living, moving, transforming mass, the allegorical characters were presented as static images. Gas Beauty is the relationship that exists in an organic whole – in a group of bodies (rhythms in rhythm), in a line (in rhythm); beauty links contrasts by mutual dependence (colours in a painting). Les Kurbas, Director’s Diary, 10 May 192129

The first play text performed by the First Studio was Gas I by Georg Kaiser. The play is set in a plant that refines a gas that is now the only source of energy for the industrial world. When the gas explodes, thousands are maimed or killed. The owner realizes that the gas is very unstable and someday will explode again, so he wants to turn the plant into a homesteading commune. But the workers are swayed by the chief engineer to demand that the plant be rebuilt. The characters in Gas, as in other Expressionist plays, are archetypes: the Mother, the Wife, the Son of the Billionaire, the Engineer. Kurbas decided to step fully into the archetypal features of the main characters and the costumes stressed this choice. The capitalists wore stylized tuxedos, the workers, stylized overalls. The costume for the Son of the Billionaire was made half of a tuxedo and half of overalls, since his position and sympathies wavered between the two classes. Each of the archetypal characters had an emblematic sign on his chest. The officer, for instance, had a target, the engineer, a geometric drafting plan. These red and white heraldic images were the only accents of colour on the grey-ochre stage and, therefore, drew great focus.30 The archetypal main characters moved like puppets and used spare hyperbolic gestures which were synchronized to the music. Yosyp Hirniak, who played the Government Official, recalls that Kurbas told him to think of the traditional Nativity puppets when he worked on his movements.31 Most of Kaiser’s play is set inside the offices of the plant. Kurbas, however, decided to place a mass chorus at the centre of both the stage and the production. Expanding on Kaiser’s image of workers who had become only that part of the body which was an extension of the machine they operated, Kurbas trained the members of the First Studio to become parts of a huge industrial machine. The choreographer of the production was Nadia Shuvarska, a student of Bronislava Nijinska. The production began with a choral pantomime. The actors entered to the sounds of a rhythmical atonal Expressionist score by Anatoly Butsky.32 They stationed themselves on the various levels of the set as workers on an assembly line but then, through their movement, they became propellers, pulleys, and switches of an industrial machine.

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14.4 Vadym Meller, sketch for a female costume in Gas

14.5 Vadym Meller, sketch for the officer’s costume, Gas

The first scene was played in front of this mass machine. Towards the end of the first act, a tension was created between the background and the foreground movements. The characters in the front scurried as they heard reports of the gas showing hazardous signs, and the mass machine in the background began to malfunction. Alexander Zaporozhets, who took part in the show, described Kurbas’s work on the movements that would transform the workers into the machines: ‘Good!’ said Kurbas … but slower, this is only the beginning. What is important is the spontaneous feeling of movement, the joy of movement. But we can still have jams or a breakdown … No, no, not all alike, you are not a monolith yet; everyone is on their own, individual gestures. Yes … Now the flywheel spins quicker, the conveyor picks up the speed. You have no time, you’re late … Confusion … However, you overcome it, fall into a rhythm, and taste high speed – but you are still people, not machines. Therefore rhythm excites you, you like the harmony of work … Try to convey the beauty of the gestures, you should enjoy the fact that you work so well with everyone. Enthusiasm forces you to work faster. Faster! You ‘four,’ you’re tired, but you can’t stop – now the wheel is driving you on … Yes! Still faster! Fear in the eyes – this can’t go on! You’re terrified of falling behind! You ‘six,’ faster! And here begins the process of transformation of human beings into robots, the mechanization of the human faktura [texture]. Tempo! More! More! More hysterical movements, fear! Terror! Don’t let me fall behind! Still faster! Fatigue! Total fatigue … Attention! The catastrophe! The explosion! … Victims …33

The mass machine ‘exploded’ in front of the audience. The actors hurled themselves all over the set. Yevhenia Strielkova, a member of the company, described the moment of the explosion: I remember with what inspiration I flung myself from a tall construction and fell backwards onto the edge of another platform, then rolled over on my back, flinging my arms over my head and lay in this position for several ‘stage seconds.’ This scene was performed by all its participants as if in the single breath of one organism.34

14.6 The entrance of the workers, Gas

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14.7 Vadym Meller’s set for Gas

Gas had a play text, but Kurbas’s production was not just an illustration of that text. Rather, on the basis of a verbal image from another scene of the play, Kurbas built a complex rhythmic stage image using mass movement set to music which became the focus of the first act. This image was not static, but evolved through several distinct phases during the act and served several functions. Kurbas’s mass machine opened up the confined office space suggested by Kaiser as the set for the first act. The set, designed for the production by Vadym Meller, consisted of a grey-ochre construction which did not seem to represent anything in particular. In the beginning, the members of the chorus entered onto the construction and established the factory through their movements. Jindrich Honzl, the Czech theatre semiotician, would describe this type of moment in the following terms: ‘It can be said that [the] representative function [of the set] was not expressed by means of form or color, but by the actors’ actions on the stage construction.’35 The factory was actually created by the movement of human bodies. This set created by actors, this factory created by human bodies, was an interesting contradiction in itself and was a source of tension on the stage. The mass image Kurbas created also added another level of tension in relation to the characters of Kaiser’s text. The moving mass of living workers was opposed to the archetypal characters that were described by the static emblematic image signs on their chests and moved like puppets. In October and Ruhr we saw Kurbas develop the idea of using the tension created by opposing a living moving transforming mass to static allegorical or emblematic characters who used puppet-like movements. In those early sketches this tension was the source of the conflict that propelled the narrative of the pieces. In Gas there was a text which could convey the

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14.8 Scene from Gas

narrative and the conflict. So Kurbas could use mass movement set to music, to create a complex image that presented a concept, an interpretation of the play text. During the first act of Gas the workers started to be transformed into machines. The organism was turning into a mechanism, as Kurbas would say, and the resulting tension caused the mass to malfunction by speeding up. Reports of this malfunction sent the characters scurrying in front. The audience observed both groups and saw the effect the rhythmic changes in one group were having on the other. The speed of the work was pressuring the workers into becoming objects, parts of the machine; they proved unable to cope with the pressure and exploded, hurling out through space. There was a social aspect to this moment – workers on the assembly line became machines. The audience perceived this social aspect through a formal choice – the highly stylized movements of the bodies were an external manifestation of the phenomenon. The focus was also on the external aspects of the explosion, the bodies scattering through space. This explosion was the major action of the first act. In Kaiser’s text this explosion is signalled by sound, the distant image of a crumbling smokestack, and a cascade of broken glass. It was also verbally reported by a messenger, who witnessed it and then died after delivering the message. Since Kurbas had a ‘factory’ created by human bodies on stage, he could present this moment in front of the audience. At the moment of the explosion, the hurling bodies were fragments of the factory or machines blasted apart by the gas. At the same time, they were also the human victims of both the explosion and also of the industrialization which was forcing them to become machines. During the moment of explosion, these flashing multiple definitions opened the eyes of the spectators to the symbolic and imagistic level which then could provoke them into grasping and experiencing the essence of this phenomenon.

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In his diary in the summer of 1922 Kurbas noted that the purpose of art ‘is to provoke by means of space, rhythm, and so forth, another human being towards intuitively grasping and experiencing the object expressed in a symbol [image], as it is in its essence.’36 The mass machine in Gas used space and rhythm to provoke the spectator intuitively to grasp and experience the essence of industrialization. Kurbas created a transforming image which added several levels of tension in the first act, opened the realistic confines of the space, and presented the essence of a phenomenon. Kurbas’s search for the original impulse in the theatre (which, during his Young Theatre days, he regarded as the chorus) led him to develop theatre pieces that consisted of mass movement set to music. Working on these, Kurbas found the transforming image or the active transformation, as he would call it, his next point of focus. Soon after Gas opened Kurbas explained: This production is a pinnacle of mass rhythm-plastiques, a polyphony of human motion on stage. Enthusiasm for mass scenes in theatre is enthusiasm for musical elements which have infused the production. In Gas there are duets, trios, quartets, chords and melodies, assonances and dissonances in the structure of the mass scenes.37

The descriptions of the scenes in Gas suggest its relation to Bronislava Nijinska’s ballet Les Noces, staged to the music of Igor Stravinsky. Les Noces opened in Paris six weeks after the premiere of Kurbas’s production of Gas in Kyiv. As with the chorus in Gas, so the corps de ballet is at the centre of Nijinska’s ballet. As the workers become the machine, so the bridesmaids ‘braid’ themselves into the bride’s hair in the most striking and important image of the ballet. This coincidence was not accidental; as we have noted, Nadia Shuvarska, the choreographer of Gas, was Nijinska’s student. However, from Nijinska’s correspondence to Shuvarska, we also know that it was Kurbas who created the main images in Gas. Nijinska actually urged her student to acquiesce to Kurbas’s demands and learn more about theatre from him.38 (See Maria Ratanova and Tkacz elsewhere in this volume.) According to the participants, every moment of Gas was choreographed and timed to the music.39 Soon after, however, Kurbas began looking in other directions. In his explanation of Gas after the premiere mentioned above, Kurbas continued: But today I am against music assuming the dominant role in a production. For me this is a stage I have passed. I see the theatre of the future as a theatre of stage images where the director is the playwright who creates the scenario. The main element will be the actor. The question of the master-actor, his craft and his creative individuality, arises in its full grandeur.40

Here, venturing a guess about the future direction in theatre, Kurbas actually described his work on the next show, Jimmie Higgins. For his next project Kurbas would indeed be the playwright – he translated, adapted, and dramatized the novel Jimmie Higgins, written by the American Upton Sinclair.41 And, the main element of the production which he would stage next fall would be the actors of the Fourth Studio.42

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14.9 The ‘European-American Concert’ scene in Jimmie Higgins

Jimmie Higgins Art is where the unity of humanity becomes manifest: where human depths, that is, our true ‘selves,’ converse with each other, not in their haphazard forms but through the diversity of individuals. Les Kurbas, Director’s Diary, 14 May 192143

Kurbas distilled Sinclair’s account of Jimmie’s adventures to a minimum. Jimmie is a simple American worker and a committed socialist. At rallies he is not the speaker, but the one who cheerfully decorates the hall and cleans up afterwards. His wife and children are killed when a munitions factory explodes. He fights in the First World War and afterwards is sent to Arkhangelsk in Russia, where the Allies landed hoping to overthrow the Soviet government. As a socialist, Jimmie is suspected of contact with the local Bolsheviks. He is tortured by the American secret service and goes insane. Before he started work on Jimmie Higgins, Kurbas told his actors that he was now interested in human depths and in exploring that which could stir the depths of the audience.44 Soon he would explain it in the following way: ‘On stage the actor exists in a limited space. To overcome this limitation, we have to search for those forms of stage expression that could transmit the limitless world of a person.’45

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14.10 Pavlo Dolyna as America, ‘European-American Concert’ scene, Jimmie Higgins

The production of Jimmie Higgins, however, started by presenting a scene with flashing archetypal static characters that were obviously lacking in depth. The scene was called the ‘European-American Concert.’ Seven nations were personified in ways similar to the vertep puppets. They appeared in lightening flashes in the dark void high above the stage floor. Each ‘nation’ – represented by a single actor – actually stood on a separate tall platform deep upstage and was lit only when it was speaking. The lines were extremely brief – the nations tapped out on the telegraph their imperialistic demands, made alliances, and spouted jingoisms. They issued ultimatums that led to war. After declaring war, each nation started singing its own anthem. The cacophony of anthems soon degenerated into the howls of a dogfight. A more complex picture of human reality emerged in the scenes with the workers, where Kurbas introduced film on stage and created a montage of film and

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stage action. Kurbas seized on the idea that film could portray characters’ thoughts on stage. In Jimmie Higgins he introduced this idea very simply at first, teaching the audience the language he was developing. When a character entered with news of a political event, a film of the event was shown as he related the story. Soon film was used to complete a character’s thought and then images were juxtaposed to events on stage, moving towards ever more complex patterns. The scene of the explosion which ended the second act was the most powerful montage of film and stage action in Jimmie Higgins. The American filmmaker D.W. Griffith was the first to develop the use of montage in film for narrative purposes.46 For example, he would tell the story of a rescue scene by cutting between shots of the different parties involved. He would also use montage to formally build the climax of the film. By using ever shorter shots, Griffith would transform the dramatic climax of a film into a visual crescendo.47 Similarly, in the explosion scene in Jimmie Higgins, Kurbas intercut between stage and film to create the narrative. This scene also revealed Kurbas’s growing interest in exploring the dynamics of the human mind. At the top of the scene Jimmie was on stage with a group of workers. The previous scene had ended with a film of an explosion. group: That’s somewhere near by. Maybe the powder plant? No, it’s probably the munitions factory. It’s in that direction. jimmie: Oh! (On screen we see a street in a working-class neighborhood. Then Jimmie’s house.) jimmie: Listen fellows, I’ve gotta go. (On screen we see Jimmie’s wife, Lizzie, playing with the children.) jimmie: (Screams) Let me go! (Runs out.) group: Why did he scream? He lives there. Where? There. Next to the munitions factory. (On screen Jimmie runs through the same street to his house. Around the corner he sees the ruins of the factory. Terrified, he runs on. Instead of his house and family, he finds a huge crater. On screen a close-up of Jimmie’s face – horrible despair. The stage is empty. Jimmie runs in.) jimmie: Damned war! Damned capital! I don’t want to live.48

Film is used in several different ways in this scene. The first segment creates a location not portrayed on stage, Jimmie’s home and neighbourhood. In the time frame of the scene, some of what is shown on film is already just a memory, but neither the audience, nor even Jimmie, realize this yet. The second segment, with Lizzie and the children, is Jimmie’s idealized memory of his family. Jimmie’s scream on stage makes the audience realize that this is

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a portrait of the family as it exists in Jimmie’s mind, and that its existence in reality may be threatened. In the third film section, Jimmie, who was just seen on stage, is seen on film. Although the place is the same as in the first segment, a street near Jimmie’s house, it is now seen in the chronological order of the scene. Actual time here has been somewhat condensed by a film cut. Jimmie, who was just on stage, is suddenly seen running near his home, which is obviously a distance off. In moments of stress, time is often perceived in a highly subjective manner and seems to either speed up or stand still depending on the circumstances. Also, since it has been established that film presents the internal moments of a character, one can say that in this segment Jimmie is also viewing himself running towards his own home. This visually recreates the sensation people often experience at the time of accidents, when they seem to develop an objective distance to their own actions. The montage gathers strength because of the extreme economy of information on stage and on screen. The constant jumble of time and space forces the audience to experience Jimmie’s whirlwind of emotion, memory, and realizations. The film cuts from a shot of the crater created by the explosion to a close-up of Jimmie’s face. This close-up of Jimmie’s face in despair overwhelms the theatrical space. The emotion is enlarged by the disruption of proportion. This image burns in the audience’s mind when Jimmie runs on stage. The double image of the close-up and the actual actor on stage reinforces the emotional impact of the final lines. The final moment, however, belongs to the actor playing Jimmie. The director built the sequence so as to allow space for the actor to create the final image – the outburst that resounded with the explosion and the crumbling with the final line, the shattering.49 By condensing time as Griffith did, Kurbas managed to transform the dramatic climax into a visual crescendo. The explosion scene both narrates the events of the explosion and becomes an explosive portrait of the moment, a jumble of exterior and interior events, fused with fragments of memories and feelings.50 Griffith’s montages not only condensed time but also juxtaposed spaces. The visual crescendo Griffith built for his audience during a rescue scene, for instance, was composed of a variety of actions in a variety of spaces. But during the screening of a film all these spaces were seen by the audience on a single plane – the film projection surface. By placing the film projection on a stage and juxtaposing its images with other actions on stage Kurbas was able to incorporate the variety of planes and spaces created by the stage set into his montage. The projection surface became part of a larger montage of performance spaces Kurbas was creating in the production. In Gas Kurbas had created an explosion by increasing the rhythm of choreographed movement to a break-neck pace and then having the actors fling themselves all over the stage. This transforming image suggested both the exploding factory building and the destruction of the mass of factory workers socially and physically. The explosion in Jimmie Higgins was created by intercutting film and stage action to portray the explosion of emotions inside one person, creating a multifocal portrait. In the final act of Jimmie Higgins, Kurbas would create a series of scenes that used the ideas of several film techniques employed in the explosion scene. However, Kurbas would stage these scenes without actually using any film.

14.11 Jimmie Higgins on platform right as his thoughts huddle

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14.12 Jimmie Higgins on platform right as his thoughts scatter under torture

Griffith believed film could recreate the sensation of the human mind by employing close-ups and flashbacks. Today, we have assimilated the language of film to such a degree that it is hard for us to see the impact these techniques originally had on the general perception of the continuity of time and space. The work of Hugo Munsterberg, a pioneer of film theory, can help us understand how profound this impact was. In a 1916 study Munsterberg notes that the close-up and the flashback disturb our usual perception of reality. These film devices, he writes, create the sensations that ‘reality has lost its own continuous connection and becomes shaped by the demands of our soul. It is as if the outer world itself became molded in accordance with our fleeting turns of attention or with our passing memory.’51 In the explosion scene Kurbas had used a film close-up of Jimmie’s face in despair to create a subjective focus on his emotional state. In Munsterberg’s terminology the close-up was used to disturb the usual sense of proportion to reflect on film the attention the soul gave to this fleeting, but overwhelming, moment. In the torture scenes Kurbas made use of the cinematic concept of the close-up to mould the outer world of the stage to reflect the sensations in Jimmie’s mind, and he did this by using purely theatrical devices. In the two scenes of torture at the end of the play Jimmie and the interrogator were on a large platform stage left approximately six feet above the stage floor. Kurbas decided not to illustrate the torture realistically, but to expand that moment in Jimmie’s consciousness which permitted him to withstand the pressure, and to present this on stage. He used a collective of actors to portray Jimmie’s thoughts. As Jimmie started to faint from the torture, the actor playing Jimmie

14.13 Jimmie Higgins surrounded by his thoughts in his final moments

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grabbed a rope and swung down from the tall platform to the stage level. There Jimmie was surrounded by actors who had previously played his friends or family members. They repeated snippets of lines from previous scenes, and even argued as to whether or not Jimmie should give into the interrogation. As Jimmie found a voice which strongly urged defiance, he swung back up to the interrogation platform and fell to the ground in a faint. As the actor playing Jimmie grabbed the rope and swung down from the platform to the stage, he was transferring the action from one playing area to another just as in a film jumpcut. The area he was jumping into was a close-up of his own mind. Although the scale of the actor did not change, the audience’s perception of the scale of the space the actor was entering shifted. The actor playing Jimmie descended from the platform, where he and the other actors played human beings, in a room to the stage floor, where he and the other actors played thoughts in his own fainting consciousness. The audience was looking at the events on stage as if through a microscope into a human soul. Where previously in the explosion scene the mind was confined to the film screen, in the final act, as Jimmie was losing his grip on reality under torture, most of the stage area was taken up by a portrayal of his mind. The actors were no longer occupying a human-sized space, but were playing his memories, presented as a montage of flashbacks from previous scenes which fused with possible solutions for Jimmie’s present dilemma. The audience was witnessing a close-up of the inner workings of a mind on the verge of a breakdown. By incorporating the new relationships to time and space developed by the cinema, the theatre could transcend the limitations of its own basic material, the physical reality of the human body. In his production of Jimmie Higgins, Kurbas showed that this transcendence could be achieved without distorting or hiding the basic human shape. The invisible could become visible without obscuring that which has always been seen. From this threshold the horizons looked limitless. Dmytro Vlasiuk, a young designer at the Berezil noted that at this point Kurbas’s co-workers began to realize that the theatre ‘could transmit not only outer events, but also the life of the human spirit, the deep inner emotional experiences of the individual human being.’52 Like modern painting, modern theatre was learning to explore the world beyond the surface of reality. With his original production of Jimmie Higgins, Kurbas used the devices of the new technology of film to reveal new ways of looking at the stage space and joined the ranks of the major creative directors of his time.53

NOTES 1 Oleksander Zaporozhets’, ‘Uroky: Spohady pro Lesia Kurbasa,’ Kyiv (Kyiv) 2 (February 1987) 142. Zaporozhets’, who worked with Kurbas as a young actor in the First Studio, later became an eminent Soviet psychologist associated with Lev Vygotsky. In the West his name is usually transliterated as Alexander Zaporozhets. 2 Kurbas started a similar program of training with the students at the Theatre Institute. According to one of them, Kurbas directed the program, while Valentyna Chystiakova,

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Virlana Tkacz who had studied with Bronislava Nijinska, led workshops in movement and plastiques, Favst Lopatyns’kyi concentrated on movement and gymnastics, and Hnat Ihnatovych led the sessions devoted to acting. Mykola V. Savchenko, ‘Stezhkamy-dorizhkamy (Avtobiohrafichnyi narys),’ Chastyna II (zoshyt 1A), Archive of State Museum of Theatre, Music, and Film Arts (Kyiv), inv. 12575, 22. Les’ Kurbas, Visti VUTsVK, 3 June 1921, in Filosofiia teatru, compiled by Mykola Labins’kyi (Kyiv: Vydavnytstvo Solomii Pavlychko OSNOVY, 2001) 564. Les’ Kurbas, Diary entry, 7 April 1921, in Labins’kyi, Filosofiia teatru 53. Kurbas, Diary entry, 27 June 1920, ibid. 50. Kurbas, Diary entry, 10 May 1921, ibid. A.V. Zaporozhets’, ‘Master: Vospominanie o Lese Kurbase,’ in Izbrannye psikhologicheskie trudy v dvukh tomakh [Collected Psychological Works in Two Volumes], ed. V.V. Davydova and V.P. Zinchenko (Moscow: Pedagogika, 1986) 1:30. ‘Les Kurbas’ by Ia. Strukhmanchuk Visti (Uman), 4 March 1921, quoted in Vasyl’ Vasyl’ko, ed., Les Kurbas: Spohady suchasnykiv (Kyiv: Mystetstvo, 1969) 335. Later Vasyl’ko would note: ‘[Yesterday] I saw Marko Tereshchenko’s work for the first time and was surprised to see that now he understands the need for movement – he who refused to recognize a regular waltz, and was the stiffest of all of us at the Young Theatre. There were many abstract things [in the show which] no one could understand, it totally lacked any sense of organized composition, [and was really] just a series of unrelated scenes. No sense of the director. You sensed the designer (Meller). There was the acrobat, the musicians, but no director! Not much to say about the performers, absolutely untrained, at best a total copy of Tereshchenko and not a good one at that.’ Vasyl’ Vasyl’ko, Shchodennyk [Diary], entry for 9 for September 1923, vol. 5, 1 Jan. 1923–14 May 1924, Archive of State Museum of Theatre, Music, and Film Arts (Kyiv), inv. 10374. Zaporozhets’, ‘Uroky’ 142–3. Kurbas’s answer to a question at a meeting of the Artistic Political Committee at the Berezil on 24 October 1930, Protocol no. 1, quoted in Dmytro Hrudyna, ‘Dekliaratsii i manifesty: Pro “shliakhy” Berezolia [1],’ Krytyka (Kharkiv) 37 (February 1931) 102n. The English translation of the Bjørnson poem used here is mine, based on the loose Ukrainian translation Les’ Kurbas did from the original Norwegian. Kurbas’s translation is quoted in M.T. Ryl’skyi, ed., Ukrains’kyi dramatychnyi teatr, 2 vols. (Kyiv: Naukova dumka, 1959, 1967) 2: 138. Apparently the original poem was not about March, but April. Les’ Kurbas, quoted by Iryna Avdiieva, ‘Pro naikrashchu liudynu, iaku ia znala v iunats’ki roky,’ in Vasyl’ko, Les’ Kurbas 149. Iosyp Hirniak, Spomyny, ed. Bohdan Boichuk (New York: Suchasnist, 1982) 150. Ryl’sky’i 2:143. See also Iu. Boboshko, Rezhyser Les’ Kurbas (Kyiv: Mystetstvo, 1987) 73. One of the students who participated in the production, Mykola Savchenko, wrote that the production of October was actually thrown together in ten days. See Mykola Savchenko, Uchobovyi 1922–1923 Spohady, notebook 5B, Mykola Savchenko Papers, Archive of State Museum of Theatre Music and Film Arts (Kyiv), inv. 12582, 23. This would certainly explain the schematic nature of the scenario. The fact that the First Studio could put together such a well-received show so quickly would point to the success of the actor training program. Savchenko also writes that Ruhr was staged in twelve days.

Les Kurbas’s Early Work at the Berezil 383 17 The writer Hryhorii Kosynka called the performances ‘Brilliant.’ Hr[yhorii] Kos[ynka], ‘Borotba i peremoha,’ review of Les’ Kurbas’s production of October, Bil’shovyk (Kyiv), 9 November 1922: 3. 18 Proletarskaia pravda (Kyiv), 12 November 1922, quoted in Boboshko 73. 19 Hirniak, Spomyny 150. 20 In the spring of 1921, the Bolshevik government had declared the New Economic Policy (NEP), which replaced the harsh nationalization policies of War Communism. Some aspects of a market economy were introduced, especially in agriculture, which had suffered a total collapse under the previous policies. By the fall of 1922 it became clear that in theatre NEP meant that the troupes lost their government subsidy and had to rely totally on box-office receipts. Experimental groups such as Kurbas’s Berezil were hit particularly hard, but even repertoire theatres were devastated. For instance, Vasyl’ Vasyl’ko, who was then an actor in a theatre that performed a European repertoire on the outskirts of Kyiv, reported in his diary that he earned only 10 million of the inflated currency a month, while a loaf of bread cost 270,000. Vasyl’ Vasyl’ko, Shchodennyk, entry for 18 December 1922, vol. 4, 1 May 1922–30 December 1922, Archive of State Museum of Theatre, Music, and Film Arts (Kyiv), inv. 10373. Vasyl’ko mentions several times that the actors were literally starving and reports his amazement that Kurbas managed to get the 45th Division of the Red Army to sponsor the Berezil by providing free meals for the actors. The production of October probably helped the theatre secure this sponsorship. 21 Vasyl’ Vasyl’ko, Shchodennyk, entry for 11 January 1923, vol. 5, 1 January 1923–14 May 1924, Archive of State Museum of Theatre, Music, and Film Arts (Kyiv), inv. 10374. Later classes also included plastiques, rhythmics, fencing, juggling, improvisation, and voice according to Kunin’s system. 22 Edward Gordon Craig, On the Art of the Theatre (London, 1911; rpt. New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1956) 61. 23 Vasyl’ko, Diary entry, 20 January 1923. 24 The granting organization was Tsukrotrest. Vasyl’ko, Diary entry for 25 January 1923. 25 Hirniak, Spomyny 151. 26 Iaryna Hradil, ‘Vystava maisterni “Berezil,”’ review of Les’ Kurbas’s production of Ruhr, Bil’shovyk (Kyiv), 27 Feb. 1923, 3. 27 Boboshko 74. 28 Les’ Kurbas, ‘Vertep na agitatsinii sluzhbi,’ Hlobus 4 (February 1923), in Labins’kyi, Filosofiia teatru 571. 29 Labins’kyi, Filosofiia teatru 56. 30 Z.V. Kucherenko, Vadym Meller (Kyiv: Mystetstvo, 1975) 45. 31 Hirniak, Spomyny 164. 32 According to Savchenko there were 58 musicians in the orchestra. Savchenko, ‘Uchobovyi 1922–1923’ 4. 33 Zaporozhets’, ’Uroky’ 144. This quote has been somewhat condensed. 34 Ievheniia Strielkova, ‘Frahmenty spohadiv,’ in Vasyl’ko, Les’ Kurbas 164. 35 Jindrich Honzl, ‘Dynamics of the Sign in the Theater,’ trans. Susan Larson, in Semiotics of Art: Prague School Contribution, ed. Ladislav Matejka and Irwin Titunik (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1976) 79. 36 Kurbas, Diary entry, 20 August 1922, in Labins’kyi, Filosofiia teatru 59.

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37 Kurbas’s production of Gas opened on 27 April 1923. The press raved: ‘This production begins a new era in theatre.’ ‘Teatr Lesia Kurbasa,’ Nova hromada (Vienna) 2 (August 1923). Iakiv Savchenko, the critic for Bilshovyk, wrote: ‘The most recent production presented by Kurbas’s studio – Gas – is no longer just the next step after October and Ruhr, but [it is] a great leap forward, [an example of] the colossal creative intensity which Kurbas embodies, now we can use the word: genius.’ Iakiv Savchenko, ‘Haz,’ review of Les Kurbas’s production of Georg Kaiser’s Gas I, Bil’shovyk (Kiev), 29 April 1923, 3. 38 As Gas was preparing to open, it was Kurbas who was facing the invisible. In his diary, he wrote: ‘Art – is creative trepidation in the face of the unknown. One must recognize that one knows that one knows nothing.’ Kurbas, Diary entry, 4 April 1923 in Labins’kyi, Filosofiia teatru 60. Unfortunately, Shuvarska thought she knew better. She left Kurbas’s theatre to work on her own. In the 1920s she worked at the Franko Theatre. Her later credits include the 1952 Soviet film In the Steppes of Ukraine. 39 This was certainly true for the smaller parts. See, for instance, Hirniak, Spomyny 164–5 and Savchenko, ‘Uchobovy 1922–1923’ 8–12. 40 Kurbas, quoted in Proletarska pravda, 26 April 1923 (original in Russian). 41 In the summer of 1923, Matvii Shatuls’kyi, a Canadian journalist, visited the Berezil. Matvii Shatul’s’kyi [Proletkor], ‘Mystets’ke obiednannia “Berezil” na Ukraini,’ Holos pratsi (Winnipeg) 12 (December 1923) 18–23. As a parting present, Shatul’s’kyi gave Kurbas a popular novel he had brought from America, Upton Sinclair’s Jimmie Higgins. Les’ Taniuk, ‘Les’ Kurbas i svitova kultura [Les Kurbas and World Culture],’ Vsesvit (Kyiv) 6 (June 1987) 150. Kurbas realized that Sinclair’s tale of American socialism, the world war, and the Revolution could provide the plot for the new revolutionary play. Kurbas dramatized the novel. 42 The script was published in 1924 with concise, informative descriptions of the production. Les’ Kurbas, Dzhimmi Higginz, a play based on the novel by Upton Sinclair (Kharkiv: Shliakh Osvity, 1924). All major movements in the production are described in this script. Music, light, and sound-effect cues are given, and even the lengths of pauses are noted. The play was written in a telegraphic verse style similar to that used by Kaiser and other German Expressionists, and had a cinematic structure. 43 Labins’kyi, Filosofiia teatru 57. 44 Shatul’s’kyi 22. 45 Les’ Kurbas, quoted by Iryna Avdiieva, ‘Pro naikrashchu liudynu, iaku ia znala v iunatski roky,’ in Vasyl’ko, Les’ Kurbas 154. 46 Edwin S. Porter actually first used a rudimentary form of intercutting, but Griffith developed the idea and is generally acknowledged as ‘the seminal genius of the narrative cinema and its first great visionary artist.’ He was the first to use close-ups and to intercut shots from various angles and distances in a single scene in order to propel his narrative. Griffith also realized the power of associative editing, which, for example, could be used to create a sense of memory. ‘You can photograph thought,’ he was once quoted as saying. David A. Cook, A History of Narrative Film (New York: W.W. Norton, 1981) 66, 59, 63–4, 87. Matvii Shatul’s’kyi reported that Kurbas was surprisingly well informed about American theatre, but seemed most interested in Griffith’s films, especially Intolerance, which he had seen several years earlier. Shatul’s’kyi 14.

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47 48 49

50

51 52 53

The Soviet film director Lev Kuleshov first developed the idea of montage theoretically. See Lev Kuleshov, ‘Origins of Montage’ in Cinema in Revolution, ed. Luda Schnitzer, Jean Schnitzer, and Marcel Martin, trans. David Robinson (New York: Hill and Wang, 1973) 69. Kuleshov developed the ideas of montage by studying Griffith’s films. See Cook 138–40. Cook 66. Kurbas, Dzhimmi Higginz 53–4. This citation omits light and music cues. Amvrosii Buchma played the part of Jimmie Higgins when the production opened. The description of the final moment of this scene is based on my interviews with Iosyp Hirniak, who understudied the part and often played it in subsequent performances. Interviews with Iosyp Hirniak, actor in Berezil 1922–33, New York, February 1987. For a more detailed discussion of the use of time in the explosion and torture scene see Virlana Tkacz, ‘Time and Transformation in Les Kurbas’s Production of Jimmie Higgins,’ in Canadian-American Slavic Studies 36:4 (Winter 2002). Hugo Munsterberg, The Photoplay; A Psychological Study (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1916; rpt. New York: Arno Press and New York Times, 1970) 95. Dmytro Vlasiuk, ‘Storinka mynuloho,’ in Les’ Kurbas, ed. Vasyl’ko, 227. Kurbas was aware of his innovation. The day Jimmie Higgins opened, the newspaper Bil’shovyk ran a short article about the production by Kurbas in which he wrote: ‘The inclusion of film, as a moment of external and internal action, replacing the aural with the visual, the organic with the mechanic, is not a novelty, neither is film in theatre; but, as far as I know, what is new is that it is such an organic part of the production.’ ‘Jimmie Higgins,’ Bil’shovyk 20 (November 1923), in Labins’kyi, Filosofiia teatru 580.

Why worship the new, merely because it is new? That is nonsense, sheer nonsense … I have the courage to recognize myself to be a barbarian; I cannot extol the products of Expressionism, Futurism, Cubism, and other ‘isms’ as the supreme revelations of artistic genius. Vladimir Lenin1

1 Lenin to Clara Zetkin, in Zetkin, ‘My Recollection of Lenin,’ in Lenin on Literature and Art (Moscow: Foreign Publishers, 1967) 274.

15 Abstraction and Ukrainian Futurist Literature oleh s. ilnytzkyj

It may seem strange, but the words ‘abstract’ and ‘abstraction’ were not all that frequent in the theoretical and programmatic writings of Ukrainian Futurists. In rereading my own work on this topic, I was reminded of how seldom I resorted to these terms.1 A more recent and very interesting book on the Ukrainian avantgarde sprinkles its text more liberally with abstrahuvannia and abstraktne, but, again, neither plays a vital role.2 These words, of course, do appear in Ukrainian Futurist publications, especially in articles about the visual arts. The Kharkiv Futurist journal Nova generatsiia (New Generation), for example, reproduced Willi Baumeister’s ‘abstract’ paintings (as well as those of many other artists) and pointedly drew attention to a German museum where ‘abstract’ exhibition space was created to complement the presentation of ‘abstract’ art.3 Although the occurrence of these terms was not high, there is absolutely no denying that all manner of abstractionist concerns, practices, and ideas played a crucial role in the Ukrainian Futurist movement. The rejection in both poetry and prose of realist conventions, objectivity, and mimesis, and the refusal to use language as a transparent referential tool – all of which were dominant aesthetic standards in the pre-Revolutionary and, later, Proletarian creative arsenal – can be considered aspects of Futurist abstractionism. Opponents of Futurism regularly accused the movement of inaccessibility and obscurity, code words for their abstractionist and formalist stance. Early critics, for example, labelled the leader of Ukrainian Futurism, Mykhail Semenko, an ‘idiot’ for writing poems that defied easy semantic processing, for frustrating the ‘emotional’ and ‘ideological’ reading of literature. Ultimately, the distortion of reality by the Futurists manifested itself in a variety of ways: as exaggerated satire bordering on the grotesque; as violation or elimination of syntax; and as pure sound poetry. One reason for the relative absence of the ‘A’ word itself is that Ukrainian Futurists preferred other terminology to convey their anti-realist, anti-naturalist and self-reflective formalist viewpoint. The most popular word without doubt was ‘destruction.’ ‘Synthesis’ – with its implication of fusing ‘destroyed’ or ‘atomized’ elements into new systemic relations – was also vital in their discourse. During periods when it was politically impractical to speak of ‘destruction,’ Futurist writers resorted to surrogate concepts, dubbing their work ‘new,’ ‘experimental,’ or ‘leftist.’ For example, in 1928 Nova generatsiia initiated a long series of

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15.1 Mykhail Semenko, 1924

theoretical and historical articles by Kazimir Malevich (Kazymyr Malevych), which was completed in the official publication of the Kyiv Futurist almanac Avangard – Almanakh proletarskykh myttsiv Novoi generatsii in 1930 (Avant-Garde – Almanac of the Proletarian Artists of the New Generation). The first of these was titled ‘An Analysis of the New and the Painterly Arts: Paul Cézanne.’4 As might be expected, Malevich emphasized such ideas as bezpredmetnist’ (literally ‘objectlessness’), bezsiuzhetnist’ (‘plotlessness’), ‘deformation,’ and ‘painterly content,’ while discarding ‘naturalistic’ depiction – all of which were also long-held positions and practices among Futurists. The abstract character of Futurist writings betrays itself subtly first in the denial of ‘Literature,’ that is, of the institution as a coherent and closed system of genres. Futurists refused to distinguish firmly among writings that were fiction, fact, or science; they viewed all forms of written texts, as well as all the arts, as subject to synthesis and mutual cross-fertilization.5 If form (genre) is considered a type of meaning that carries a certain amount of predictable information and promise of a specific experience, then the failure to practice writing within traditionally defined parameters automatically introduced ambiguities and disorientation for the reader. Futurists happily resorted to ad hoc and hybrid genres (revfutpoema – ‘revolutionary futurist narrative poem’); they gave their works odd subtitles or designations (e.g., Poème philosophique, Poème éléctrique, Poème objectif, Poème social, etc.); and they mixed artistic discourses with ‘practical’ scientific or journalistic styles. In short, Literature and Art – as ‘systems’ or ‘institutions’ – became contingent categories, fraught with chance and unpredictable formal outcomes. The ‘Panfuturist’ theory, which served to justify Futurist activity, hypothesized that, diachronically, ‘Great Art’ was in irreversible decline, and therefore destined for death.6 Synchronically, this gave Futurists an excuse to exploit traditional forms as objects on which all kinds of operations could be carried out, that is, from which elements, parts, and features could be taken (abstracted) for the purpose of creating new systems and arts. In place of canonical, integral categories (‘painting,’ ‘music,’ and so forth), Ukrainian Futurists emphasized the construction of new ‘things’ that used recombined elements, preferably from outwardly incompatible arts.

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Abstractionist tendencies in Futurist literature were very much inspired by analogous developments in painting. In his excellent book Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry Charles Altieri noted the impact that avant-garde abstract painting had on the writings of American poets, and how the visual revolution in the arts contributed to their thinking about poetic work in general.7 Although there is no similar study for the Ukrainian avant-garde, many of Altieri’s observations ring true for Ukrainian Futurist poets and prose writers, who from the start of their activity recognized painting as the pre-eminent modern medium because it best pursued noble ‘destructive’ artistic ends. Semenko, the leading theoretician among Futurists, identified Impressionism (especially Paul Cézanne) as the earliest stage in the revolution of Art.8 His own theory of ‘Panfuturism’ unselfconsciously embraced all the avant-garde ‘-isms,’ treating them as ‘discrete elements of a single organism’9 that was working to undermine the remnants of Great Art. Semenko privileged such movements as Cubism, Italian Futurism, German Expressionism, and Dada, but other trends (De Stijl, the Bauhaus, Neue Sachlichkeit) were also keen objects of interest. In the latter part of the 1920s Nova generatsiia was the most avid and consistent exponent of these Western avant-gardes in the whole Soviet Union. Photographs and articles reported on major developments in painting and drew attention to a variety of specific artists (not all necessarily painters), beginning with Ukraine’s native sons, such as Alexander Archipenko and Kazimir Malevich, and including such figures of the avant-garde as Hans Arp, Guillaume Apollinaire, Giacomo Balla, Marcel Breuer, Georges Braque, Giorgio de Chirico, Otto Dix, Juan Gris, Walter Peterhans, Paul Klee, Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, Le Corbusier, Fernand Léger, Walter Mehring, Jean Metzinger, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Pablo Picasso, Victor Servranckz, and Oskar Schlemmer. In short, there can be no doubt that in terms of theory and practice, avant-garde abstract visual arts had a profound impact on Futurist literary activity. Semenko made the most overt linkage between abstract painting and Futurist writing in his article ‘Poezomaliarstvo’ [Poetry-painting],10 written and published in Kyiv in 1922. Here he advocated a move away from the ‘straight, smooth lines’ (156) of poetry to ‘other forms of writing’ and recommended ‘rejecting that which is called “a poem” or ‘poetry’ in favour of ‘new ways of incarnating’ language (157). Semenko spurned the notion of organizing literary works solely around the ‘word’ and ‘metrical-rhythmic’ combinations, which, in his view, simply meant imitating ‘academic’ forms. The sources of renewal for poetry, argued Semenko, did not lie ‘within [itself] but without’ (157), namely, in the precedents offered by painting. And Futurists, as ‘children of their day’ (154), he said, were obliged to work towards poetry’s final destruction by undermining it ‘from the side of faktura’ (155), that is, by concentrating on its material form and structure. They set out to ‘break down the material of poetry, i.e., words, into their component elements’ (158). In subjecting the word to ‘energetic experimentation,’ its visual aspect would become available for independent contemplation. Semenko spoke of ‘visual (spatial) poetry or poetry-painting’ (158), in this way stressing the new genre’s ‘external appearance (form).’ The nature of the times was such, said Semenko, that contemporary thought could only be expressed either in the ‘dynamics of the masses, or in the equilibrium (statyka) of huge canvasses’ (159). This meant that poetry would have

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15.2 Kablepoema Karta No. 3

to approximate such arts as painting and posters, borrow their vocabulary, so to speak, and share in their penchant for abstraction. Semenko produced two series of works in support of his claims. The first was ‘Kablepoema za okean’ (Cablepoem across the Ocean, begun in Kyiv in 1920; completed in Kharkiv in 1921); the second bore the title Moia mozaika (My Mosaic, Kyiv, 1922).11 The former not only exploited spatial premises to organize the ‘poem,’ but also brought in colour as an additional visual element, a feature not usually important in literary texts. The last poem of ‘My Mosaic’ was titled ‘Suprepoziia’ (Suprepoem, Kyiv, 3 October 1922) and was unabashedly connected to Malevich’s Suprematism in both name and appearance. Even as Semenko spoke of poetry in terms of painting, he also recognized that experimentation with the ‘word’ opened opportunities for the ‘aural poem’ (slukhova poeziia, 158), that is to say, a work in which sound took precedence over semantics:

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15.3 Mykahil Semenko, ‘Suprepoeziia’ (Suprepoem, 3 October 1922, Kyiv), from the cycle of visual poems Moia mozaika (My Mosaic)

‘While [visual poetry] touches on the laws of painting, [aural poetry] obviously will touch on music or, more generally, sound (voice)’ (158). One Futurist, Andry Chuzhy, for example, referred to his poems of 1921 as ‘drawings for the eyes and ears.’12 A roundabout elaboration of the aural argument fell to another Futurist, Geo Shkurupy, who penned a short article on the topic of ‘Noise-Music.’13 Although he did not initially link the latter with poetry per se, his words resonated with Semenko’s statements. In promoting ‘noise-music’ as a Futurist task, Shkurupy betrayed familiarity (probably through a French source) with the work of Italian Futurists and the German Dadaists, who were already exploring these very ideas, as he himself acknowledged.14 Interestingly, his argument in favour of ‘noise’

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began with a condemnation of ‘tonal music,’ which he said was ‘based on mellifluousness’ and was consequently ‘a terribly conservative thing.’ Shkurupy foresaw noise-music opening up prospects for noise orchestras, noise instruments, and new forms of musical notation – not to mention the establishment of novel performance venues and the empowerment of proletarian masses to act as musicians. Following Semenko, Shkurupy presented the impending death of traditional music as a function of the transformation of its formal elements (faktura). Although Shkurupy wrote that the ‘development of noise-music is being conducted among us completely independently’ (33), there is no evidence that Ukrainian Futurists – who were primarily writers – engaged in noise-music in any concerted manner. Nevertheless, Shkurupy’s article does demonstrate their readiness to embrace the principle. There is no doubt, moreover, that in general they responded positively to manifestations of noise as well as other forms of modern music and rhythms, which they considered one of the defining attributes of contemporary urban life (the other being, of course, technology). This tendency can be seen as another form of deviation from what might be called the traditional (melodious) norms of music/sound. We can see, for example, clear acceptance of jazz, a form of music Futurists associated with non-conformity and scandal. In his 1929 novel Dveri v den (Door into Day), Shkurupy does not invoke noise-music as such, but he does open his work by mentioning jazz, emphasizing its polyphony, tempos, and status among the less reputable stratum of society: ‘Near the open doors [of the bar] prostitutes were marching to the beat of a Jazz band ... The Jazz band swayed to the rasping sounds of a saxophone, copper cymbals, and drums, which were rising like a frenzied muscle spasm in the corner of a hall full of cigarette smoke. Griped by fever, [the band] shivered and quivered. Gout-stricken, it rocked on weak thin legs, and stepped out into the raucous life of the city street like a cat wailing.’15 Mykola Bazhan (a Futurist in his early career), too, recreated the jazz age in his brilliant poem ‘Fokstrot’ (Foxtrot, 1929), a dance that at one time was associated with seductive eroticism and public indecency. Set in a music hall (miusik-khol), where violinists groan (stohnut) and a variety of other instruments (flute, banjo, guitar) make sounds that Bazhan portrays as fluids (drops of water, flowing liquid, bile, mercury), the poem ends with the foxtrot morphing into the ragtime rhythms of the shimmy (another ‘indecent’ dance), while the poem itself reaches a climax in a cacophony of sibilants. ɍɫɬɨɤɤɚɬɨɲɭɦɭɲɿɦɿ, ɋɩɨɬɢɤɚɬɢɫɶɜɲɭɦɿɲɿɦɿ, ɐɟ±ɥɸɛɨɜ. Ɉɫɶɬɚɤɚɬɢɜɲɭɦɿɲɿɦɿ, ɍɫɬɪɨɤɚɬɿɦɲɭɦɿɲɿɦɿ Ɍɢ±ɥɸɛɨɜ!16

The staccato of a swishing shimmy The staggering in the swishing of a shimmy That is – love. Such are you in the swishing of the shimmy A kaleidoscopic swishing shimmy Love – that’s you!

In the poetic practice of Ukrainian Futurists, the assault on melody and mellow sounds started first as a rebuttal of modernist and Symbolist poetry, which prided itself on imitating music and producing harmonious tones. The Futurists criticized

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Pavlo Tychyna and others for simply ‘translating “beautiful Ukrainian folk songs”’17 – another genre too mellifluous for their tastes. In response, unkind critics, with some justification, characterized Futurist poetry as nothing but noise. One wrote about Semenko that he was like ‘a self-taught man who sits down at an instrument, letting his fingers strike anywhere in an attempt to play chords. Once in a while he strikes a pleasant note, but generally it is simply noise.’18 The penchant for noise-music and strange sounds was realized through a type of poetry that Russian literature called zaum or trans-sense. Ukrainian Futurists adopted such verse from Russian and Italian Futurism, and Dada – showing a predilection for a variety of nonsensical or semi-sensical verse. Take, for example, Semenko’s ‘Malenkyi virshyk’ (A Little Poem, 1913): ɋɩɿɜɒɭɦɄɢɩɿɜ. ɁɝɪɚɣȾɭɦɊɚɣ. ȽɧɿɜȽɥɭɦȽɨɪɿɜ Ƚɪɚɣ. Ʉɭɦɋɩɿɜɚɣ.19

Song. Sound. Bubbled. Throng. Thoughts. Eden.

5DJH6FRUQ%XUQHG Play. Chum. Sing.

In this instance Semenko eliminated syntax, but preserved meaningful words and enough morphology to hint at some meaning. The one-word sentences create something resembling a stanza with rhymes – although they could also be considered three columns and read down rather than across. A much more radical challenge to semantics occurred when he elevated abstract auditory elements to independent status. Semenko’s ‘V stepu’ (‘In the Steppe,’ 1914, written in Kyiv) earned him especially scathing criticism from the Modernists: ȼɇɋɌȱɄ ɉȱɄɄ ɇɍɉ ɅɖɈɅȱɅɖɈɉ ɇȱɋȼɇɄ ɉȱ ɅɖɈȼɇɅɖɌȱ ɉȱɋɄɄ ɇɍɅȱɅɖɈɅɖɈ ɌɄ20

VN S TI K PI K K NUP L’O LI L’O P NI S VN K PI LO VN L TI PI S K K NU LI LO LO TK

While this group of lines and sounds aspires towards the status of a stanza, betrays elements of internal refrains, and even suggests a definitive finale, it is otherwise non-figurative and eludes meaningful interpretation. The consonantal clusters create enunciation problems; the capital letters seem to underscore the independence of each letter/sound, discouraging attempts to formulate sensible syllables or words. Semenko wrote several works of this type, but he also played with verbal units that still carry traces of semantic value, teasing the reader with meaning, but without ever delivering a clear message. A 1914 poem, also written in Kyiv, plays with the word ‘trolley car’ (tramway):

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ȼɚɣɬɪɚ ɪɚɦɬɚ ɬɪɚɦ ɣɚɜɚɜ ɜɚɜ ɬɪɚɦɬɚɦ ɪɚɦɚɣ ɬɪɚɦɜɚɣ ɚɜɪɚɚɦ.21

Way tra ram ta tram yaw waw tram tam ram ay tram way avraam.

As if in an Impressionist painting, the ‘tram’ (ɬɪɚɦɜɚɣ) is visible/recognizable but only barely: it is a deformed signifier, evoking a deformed signified, while mimicking sounds the real object makes in the world. If looked from a Cubist perspective, we can see that the signified object (or, more accurately, the word that stands for it) is not presented in a manner that would preserve its visual or semantic integrity. The atomized syllables form a kind of phonetic ‘geometry’ scattering the tram on multiple planes, its parts assembled in the poem (canvas) not to make logical sense but to create a phonic collage/impression. This Cubist principle was used to especially good effect by both Semenko and Geo Shkurupy in their respective verbal ‘self-portraits.’ In both cases, the poets disassemble the unitary wholeness of the Self – whose essence is inscribed in their names (that is, ‘Mykhail Semenko’ and ‘Geo’) – by fragmenting the word that stands in for their person. These signifiers of their ‘identity’ are broken down into constituent phonetic or syllabic segments, and then recombined into suggestive abstract sounds. Thus, Semenko (Ɇɢɯɚɣɥɶɋɟɦɟɧɤɨ) becomes: ɏɚɣɥɶɫɟɦɟɧɤɨɦɢ ɂɯɚɣɥɶɤɨɯɚɣɥɶɚɥɶFɟɤɨɦɢɯ ɂɯɚɣɦɟɫɟɧɦɢɯɫɟɨɯɚɣ Ɇɯɣɥɶɤɦɫɦɧɤɦɢɯɦɢɯ22

Khail’ seme nkomy Ykhail’ kokhail’ al’se komykh Ykhai mesen mykhse okhai Mkh yil’ kms mnk mykh mykh

‘Geo Shkurupy’ (working with a novel transliteration system employed by the Futurists, in which ‘w’ stands for ‘sh’) is transformed into this: geo O ge ego geo Wkurupij geometr i ja geograf i ja geo23

While Semenko’s persona is removed from any concrete physical or social context, Shkurupy’s plays with Futurists motifs of exaggerated self-importance, travel, and the exotic. He associates himself with geometry and geography. It should also be noted that one ‘portrait’ is ‘painted,’ so to speak, in Cyrillic, the other in Roman letters – both in their own way underscoring the materiality of language.

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Another interesting abstract poem from Semenko’s Kyiv period is ‘Misto’ (City), written on 23 May 1914: Ɉɫɬɟɫɬɟ ɛɿɛɨ ɛɭ ɜɿɡɧɢɤɢ±ɥɸɞɢ ɬɪɚɦɜɚʀ±ɥɸɞɢ ɚɜɬɨɦɨɛɿɥɿɛɿɥɿ ɛɿɝɨɪɭɯɪɭɯɨɛɿɝɢ ɪɭɯɥɢɜɨɛɿɝɢ berceus ɤɚɪɭ ɫɟɥɿ ɟɥɿ ɥɿɥɿ ɩɭɬɢɜɟɥɟɬɧɿ ɞɢɦɭɫɬɚɥɶ ɩɚɥɹɬɶ ɩɚɯ ɩɚɯɤɚ ɩɚɯɢɬɨɫɤɚ ɞɢɦɫɢɧɿɣ ɱɨɪɧɢɣɞɢ ɦ ɩɭɫɤɚɸɬɶ ȻȿɇɁȱɇ ɱɚɞɭɠɢɬɶ ɱɚɞɭɛɥɚɝɚɬɶ ɤɨɯɚɬɶ ɤɚɯɢɤɚɬɶ ɠɢɬɬɽɞɚɬɶ ɠɢɬɬɽɪɭɯ ɠɢɬɬɽɛɟ ɧɡɿɧ ɚɜɬɨ ɬɪɚɦ.24

Oste ste bi bo bu driver–people trolleys–people automobilebile runningtraffic trafficruns busyruns berceus merry go rounds Lilli putians giant smoke steal burn puff puffing puffingsadness smoke blue black smo ke they release BENZINE fumes live fumes beg love cough givelife lifetraffic lifebe nzine auto tram.

Opaque at first reading, the poem on closer examination comes into focus as an obviously dynamic urban landscape, created through sound and suggestive fragmentary (and fragmentized) images. Speed, noise, factories, cars, trams, people – engulfed in fumes and smoke – characterize the scene. The first line suggests the word city (ɦɿɫɬɨ); the next two can be construed as sounds typical for this environment. Lines 4–7 emphasize motion: in montage fashion, we are shown a quick succession of quasi-cinematic frames (ɜɿɡɧɢɤɢ±ɥɸɞɢ / ɬɪɚɦɜɚw–ɥɸɞɢ), then the blurred image of white cars moving swiftly (ɚɜɬɨɦɨɛɿɥɿɛɿɥɿ). The French word for lullaby begins a chain of association with children (ɥɿɥɿɩɭɬɢ) around a merrygo-round. The splitting of words at the end of line (Nɚɪɭ / ɫɟɥɿ; ɥɿɥɿ / ɩɭɬɢ) or their

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15.4 Mykhail Semenko, ‘Svit’ (The World, 9 July 1922), from ‘My Mosaic’

fusion into neologisms adds to the Cubist-like collage effect, while the recreation of speed through verbal devices is reminiscent of painterly techniques used by Futurists to simulate motion on canvas (à la Boccioni, Balla, and Carrà). From the foregoing examples we can see that natural language was not used principally for cognitive or ideological goals, that is, instrumentally, but was exploited to produce a sense of arbitrariness, and to create relatively autonomous, self-reflective, and non-representational works. The abstract character of Futurist writing was indebted not only to painting and modern music, but also to the revolution in typography and book design that swept Europe and the Soviet Union during the 1910s to 1920s. In Ukraine even government publishing houses were under the spell of these changes, commissioning avant-garde designs from such noted artists as Adolf Strakhov.25 Of all the literary groups, the Constructivists around Valerian Polishchuk and the Futurists were the most radical and consistent in dedicating themselves to an original appearance of their printed books and pages, which often had much in common with visual and/or aural poems. Ukrainian Futurists in this respect were completely in step with major Western movements such as Italian Futurism, Dada, Constructivism, and the Bauhaus. It is no coincidence that in 1928 they reproduced in their journal two film posters by one of the most outstanding and influential typographers of the twentieth century, Jan Tschichold.26 The poetry-painting and sound poems mentioned above were indivisibly tied to innovations taking place in typography and page design. Many of the ‘abstract’ literary effects would simply have been impossible if Futurists were not concerned with giving prominence to the text as such and recognizing the page as a visual space. This explains why their publications so often resort to such features as colour, mixed alphabets (Roman and Cyrillic) and font sizes, mathematical symbols, bullets, arrows, lines, boxes, and squares. In some cases, no clear boundaries can be established among visual ‘poems,’ book ‘covers,’ or ‘posters,’ since all are prone to borrow from and impinge on each other’s formal features. For example, Zhovtnevyi zbirnyk panfuturystiv (The Panfuturists’ October Anthology, Kyiv, 1923) not only had a strikingly bold front and back cover that claimed the reader’s attention independently of its semantic message, but some of the so-called poems in the

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15.5 Zhovtnevyi zbirnyk panfuturystiv (The Panfuturists’ October Collection, 1923)

collection were designated as ‘posters’ (plakaty) and ‘slogans’ (hasla). Something similar takes place in Shkurupy’s 1922 Kyiv publication Psykhetozy, a collection of short verses that includes parodic, self-promoting advertising as well as illustrated posters of machinery with revolutionary slogans – among them one exhorting readers to ‘perfect the music of noise.’ This particular book mixed Cyrillic and Roman alphabets, and included text in French and German. Futurists thus placed on their readers two simultaneous demands: ‘viewing’ and ‘reading.’ A good example of just how much the abstract ‘look’ of the page was often an integral part of the literary work, and how the semiotics of language frequently competed with the semiotics of space on a page, can be illustrated by Andry Chuzhy’s semantically and visually challenging novel Vedmid poliuie za sontsem (The Bear Hunts the Sun) – a difficult text made even more so through the arrangement of the printed words into animal figures and other geometric shapes. This novel compelled the reader to struggle with esoteric meaning and with the abstracting effect of trying to negotiate words on a page that should have been automatically graspable by the mind’s eye. The unusual display of the words actually estranged and complicated the reading process itself. The act of reading (that is, the apprehension of meaning) turned into a requirement not only to focus on individual words but also to grasp them as a collective visual element.27 In short, the page, when viewed not as a series of words but as a graphical element, had the potential of communicating in its own right. Favst Lopatynsky (a theatre and film director with the Berezil discussed by Anna Veselovska in this volume) explored this potential by writing a visually elaborate film script (‘Dynamo’) to convey the ‘screenwriter’s emotions immediately to the ... director.’ The communication of such things

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15.6 Geo Shkurupy, Dvyhunamy … (By Means of Engines, by Means of Engines of the Intellect, We Will Destroy the Prejudices of the Heart). Poster in Geo Shkurupii, Psykhetozy, 1922

as rhythm, speed, perspective, and approaching or receding action was not done through words but through a variety of typographical devices, notations, and layout. On the page, the script itself resembled modern free verse.28 Preoccupation with the abstract is also evident in many of the covers of Futurists’ publications, which tend towards distorted typefaces and contours. Among the books that appeared in Kyiv one should mention in particular Mykhail Semenko’s two early poetry collections,29 whose design was executed by Anatol Petrytsky in a calligraphic manner that was a cross between old Cyrillic manuscript writing and the Art Nouveau style of Alphonse Mucha. Geo Shkurupy’s book of poems, Baraban (1923), also had a touch of Art Nouveau, although the florid flourishes were used in combination with plainer and more angular typefaces. The cover of Shkurupy’s previously mentioned Psykhetozy betrayed some influence of Dada and Surrealism. Quite different was the 1922 almanac Semafor u maibutnie (Semaphor to the Future), which exemplified the use of miscellaneous typefaces, mixed alphabets, and colours – all working to estrange the ostensibly informational function of the cover. The second page of this publication illustrates how Roman script, a variety of font sizes and type styles, lines, and equal signs were incorporated

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15.7 Page from Favst Lopatynsky’s ‘Dynamo,’ a ‘visual’ film script

into the design. This particular page defined a Roman transliteration system for Ukrainian, which the Futurists hoped would take the place of the ‘outdated’ Cyrillic. The inclusion of the small Cyrillic text beneath the transliterated Roman established a correspondence between the two systems, initiating the reader gradually into the new rendering of the Ukrainian language. Further inside the journal, whole articles were published in Roman transliteration. Honh komunkulta (The Gong of Comm[unist] Cult[ure], 1924) betrayed the strong influence of Constructivist ideas

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15.8 Mykhail Semenko, Blok-notes (Bloc-Notes). Kyiv, 1919. Design by Anatol Petrytsky

in the Futurist movement. Here the abstract human figure is created from rectangular geometric shapes, and words are used as much for graphic as semantic ends, merging, in fact, into the overall visual design. The last futurist journal to appear in Kyiv, Avangard – Almanakh proletarskykh myttsiv Novoi generatsii (Avangard – Almanac of the New Generation of Proletarian Art), also adhered to sparse constructivist lines. It contained cleverly laid out promotional materials for Futurists publications. As in the fine arts, therefore, ‘abstraction’ in Ukrainian Futurist literature meant moving away from the reproduction of natural things in familiar ways. More importantly, it also meant not practising literature as if it was a ‘given’ or ‘natural’ object. The result was a type of writing that emphasized its own artifice or medium,

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15.9 Semafor u maibutnie (Semaphore to the Future). Kyiv, 1922

and explored inter-art borders, mingled genres, and attempted to create new modes of art. With emphasis on form and the appearance of the text and the page, ‘abstractionist’ practices tended to detract from semantic meaning and mimetic reproduction, while highlighting the visual or acoustic elements of language. This was in step with the Futurists’ rationalistic view of art as a relative and historically contingent category that ought to be manipulated for the sake of novelty rather than used instrumentally for the purpose of communicating ‘messages’ or ‘ideas.’ For this very reason – and despite the leftist leanings of Futurists – politicians ultimately scorned their revolutionary practices because they were too complicit in formal and technical experimentation. Traditional lyric writers (for example, modernists and Symbolists) and realistically inclined critics also faulted the Futurists

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15.10 Honh Komunkulta. Kyiv, 1924

for not providing enough usable human ‘content’ and ‘meaning’ in their works. The abstract ‘experience’ of the medium itself, the Futurist joy of experimenting, clashed with the traditional reader’s and politician’s expectations, which often amounted to an insistence on semantic clarity, communication, and some form of emotional content. The collage-like arrangement of words in place of logical syntactical structures created linguistic ambiguities, that is, ‘abstraction,’ placing new burdens on the audience, which often refused to carry them. From the latter’s point of view, the simplified or minimalist-looking texts were actually full of ‘complexity’ that was not worth the effort of deciphering. Such reactions were not unique to Ukraine, since audiences throughout the world have had difficulties with modern twentieth-century art.30 Although they met with especially strong

15.11 Semafor (page 2)

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15.12 Futurist advertisement from Avangard: Almanakh proletarskykh myttsiv Novoi generatsii (Avangard: Almanac of the New Generation of Proletarian Art), Kyiv, 1930

resistance during their time, we can see from their literary endeavours that Ukrainian Futurists enthusiastically jumped on the bandwagon of ‘difficulty’ and ‘abstraction’ and made interesting contributions in their own right.

Abstraction and Ukrainian Futurist Literature 405 NOTES 1 O. Ilnytzkyj, Ukrainian Futurism, 1914–1930: An Historical and Critical Study, Harvard Series in Ukrainian Studies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 1997). 2 Anna Bila, Ukrains’kyi literaturnyi avangard (Donet’sk: Donets’kyi natsional’nyi universytet, 2004). 3 Villi Baumaister (Willi Baumeister), ‘Abstraktnist’ na chervonomu tli,’ Nova generatsiia 6 (1928) 63. See also ‘Muzeine prymishchennia dlia abstraktnoho mystetstva,’ Nova generatsiia 5 (1928) 386. The latter is a short report about Alexander Dorner’s museum in Hanover, and refers to El Lissitzky’s adaptation of exhibition space to complement abstract paintings. On this topic see Devin Marie Fitzpatrick, ‘The Interrelation of Art and Space: An Investigation of Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century European Painting and Interior Space,’ MA thesis, Washington State U, Department of Interior Design, May 2004, esp. 28–9. This thesis is available at http://www.spokane .wsu.edu/ACADEMIC/design/content/documents/devinthesis.pdf. 4 K. Malevych, ‘Analiza novoho ta obrazotvorchoho mystetstva (Pol’ Sezann),’ Nova generatsiia 6 (1928) 438–46. For a complete list of Malevich’s articles, see Ilnytzkyj, Ukrainian Futurism 369–70. 5 See Ilnytzkyj, Ukrainian Futurism 207, esp. 210ff. 6 See Ilnytzkyj, Ukrainian Futurism 181ff. 7 Charles Altieri, Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry: The Contemporaneity of Modernism, Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture (Cambridge, Eng., New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989) 13. 8 Mykhail’ Semenko, ‘Panfuturizm (Iskusstvo perekhodovogo perioda),’ in Aleksandr Leites and Mykola Iashek, eds, Desiat’ rokiv ukrains’koi literatury (1917–27) (Kharkiv: DVU, 1930) 121. 9 Semafor u maibutnie: Aparat Panfuturystiv (Kyiv: Hol’fshtrom, 1922) 1 (May 1922) 10. 10 First published in Semafor u maibutnie: Aparat Panfuturystiv. My quotes come from Mykhail’ Semenko, Ausgewahlte Werke, ed. Leo Kriger, vol. 2 (Würzburg: Jal reprint, 1982) 152–60. 11 For details, see Ilnytzkyj, Ukrainian Futurism 324ff. 12 Andrii Chuzhyi, Poezii: Virshi ta poemy (Kyiv: Radians’kyi pys’mennyk, 1980) 9. 13 Geo Shkurupij (sic) (Geo Shkurupii), ‘Muzyka shumiv (Musique bruitiste),’ Semafor u maibutnie 33. 14 Shkurupii was no doubt making reference to Luigi Russolo, author of a 1913 manifesto, ‘L’Arte dei Rumori’ (The Art of Noises), and the designer of noise instruments (Intonarumori). Dada was famous for its noise-music and other antics, such as those performed in the Zurich Cabaret Voltaire. 15 Geo Shkurupii, Dveri v den’ (Kharkiv: Vyd. ‘Proletarii,’ 1929) 5. The reader was invited to send a comment to the author in Kyiv, who lived on Korolenko Street, no. 51-12. 16 Mykola Bazhan, Tvory v dvokh tomakh, vol. 1 (Kyiv: Vyd. Khudozhn’oi literatury ‘Dnipro,’ 1965) 111. 17 Anatol’ Tsebro (M. Semenko), ‘Futuryzm v ukrains’kii poezii (1914–1922),’ in Semafor u maibutnie 41. Rpt. in Mykhail’ Semenko, Ausgewahlte Werke, ed. Leo Kriger, vol. 2 (Würzburg: Jal reprint, 1982) 166–75.

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18 M. Volok (Valeriian Polishchuk), review of O. Slisarenko, M. Liubchenko, and M. Semenko, Al’manakh tr’okh (Kyiv: Vyd. T–va Ukr. Pys’mennykiv, 1920), in Grono, Literaturno mystets’yi zbirnyk (Kyiv, 1920) 92. 19 Mykhail’ Semenko, Ausgewahlte Werke 1: 121. 20 Ibid. 124. 21 Ibid. 131. 22 Ibid. 136. Also reproduced in Ilnytzkyj, Ukrainian Futurism 266. 23 Geo Shkurupii, Korol’ futuroprerii. Psykhotezy. Vitryna tretia (Kyiv: Panfuturysty, 1922) n.p. Also reproduced in Ilnytzkyj, Ukrainian Futurism 266. 24 Mykhail’ Semenko, Ausgewahlte Werke 133. 25 See, for example, his constructivist cover Prohrama mizhnarodn’oho konkursu na proiekt derzhavnoho ukrains’koho teatru (Kharkiv, 1930). A colour reproduction can be found in Ellen Lupton and Elaine Lustig Cohen, Letters from the Avant Garde: Modern Graphic Design (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996) 33. 26 The posters ’Napoleon’ and ‘Casanova’ were taken from Jan Tschichold, Die Neue Typographie: Ein Handbuch für Zeitgemäss Schaffende (Berlin: Bildungsverbandes der deutschen Buchdrucker, 1928). See ‘Kinoplakaty, 1927,’ Nova generatsiia 11 (1928). On typography see Johanna Drucker, The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art, 1909–1923 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 27 For reproductions of the novel’s pages, see Ilnytzkyj, Ukrainian Futurism 331. 28 The film script, called ‘Dynamo,’ was based on H.G. Wells’s short story ‘The Lord of the Dynamos.’ For details, see Ilnytzkyj, Ukrainian Futurism 330–2. 29 Piero mertvopetliuie. Futuryzy. 1914–1918. Poezii. Knyzhka 3-a (Kyiv: Flamingo, 1919); Blok-notes. Poezii 1919–roku. Knyzhka 4-a (Kyiv: Flamingo, 1919). 30 On the subject of ‘difficult’ art, see Leonard Diepeveen, The Difficulties of Modernism (New York: Routledge, 2003); Leonard Diepeveen and Timothy Van Laar, Art with a Difference: Looking at Difficult and Unfamiliar Art (Mountain View, CA: Mayfield Publishing Co., 2001); Marina van Zuylen, Difficulty as an Aesthetic Principle: Realism and Unreadability in Stifter, Melville, and Flaubert, Studies in English and Comparative Literature vol. 9 (Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1994).

Arm in arm, like little children, or like lovers, Pavlo and I walked over to admire our posters. In spite of everything, they belonged, in the first place, to us. Now a thousand eyes were looking at them, but this didn’t dampen our ardent feelings. Look where they are now! In the sight of the sun, the whole city, and all the people! Klyment Redko, unpublished autobiography1

Translated from the Ukrainian by Irena R. Makaryk 1 Klyment Redko, p. 38. The editors wish to thank Dmytro Horbachov for a copy of this unpublished manuscript. Redko (1897–1956) was a painter and graphic artist.

16 The Graphic Arts: From Page Design to Theatre myroslava m. mudrak

The history and development of early-twentieth-century Ukrainian graphics was formed along a trajectory of a rich synthesis of styles and an appropriation of forms, culminating ultimately in an imaginative translation of traditional artistic and formal means indigenous to the region. The process of articulating a modern national style within the graphics medium went hand-in-hand with the lifting of restrictions on Ukrainian-language publications – a decisive abandonment of the status quo that only finally came to fruition at the time of the First World War. Until the twentieth century, Ukrainian-language imprints essentially had been shut down by a tsarist edict known as the Ems ukaz, issued in 1876 by Alexander II. The edict prohibited the use of the Ukrainian language in all printed matter and interdicted the dissemination of publications on Ukraine. On the basis of this edict, the term ‘Ukraina,’ or any references to things Ukrainian, were banned. With the dissolution of Imperial rule and the expectations that came with sovereignty after 1918, the graphic arts gained in prominence as a medium for relaying and exemplifying revolutionary changes, and for reconstructing culture and re-establishing cultural identity on new modernist grounds. There was an efflorescence of Ukrainian-language books and magazines produced. In the 1920s especially, as publishing became more widespread, so the example of good graphics became more pronounced. The public sphere of art, the new showplace for artistic activity, challenged the artist to reconsider the parameters of his art-making and reorient his own artistic practices towards an intensified engagement with the public. Without exception, artists found themselves in the service of national revitalization, no matter what political platform they endorsed. The 1920s brought into artistic consciousness the necessity of focusing on the process of defining the current national culture. Most artists were willing to serve the cause of Ukrainianization while simultaneously coming to grips with the new socialist order. Others found it opportune to apply their artistic vision to new demands (and, as a result, find occasion for sustained work). Art was perceived as a powerful agent that reoriented perceptions about life, transformed the passive individual into an active one, and redirected energies towards new aspirations. The evidence of artists’ involvement was ubiquitous: in producing posters, designing newspaper mastheads, book covers, and postal stamps, and painting didactic murals in workers’ clubs – in essence, the construction

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of an extended graphic environment. It is through the medium of graphics that a natural transition occurred from the singular and individualized experience of art generated by a flat graphic medium to the design of an entirely full-dimensional lifestyle for collective consumption. The fact that artists could easily overlap multiple ‘graphic’ genres – from designing book covers and illustrating text to making their art ‘perform’ for society – was an expected result of their commitment to the ‘totalizing’ effect of ‘New Art.’ By necessity, the artist’s workspace was no longer confined to the isolated studio and was moved into the streets, printing houses, factories, sanatoria, workers’ clubs, and railroad stations – into the very interstices of real life. The advertising sector of the publishing industry, at the ready to serve in cultural rebuilding, offered a stable environment and technical resources for artists to endorse new attitudes and implement them in their art; the meteoric rise of new publishing houses sustained the graphic-arts profession despite the lack of goodquality paper. During this extremely prolific period of book production in Ukraine, houses such as DVU (Derzhavne Vydavnytstvo Ukrainy, the Ukrainian State Publishing House, organized in May 1919) and others1 commissioned many progressive artists, some key figures in the creation of an artistic avant-garde, to change the stagnant state of graphics by encouraging experimentation with format and font. Through the publication of Ukrainian-language books and illustrated magazines such as Avangard (Avant-garde), Chervonyi shliakh (Red Path), Hart (Tempering), Hlobus (Globe), Krytyka (Criticism), Literaturny yarmarok (Literary Bazaar), Nova hromada (New Community), Nova generatsiia (New Generation), Pluh (Plow), VAPLITE (acronym of the Vilna Akademiia Proletarskoi Literatury, Academy of Proletarian Literature), Vsesvit (Cosmos), Zhyttia i revoliutsiia (Life and Revolution), and Zoria (Star), Kyiv-based printers Vasyl S. Kulzhenko and S .P. Yaremych were influential in engaging the public in modernist discourse. Their printing houses catered to the educated citizenry. With the inclusion of photographic spreads in some of the journals, they reached an even broader segment of the population and helped to build a new visually literate audience. A number of journals were clearly directed at a clientele that needed to be educated in the nature of the New Art as well. Many artists who were initially trained in a moreor-less strict academic manner as painters or architects found themselves turning their full attention to the potential of the new medium, and saw the publishing industry as a transformative agent in changing the very role of the artist in society. A number of publications would issue didactic articles on various aspects of artmaking and its processes. In terms of the theatre arts, they included informative articles on how a stage functions, the requirements of make-up, and even general histories of the founding of particular theatrical groups as well as an explanation of their objectives in the context of culture-building. A case in point is the theatre journal Siluety (Silhouettes), which generously published photographs of the Berezil ‘laboratory’ at work in Odesa. Photographs played a major role in the composition of not only cover designs, but also the internal structure of journals and serial publications. The insertion of these materials lent a ‘factographic’ or documentary aspect to the publication and brought a new ‘reading’ public in line with shifting attitudes in visual culture.

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16.1 Pavlo Kovzhun, cover design for the journal Nova generatsiia (New Generation), 1929

Exhibitions of printing such as the 1924 Kharkiv Exhibition of Prints and Techniques validated the work of graphic artists, enlisted new talents, and helped to spread new attitudes about visual design. The catalogue of the First Exhibition of Drawing and Graphics held at the Kyiv Picture Gallery in November 1926 listed 130 works by artists already well-established in the industry by mid-decade. (These included Lev Kramarenko, Ilarion Pleshchynsky, Dmytro Shavykin, Oleksy Usachov, Volodymyr Yung, and Iryna Zhdanko.)2 The graphic arts enjoyed a distinct renaissance in this period. The director of the Kyiv Art Institute and influential critic, Ivan Vrona, wrote of the Exhibition of Graphics and Drawings (held in Kyiv) in the journal Krytyka for November 1928 that ‘the mechanics of the show … created an image of [our] culture.’3 In such a climate, the artist now had the unprecedented

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power of organizing the ‘psychological’ life of society while possessing an inordinate amount of control and freedom of choice. By the late 1920s, the graphics medium achieved a singular role in responding to immediate needs, rather than luxuriating, as painting could and did, in a protracted process of artistic expression. The influence of industry and technology began to alter the way graphic imagery was conceived and produced, and helped to move the graphic arts towards fulfilling new responsibilities. The array of published Ukrainian books, including books for children, was testimony to the innovations in the graphic arts and the typographic medium in Ukraine. As one of the most traditional forms of art, the graphics medium served as the bridge towards new possibilities for blurring distinctions between media. In a new revolutionary context, it dissolved all prescriptive impositions on artistic expression. This repositioned graphic art from its nineteenth-century function as narration and illustration to a new pre-eminent role as a cultural barometer of the time. Representatives of an entire spectrum of artistic directions applied their varied visions and diverse stylistic preferences to this genre. All the labels of modern-art directions that were threaded by a single feature – a compelling urge towards abstraction – found their origin in graphic form, be it Symbolism, Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Neo-classicism, or Constructivism. The present chapter offers a general view of the way that the graphic arts in early-twentieth-century Ukraine restored certain precepts of traditional local aesthetics while resuming their function as an art of utility and organization. It is also about how self-consciously and deliberately the graphic arts in Ukraine rehabilitated their critical role as purveyor of popular consciousness while responding to the forms of contemporary art. In the Middle Ages, before the invention of printing, the graphic arts were the easiest way to expose large populations to moral, religious, and social themes intended for their improvement. The modern era sought to regain this position by using the arts as a teaching tool. A case in point is the pedagogic text of Cubo-Futurist painter Oleksander Bohomazov, whose theoretical tract ‘Painting and Elements’ (1914) contained an entire set of ‘Futurist’ initials which introduced the separate chapters of his text in the manner of illuminated medieval manuscripts.4 The various inserts of drawings throughout Bohomazov’s manuscript, as well as the initials, demonstrate his indebtedness to the direct visual appeal of old imprints such as Ivan Fedorov’s Apostol (Epistle, 1564), the first printed book on Ukrainian territory issued from the Lviv printing workshop of Ivan Fedorov, or the more famous Ostrih Bible, which dates to 1580–1. As elsewhere in Europe, so in Ukraine, the graphic medium was connected to religious teaching and was employed in both the writing and printing of sacral texts.5 By the Kozak era, graphics were utilized for higher learning as well as for official state purposes. With the destruction of the last stage of Ukrainian self-rule, the Zaporozhian Sich by Catherine II in 1775, the long-standing tradition of Ukrainian graphic culture was abruptly curtailed and began to wane in prominence. By the mid-nineteenth century, art was caught in the grips of Romanticism – a period of sentimental longing for a lost, culturally efflorescent age. By then the graphic arts medium corresponded with the lyrical ‘mood’ imagery of painting in scenes of localized genre and views of Kyiv and surrounding regions as depicted

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16.2 Page from a Bible printed in Lviv, 1636

by Taras Shevchenko in his etchings, engravings, and drypoints.6 Subordinated to nostalgic themes, the graphic arts were relegated to the status of a handmaiden to painting. By the early twentieth century, they would again re-assume their role in cultural revival and education. To focus on Ukrainian graphics of the early twentieth century, therefore, is to acknowledge the reinstatement of the graphic arts to their earlier function, not merely as producing aesthetic activity, but as resuming a historical mission in relation to the people they serve – the consumers of the art. The revival of the graphic arts occurred simultaneously with experimental trends in the visual arts. Flimsy booklets of poetic experimentation, emphasized by playful typography and lithographic vignettes, represented the first break from sentimental graphics and led to inventive journal layout and book-cover design.7 David Burliuk (1882–1967), together with fellow Futurists (specifically, Velimir (Viktor) Khlebnikov and Aleksei Kruchenykh), whose collective work was threaded by their connection to the unmediated verbal expressions and guileless world view of Ukrainian peasants on the periphery of the Empire, turned the tide of traditional poetry by giving weight to the ‘visible’ and ‘constructed’ word. In 1913 Burliuk summarized his position by stating that his responsibility as an artist-poet was to ‘publish every sort of graphic and printed art.’8 (See colour plates 17, 18.) Thus, in the writing of poetry, vowels were assigned the role of signalling not only colour and texture, but also a sense of time, space, and planar field. The miniatures of Kyiv-Rus incunabula, the naive art of local regions, and children’s drawings were especially influential in formulating Burliuk’s graphic concept. Extrapolating from these sources, Burliuk created a boldly ‘textured’ page based on lettering of various sizes and scripted words that were ill matched in writing style and not uniform in scale. The intense valuation of colour was also unexpected, resulting in a page that was full of visual surprises. Impelled by such innovation and experimentation, modern

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16.3 Taras Shevchenko, The Judges’ Meeting, 1844

graphics underwent a radical transformation. By the time Ukraine’s independence was proclaimed in 1918, the publishing industry was poised to utilize the graphic arts for its end – the proliferation of Ukrainian-language imprints dressed up to meet the modern world. Within the decade before the First World War, the Symbolist and Secessionist motifs, with their emphasis on biomorphic form that dominated turn-of-thecentury aesthetics, had subordinated all formal elements to an overall rhythm that spread across the entire page. Moreover, through a blend of philosophy and science that sought to capture a wholesome harmony between man and nature, artists in the first years of the century produced a veritable cornucopia of original mastheads with ornamental plant motifs. These works opened the floodgates to a more universalist understanding of the visual image, where a blend of title and illustration created an internalized aesthetic sphere. The graphic art of Mykhailo Zhuk,9 who produced a series of portraits of Ukraine’s cultural figures, including fellow artists Hryhory Narbut and Mykola Burachek and the Berezil actress Natalia Uzhvy (and two portraits of Les Kurbas, in 1918 and 1919), popularized the stark turn-of-the-century Symbolist genre of the graphic silhouette, but made it relevant to Ukraine’s cultural status. He allowed the graphic arts to function as a full

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16.4 Mykhailo Zhuk, drawing

16.5 Mykhailo Zhuk, cover design for the journal Muzahet, 1919

expression of modern cultural freedom, bearing witness to the close symbiotic relationship between the various genres of artistic expression. Les Kurbas, who sought to break down the rampant emotionalism and melodrama of the theatre and to raise art to an abstract, almost emblematic, level, had at his disposal an entire coterie of contemporary graphic artists to carry out shared goals. Perhaps in no other period of art history was the collaboration and integration of graphic artists into the theatre as active as it was in early modernism. Les Kurbas was born with the keen eye of a draughtsman and all the designers who gave Kurbas’s theatre its visual signature were, to one degree or another, involved in the graphic arts. Among them, Vadym Meller was perhaps the most attuned to

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Kurbas’s philosophy and physically implemented the director’s artistic concepts in his stark Constructivist stage designs. It is no wonder, then, that Kurbas’s miseen-scènes have been described, from the vantage point of contemporary analysis, as possessing ‘a hard graphic quality of contours, economy, simplicity of groupings and a sparseness and clarity of line’10 – language that is usually ascribed to the graphic medium. By the time that Kurbas’s Molodyi Teatr (Young Theatre) came into being in Kyiv in 1916, the collaboration with graphic artists had been firmly established. By February of 1918, Anatol Petrytsky, who had actively worked in the field of graphic-art production, was already in the employ of the Young Theatre Studio. Petrytsky took advantage of the playful exchange of the reversal of lights and darks which marked Symbolist art and used this device extensively at the time that Kurbas’s Young Theatre began its transition into the Berezil. However, it was at that time that the graphic-arts industry in Ukraine was being almost single-handedly transformed by Heorhy Narbut (1886–1920), who confirmed a slightly different orientation from the strong presence of fin-de-siècle influences and the vestiges of Symbolism. Narbut’s designs, illustrations, and book vignettes, as well as official attributes of state (that is, insignias and heralds of an independent Ukraine, including legal tender and handbills) firmly established his position as the ‘Ukrainianizer’ of Ukrainian graphics.11 Before assuming this title in Ukraine, Narbut worked in the circles of Mir iskusstva (The World of Art), the St Petersburg–based art group renowned for its aesthetic credo of ‘art-for-art’s sake.’ His early work was tinged with the tight descriptive detail that characterized the Petersburgian World of Art contingent. While living and working in the Imperial capital before the Revolution, Narbut also had full exposure to the pervasiveness of appropriated classicism imposed by the Western tastes of the courts. Once appointed by the first president of Ukraine, Mykhailo Hrushevsky, to serve as part of the original faculty that organized the graphic-arts curriculum in the newly founded Ukrainian Academy of Arts in 1918, Narbut translated his skill into a modern style adapted to the evolution and history of local developments. In the capacity of professor of graphics in Kyiv, Narbut revived the graphic-design industry, producing a host of students who throughout the 1920s and 1930s involved themselves in the artistic side of the publishing industry, specifically book-cover design, among them, the extremely prolific Les Lozovsky. Narbut restored to the graphic arts its function as a reflector of its historical period, summarizing the contemporary attitudes of a people who, for the first time after a long period of disenfranchisement, began to recognize themselves as a politically and culturally viable entity. The graphic arts allowed for the immediate creation and dissemination of a system of symbols and images that mirrored the restored hopes and growing identity of the population. Not since the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the Kozak state heavily employed the graphic arts to secure its image as a sophisticated society evolved out of scholasticism, did this medium enjoy such a prominent status in Ukraine. The lessons of that era were not wasted on Narbut. He successfully navigated between the ‘enlightened’ tastes of the Imperial centre, where his aesthetics were formed,12 and the historical precedents found on the territory of Ukraine, particularly the regional translation of Western aesthetics as evidenced in Kozak-era imprints. Moreover, he facilitated the grafting of the staid qualities of Western classicism onto the

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animated organic principles of the Ukrainian Baroque graphics tradition, and achieved a blend of aesthetics that engendered the lettering style and design concepts of ancient incunabula and manuscripts of the Baroque period, including official Kozak documents (hramoty).13 Ancient texts that incorporated miniatures into scripted text, combined with floriated initials – all of which was eventually replaced by print and varied typography – were brought to bear on Narbut’s establishing of a contemporary vernacular graphics. His contemporary Vasyl Krychevsky (1873–1952), in his own way, imposed classical norms on regional handicraft traditions.14 Beginning in the first years of the twentieth century, Krychevsky began to codify these forms into a system of stylized shapes that were characteristically used in a diverse array of applied arts, especially in architecture, and then in book covers. He used folk and local decorative motifs taken from native domestic handicrafts that had been handed down through generations (particularly in the regions of Poltava, Kharkiv, and eastern, Left Bank Ukraine). This enterprise marked a dramatic shift in recognizing the value of the folk arts in modern Ukrainian culture and served as a distinctly different point of departure from the way that the Burliuks sought to capture the emotional content of primitive art forms, delivered in their raw, vulgar state. Just as Kurbas viewed the form of traditional songs and the abstract motifs of folk dances as an integral part of theatrical staging in Berezil, so Krychevsky’s study of folk art offered ample opportunity to analyse simple forms and create a straightforward and striking visual language. Folk art was no longer to be treated as a diversion from the serious purpose of high art. For Krychevsky, who, like Narbut, combined these forms with heraldic symbols of Kozak aristocracy and regional coats-of-arms, the practice evolved into an elegant Ukrainian style moderne.15 Using the imagery of Ukrainian folklore and its reconsideration as design as a basis, Krychevsky sought to find ways to implement those qualities in technological production and maintain their position as part of the currently popular, socially functionalist, arts-and-crafts concept of visual design. In 1920 Kurbas utilized this concept in his production of Haidamaky after a poem of the same title by Taras Shevchenko, wherein Ukrainian folklore images formed an ‘integral component part of the tragic action and established a new directorial direction.’16 As a result, Kurbas presented a completely independent, innovative approach to staging. Krychevsky never worked for Kurbas, but in 1928 he created the scenic decor for Oleksander Dovzhenko’s classic film Zvenyhora, utilizing the same precept of meshing the essential qualities of folk and fine art. Narbut, too, had no involvement in the theatre. Even though he was close to the heartbeat of art’s new vibrant mission acquired in the wake of drastic historical change, and his role was central to its further evolution, he was first, foremost, and perhaps solely a graphic artist at heart. Narbut’s mastheads for the first journal devoted to Ukraine’s modern art and literature, Mystetstvo (Art), were naturally appealing to a wide audience, who could readily recognize the abstracted patterns of embroidery and textile weavings, the stuccoed architectural motifs of Baroque church façades that were ubiquitous throughout the country, and the familiar mural ornamentation on the interior of Byzantine-Rus churches – all reduced into a distinctive graphic lexicon. It was from these sources that Narbut derived his recognizable trademark – a flat triangle, subdivided into smaller pyramidal forms

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16.6 Vasyl Krychevsky, book cover for the novel Maister Korablia (Master of the Ship), 1928

16.7 Heorhy Narbut, cover design for the journal Mystetsvto (Art), 1919

and reduced to a tricornered geometric insignia originating in the ecclesiastical motif of a cluster of grapes. A notable quality of his graphic design is recognized in a primer for teaching the Ukrainian alphabet, which he composed freehand and accentuated with Baroque flourishes of native flora and fauna.17 This project, although unfinished, provides evidence of the full sway of Narbut’s talents – to educate and to make concepts visually consumable, ensuring some degree of allegiance to the images’ symbolic import. The journal Mystetstvo was the first of its kind in Ukraine, setting a precedent for other publications of its ilk, including Berezil’s publication Barykady teatru (Theatre Barricades), designed by Vadym Meller during 1923–4. (The impact of the avant-garde on the design of this journal is discussed more fully below.) Narbut’s protégé, Marko Kyrnarsky, turned his entire attention to graphic book design after Ukraine’s proclaimed independence. Initially trained as an architect, and naturally predisposed to visualizing form in three dimensions, Kyrnarsky conceived of graphic rendering in terms of architectural motifs distributed uniformly over the flat surface of the page. Kyrnarsky’s layout provided clean fields from which emerged controlled embellishments abstracted from Kozak Baroque architecture. A characteristic feature of Kyrnarsky’s art was to mesh the old with the new, the handwritten with the machine-printed. Similarly to Narbut, whose experience of enlightened Western classicism and Roman characters was combined with his knowledge of glagolithic and Old Church Slavonic epigraphy, Kyrnarsky, too, cultivated a conception of interchangeable Latin and Cyrillic letters, using consonant ‘sounds’ shared by both alphabets to make relevant substitutes. His sparse ‘scriptorial’ covers18 containing nothing more than the title, author, and publisher, exemplified the avant-garde tendency to universalize language and reduce all form to an easily communicable, abstracted structure, just as Kurbas’s theatre and Burliuk’s poetry made syncretic use of visual and verbal means of communication. That most early transformations in the modernist graphic medium bore direct connection to traditions of higher learning in monasteries and confraternities or brotherhoods is evidenced in the anagrammatic and chiasmic distribution of

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lettering across the pages of Ukrainian graphics of the early twentieth century. In Barykady teatru, Meller used this device to create the effect of industrial scaffolding, forcing a reading of the cover lengthwise, across the page, and in an oblique fashion. The varying font creates an additional visual interplay among the elements. The propensity to blend word and image was systematized by eighteenth-century poetics professor at the Mohyla Academy, Mytrophan Dovhalevsky, the author of a course on scripted Latin poetry during 1736–7.19 He created an entire handbook of poetic paradigms which included ‘painting puzzles’ in which thumbnail-image drawings substituted for words or syllables, or a poem. This ‘plastic’ means of rendering language depended on principles of word and image substitution. For instance, taken from a Sapphic poem in Latin verse beginning with the letter V, the following phrase creates the image of a heraldic emblem that describes Metropolitan Raphail Zaborovsky’s coat of arms: Diiadyma, krest s serdtsem, herb iest Rafaila, Im zhe ieho znamena krestonosna syla. The diadem, cross with heart, is the crest of Raphail By this is recognized his crusading power.

16.8 Zaborovsky heraldic poem

The central letter ‘V’ is derived from the beginning letter of this dithyrambic poem: Vade sacratum celebrare stemma, Vade chordis musa sonare nomen, Numen est Pastor Raphael benignus Stemmate gaudens.

The Graphic Arts: From Page Design to Theatre 419 Sobrius, iustus, pius hic in orbe Et manus cunctis miseris aperta, Almus et vita moderatur aequa Angelus unus. Vivat et grate vigeat per annos Magnus et faustus reputando facta, Alta post scandat loca sacra summi Victor ab altis, Pastor ab imis.

16.9 Heraldic poem

Dovhalevsky’s inventiveness inspired the rebirth of the Baroque in modern Ukrainian poetic practice, especially among the Futurists, whose experimental poetry depended on the cross-over from conventional literary means into visual treatment, and the transvaluation of linguistic structure with pictorial representation. Futurist poet Mykhail Semenko (1892–1937) revived the methods of Baroque poem construction and wordsmithing cultivated earlier by the Jesuit-influenced Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. Since 1920 Semenko, the enfant terrible of Ukrainian Futurist poetry, made extensive use of the meshing of the graphic, optical, and aural in his visual poetry – as Oleh Ilnytzkyj reveals in his essay on Semenko and the Futurists in this volume. In his hybridized form of image poetry – what Semenko called poezomaliarstvo (poetry-painting) – the traditional linear (narrative) reading of a conventional poem was subverted by a visual construction on a flat ground. In the manner of the traditional techniques of icon-painting, or more precisely, ‘icon-writing,’ Semenko’s poezomaliarstvo unwittingly oriented itself towards visual interest that would cover the entire picture surface. Instead of dabs of paint, Semenko ‘painted’ his poem with discrete word units, letters, and associative sounds.20 In keeping with the principles of Futurism, wherein each artistic agent catalyses an entire environment, everything placed before the viewer on the

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16.10 The Life of St Nicholas (Sv. Mykolai v zhytti), second half of the 16th century. Wood tempera, village of Liskovate

tableau of the poetic ‘stage’ plane became animated and dynamic. This notion constitutes the very underpinning of iconography made even more intense by the robust dynamics of the Baroque. Optically, Semenko’s poetry is reminiscent of Kyiv panegyrics from the Kozak period. But Semenko’s is a compartmentalized distribution of partial words, letters, isolated consonants, and simple vowels – all manipulated in scale and boldness of typeface and reinforced by a lexicon of assonance and dissonance (and nonsense). As the reader moves from word to word, phrase to phrase, section to section, idea to idea, he discovers that the reading is reduced to textural impressions. Through the use of visual topoi, or iconographic resting points for the eye, the parts might seem disjunctive, disconnected, and unconforming to narrative sequentiality in the way that a conventional subject or text would require; but here one eventually arrives at a final overview by ‘connecting’ the various resting points of visual information and fixes upon their associative references. Thanks to the graphic sensibilities of the artistpoet, what initially might appear like a jumbled and perfunctory arrangement of singular sounds and aural and visual impressions haphazardly sprawled across the page, ultimately coalesces into a highly textured ‘staged’ experience of a panoply of voices, images, various sounds, objects, movement, colour, physical texture, and other tactile and gestural references. In the final analysis, the subject is revealed, as in traditional iconography, through a kind of surface road map, moving the eyes from point to point, and allowing them to rest there momentarily. Inasmuch as iconography represents the ‘word-made-image,’ the icon has uniquely served modernist graphics, particularly in the case of those artists (and poets) nurtured on the iconography of Eastern Christianity, who would seek to relay their artistic musings by experimenting with the devices used in icon-writing. Hence, what would appear in Ukrainian (and Russian) modern art to be the domain of Western Cubist influence – the presentation of multiple focal points in a simultaneous planar viewing – had been contested in its time by Oleksa Hryshchenko (also known as Alexis Gritchenko). In his self-published book On the Relations of Russian Painting with Byzantium and the West (1913), Hryshchenko maintains that the effect of ‘simultaneist’ presentation is really an inherent feature of iconographic treatment.21 Approaching visual experience from Byzantine iconographic roots rather than from

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16.11 Mykhail Semenko, poetry-painting ‘Longing for the Beast,’ 1922

the vantage point of Renaissance scientific perspective, Semenko’s poetry produces an abstract conceptual result rather than a naturalistic mimesis. His graphic poetry, created (or rather ‘constructed’) in Kyiv in 1922 in a collection titled Moia mozaika (My Mosaic), is based (like the icon) on a syntagmatic linguistic structure which organizes a string of composite word-images to create meaning. Thus, the poetry-painting ‘Longing for the Beast’ reiterates a pining for something distant, at once taunting and menacing, while describing specific features of Semenko himself (for example, his nose, his slanted ‘Asiatic’ eyes): ‘Aa Aa Aa / aSian auoue / various As / Aa Aa Aa / yellow in furs / chocolatey with a spear / IN the no/se / O my nose my nose / and my slanted eyes / Oo Oo Oo / Who will pierce my beautiful nose / with a toothpick / aA aA AA / oO oO OO / AUAU.’ These strong graphic components translate into a kind of ‘internal performative space,’ with an intersplicing of implied location (the present and some distant land), material qualities (chocolate and fur), and elements of time and its duration (the present being elongated by the stretching of the vowels). We are then suddenly struck by the bold lettering as an abrupt reconnaissance with the palpable present. Experimental typography in the graphic arts firmly established the groundwork for blurring the boundaries between visual signs and aural expression. The undoing of semantic structure into graphic pictorial impressions was a key aspect in the word-image smithery of the Futurists, whose main mission was to disassemble stale divisions in art and democratize the reception of New Art. They disregarded linguistic systems altogether and made light of grammar and syntax by deconstructing language into basic syllabic units and, oftentimes, into mere letters. They treated language as a syncretic system of graphic communication, giving themselves licence to speak in a single aural, optical, and gestural voice. By the time that the Ukrainian ‘Father of Russian Futurism’ David Burliuk undertook a Futurist tour through his native ‘provinces’ in 1913, the poet and graphic artist had already been collapsed into a single artist-‘performer.’ Semenko’s manipulation of typeface, the placement of words and letters above, below, and to the side of each other

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16.12 Anatol Petrytsky, costume design for ‘Adam’ for the production of Gogol’s Vii, directed by Hnat Yura (Kharkiv, 1924)

on the surface of the page is equivalent to theatrical stage direction that involves ‘actions’ distributed across the flat field of a scaffolded theatrical tableau, all having equal weight. His poetry-painting made a giant stride in transgressing the division between the literal and the pictorial, but it was the stage that became the ultimate arena for the marriage of the optical and aural. During Les Kurbas’s Kharkiv (or ‘Constructivist’) period, his designers, specifically Vadym Meller, exploited widely the indexical use of graphic lettering, integrating word and image, sight and sound, into theatrical effect; others, such as Anatol Petrytsky, who extended this principle into opera and ballet, as evidenced by his costumes for Vii (1924) in Kyiv’s Franko Theatre. The journal Nove mystetstvo is filled with pictures from productions that utilize this device. Petrytsky, as a case in point, made extensive use of printed words in his theatrical conceptions. Graphic block lettering was used to identify locations and settings and establish a titular mode akin to the dynamics of a book cover. Sometimes name tags were draped around actors to identify and reinforce the character they were representing. In many cases, costume designs also bore the stamp of ‘product identification’ – a tag that could identify not only a character, but also the nature of the role performed. At other times, hanging posters in the manner of billboard advertising were strategically placed in the scenic display. In the 1924 production of Macbeth, changes of location were indicated by gigantic poster-like signs. (This production is discussed in Irena Makaryk’s essay ‘Dissecting Time’ in this volume.) Meller, in particular, transcended the literal use of language and used it almost exclusively as an essentialized laconic visual sign. He abbreviated it as though it were a hieroglyph divulged through a graphic contrast between dark and light. All in all, solids and voids, latticed intersections, vertical shifts and foreshortened floating bars, and broad black bands characterized Meller’s book covers and journal designs. In the design of the theatrical journal Barykady teatru, for instance, he imposed rationality upon the ebullience of revolution implied by the title of the Berezil’s journal, and infused the image suggested by the title with a classical dignity. Massive black

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16.13 Cover of Marko Tereshchenko’s book Mystetsvo diistva (Art of Spectacle), 1921, designed by Vadym Meller

16.14 Volodymyr Tatlin, design for Zustrich na perekhresti (Meeting at the Station Crossroads), 1927

geometric segments are fixed against an expansive white field. The manipulation of the size of the font allows scale to imply a ‘floating’ quality and a gentle push into depth: a block of lettered information functions like a theatrical wing. Meller’s designs presage Volodymyr (Vladimir) Tatlin’s famous cover for the Kyiv publication of Zustrich na perekhresti (Meeting at the Station Crossroads, 1927), created for a collection of poems by Mykhail Semenko, Geo Shkurupy, and Mykola Bazhan. With its sleek geometries and tilted perspectives, Tatlin’s cover is descriptive, yet in an abstractly dynamic way, making effective use of telephone cables to highlight and connect technology, communication, industrial progress, and references to the poets of the day who were committed to an era of technically inspired pictorial experimentation. Vasyl Yermilov (1894–1967) was a pioneer in turning the printed-page medium into a full-blown aesthetic environment. (See colour plate 19.) His sensitivity to the pre-eminence of architectural form precipitated the meshing of borders between two-dimensional and three-dimensional media, between linear, planar graphics and the spatial environment. The design of spatial environments made possible the fullest realization of the contemporary mandate for restructuring life into new, socially enlightened possibilities. Just as the confined, temple-like space of a theatre or club embodies the full aspiration of the audience and its transition into a higher and transformed consciousness, so the graphic page served as a primer to guide the viewer and introduce him to another level of understanding. By making explicit its mode of construction and laying bare its contextual elements, it unabashedly thrusts the viewer into all of its raw energy and becomes a template for modern living.22 The transition from individual pages of graphic design to a total environment such as workers’ clubs bespeaks a philosophy about art that engages the most active, socially committed part of human life on a collective level. In large measure, the theatre and graphic arts were joined in their mission as an effective forum for agit-prop. In the context of the post-tsarist period, artistic

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16.15 Agit-train (TsDAMLMU)

propaganda was used to align the population at large with the currents of the new socio-political ideology. In Ukraine, however, the aim of agit-prop went beyond promoting the precepts of political parties. Because sovereignty and national awakening were at stake, agit-prop also served the cause of Ukrainianization as part of an ongoing ideological struggle. As a message-laden graphic, agit-prop resorted to illusionistic picture-storytelling and offered a striking contrast to the classic linearity and emphasis on geometry more typical of book design. From September 1919 to February 1922, in the midst of civil strife, Vasyl Yermilov led design brigades in the making of posters, decorations, and banners, including cartoons for UkrROSTA, the Ukrainian chapter of the Russian Telegraph Agency. Under his leadership, groups of artists promptly illustrated up-to-the-minute news releases, sometimes caricaturing and exaggerating the information for effect, and producing a clever synopsis of information, commentary, and visual hyperbole – in essence, a new modernist Baroque with strong overtones of a secular counter-reformation. UkrROSTA effectively used this popular format to impart revolutionary messages, which, like a stencil, could easily be transferred to the design of agit-trains and other mobile art forms. After 1920, Yermilov’s reputation as an artist of the revolution was based largely on his designs for these trains that travelled the countryside to spread the idea of revolution. In some instances, poster designs were glued to the train cars; in other cases, brigades of painters helped him to transform the bland cargo-car walls into familiar motifs of the domestic agrarian life that characterized

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16.16 Vasyl Yermilov, poster design ‘Construction of National Home’

the experience of a largely agricultural population. (See colour plate 14.) This new ‘vulgar’ (in the sense of ordinary, yet ostentatious) format could be read as an extension of the inchoate nature of the Ukrainian Baroque, which, as has already been noted, consistently resurfaced, as a grotesque form, in modern Ukrainian culture. In the context of the Kozak Baroque, the grotesque was nothing more than an intensification of the artistic clarity of a work, sharpening the visual impact through anti-naturalistic graphic excess, and cultivating what might be characterized as a deliberate, excessive, and indulgent ‘crudeness.’ Pitting sensuousness against rational purity, the grotesque could be sensed in commonplace forms of ‘communication and invention’23 such as anecdotes and jokes, fables, feuilletons, and humoresques, including visual caricatures and cartoons, to exaggerate (and make somewhat fantastic and larger-than-life) the stuff of the simple and oftentimes naive village-bumpkin.24 Yermilov’s commitment to the working class through graphic design was affirmed from his earlier participation in the First Proletarian Art Exhibition of Kharkiv in 1919, to which he contributed functional items such as tobacco and cigarette boxes and album and book covers.25 The interchange between small object items and a fullfledged poster advertisement was a natural extension of Yermilov’s graphic sensibilities. His rise was meteoric in terms of clarifying a style for the new industrial era: in 1922 he landed a gold medal at the International Graphics Exhibition in Leipzig; by 1928 he was appointed to design the Ukrainian section of the International Press Exhibition in Cologne in 1928. As indicated by the official title, the purpose of the exhibition was to focus on the publishing efforts of the nations of the world. The Pressa-Köln exhibition was a prime opportunity to demonstrate new possibilities for graphic art. Vadym Meller, by then Kurbas’s most accomplished designer, assisted Yermilov, who was responsible for the artistic design and arrangement of the section. The Ukrainian display was only a part of the larger USSR pavilion designed by El Lissitzky.26 Yermilov and Meller were harmonized in their collaborative work, sharing similar aesthetic objectives which combined the national features of Ukrainian folk art design, especially the strict geometricity and use of pure colour derived from folk art, with the industrial dictates of Constructivism.27

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16.17 El Lissitzky, design at the Pressa-Köln exhibition, 1928

Meller’s experience as designer of the Berezil’s sets and his ability to ‘excite’ the spectator through minimal visual means merged with Yermilov’s extension of the graphic medium into reliefs, street kiosks, and the stinhazeta (wall newspaper). In Kanatka (Cable), one of the wall newspapers shown in Cologne, the viewer’s eye level determined the coordination of the parts of the design.28 The simplicity of the wall newspaper’s design took into account the surrounding setting and the individual’s reading of the newspaper while standing, with eyes uplifted. News items were pasted on cards, which were then conveniently inserted into grooves or slots on a pedestal stand, making the object accessible from all four sides. It comes as no surprise therefore that in the context of building faith in the principles of revolution, the Kanatka was described by a contemporary writer as ‘a complex icon.’29 The wall newspaper, a three-dimensional treatment of graphic layout,30 was more than pages of newsprint spread out and tacked to a wall, however. As a community bulletin board, where the visual sphere has no chronological or sequential intent similar to the episodic scenes (kleima) of menologian (storytelling) icons, all the separate units of the icon are coordinated nonetheless into one totality (loci communes) as indicators of the same idea. The stinhazeta (or flat, posted newspaper) brought together the devices of sacred and secular art. If the sacral icon is meant to induce spiritual stirrings in the believer by its subtle connectedness between various images, then the ‘iconic’ wall newspaper also gently guides the beholder from one area of focus to another. In both, the inherent right and left sides function in the same way that stage directions (‘stage left,’ ‘stage right’) are implemented to bring about the internal content of a theatrical performance.31 The stinhazeta ‘Generator’ defined Yermilov’s transition toward a ‘productionist’ aesthetic32 – the point at which the artist turns from an artist‘aesthete’ into an artist-‘constructor.’ Similarly, the iconographer’s role differs vastly from that of the secular painter. The harmonious integration of content and

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16.18 Vasyl Yermilov, Kanatka (Cable), a portable wall newspaper shown in Cologne, 1928

16.19 Vasyl Yermilov, wall newspaper ‘Generator,’ 1928

graphic detailing constitutes a critical aspect in the making of these works. But Yermilov’s constructions also derive from the principles of an efficient, well-built, and optimally functional machine. The ‘Taylorized’ concept behind Yermilov’s compositions establish a fluid and organic connection between top and bottom, left and right, and include the necessary spaces or intervals to maintain visual rhythm and optical respite.33

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16.20 Vasyl Yermilov, murals for Central Red Army Club, 1920

When graphic artists assumed their new roles as ‘visual engineers’ during the turbulent years of the Civil War, they extended their services to a wide range of community projects and agencies, including the cultural activities of the Red Army, which had a significant influence on formulating the politics of Soviet culture. Actors and artists alike worked in clubs to make active the revolutionary ideals of the Party. This resulted in a vibrant cross-fertilization of artistic media, with graphic design in the lead. The wall newspaper and its visual means of communicating ideological urgencies probably originated for Yermilov in his 1920 murals for the Central Red Army Club in Kharkiv. Here an entire environment was created for the edification of workers and the military. The mission of this project was twofold: first, to ‘hook’ a targeted audience of peasants and workers by making a public display of familiar ethnographic details taken from their daily life; second, to exploit those domesticated paradigms by purging them of their inherent sentimental weaknesses, thus subverting the expected emotional response to them and sublimating the experience to one of revolutionary import. On the walls of Yermilov’s interior settings, over doorways, and on display windows, the typical characterization of the Ukrainian peasant – barefoot and clad in a raw linen baggy shirt and pants – was pervasive. No longer was the peasant image a trigger for woeful nostalgia; rather, his ubiquitous image was recognized as a subject and artistic motif submitted for contemporary revaluation. Showing professional labourers – carpenters and masons – with the tools of their working trade, these images became emblematic of an ideological shift. The strict planarity of Yermilov’s handling gave his murals an ideological expediency appropriate to the subject of the socialist building they described. What may have been previously construed as playful decorativism now informed a set of principled devices: a purposeful clarity and division between figure and ground expressing the emotional content of revolution in a material way.

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Like the banners that decorated city squares, these murals showed the artist to be well versed in the visual language of design and advertisement while intimately attuned to the ‘texture’ of quotidian life. The colour that ordinarily defined the peasant costumes and woven geometric patterns of everyday wear resonated with intensity throughout the interior spaces dedicated to galvanizing the modern revolutionary spirit. Windows, doors, archways, and the broad, flat planes of the interior walls were conceived of as backdrops to shifting scenes of non-illusionistic images. In a poster-like manner, they provided inviting associative imagery that referred to familiar motifs of rural and urban life alike. Yermilov’s graphic sensibilities affected other artists’ work, including that of Oleksander KhovstenkoKhvostov, who would pepper his images with letters and partial words, seeking to reflect the epoch and engage the spectator as a co-organizer of modern life. The graphic manner of his conceptions is architectural in nature, at once summoning the parameters of a structure’s ground plan and elevation while providing a sense of volume and mass. Despite the architectonic conception, Khovstenko-Khvostov relinquishes one’s view of the space to encompass many perspectives – the kind of fluctuating multiple angles that could be seen from an airplane coming in for a landing. His manipulation of viewpoints might have been influenced by the strong cross-diagonals used in the new Soviet photography published by artists such as Aleksandr Rodchenko since the mid-1920s in the popular journals of the day. A crisp linearity certainly describes Khovstenko-Khvostov’s theatre design principles; yet rich colours imbued with emotional purpose underlie his elegant designs for Wagner’s The Valkyrie. Their simple geometry captures both the virility of Hunding and the feminine grace and litheness of Sieglinda. The qualities of these characters are distilled into a crescendo of transparent colour planes where the strains of deep expressionism mingle with the strict relational qualities of Constructivism. Like Petrytsky’s, so too Khovstenko-Khvostov’s set designs use the properties of Constructivist scaffolding and advertising art to organize the space of the stage and offer multiple levels for performance, while at the same time invoking the flat and frontal planarity of the traditional vertep34 – another form of the grotesque in Ukrainian Baroque culture that blends both the sacred and secular in a multi-level puppet production. (See colour plate 16.) During the height of the agit-prop period, the designer Hryhory Tsapok explored the themes of agitational propaganda in far more nuanced ways. Tsapok’s works invoked the subtle contradictions inherent in the revolution. In the graphic drawing Portrait of Citizen Peter Wakkenskel from San Francisco (1918), an American dandy is shown standing high atop the skyscrapers of the city. Heightened cosmopolitanism is rendered serenely and strikes a sharp contrast with the anti-capitalist campaign launched by the current modes of agit-prop. Tsapok was a member of the Kharkiv circle of avant-garde artists, Soiuz Semi (Union of Seven), that was active in the very midst of war.35 The group’s published miscellany Sem plius tri (Seven Plus Three) demonstrated the dissolution of the traditional single-skill training for artists and propagated an overlapping of various media and forms of artistic production across genres, without valorizing one above another. By the inclusion of demonstrably unrelated materials, the miscellany sacrifices and confounds the reading of the group as a (truly) united artistic front. Instead, it seems

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16.21 Vasyl Yermilov, cover design for the miscellany Sem’ plius try (Union of Seven), 1918

quite intent on purposefully favouring artistic diversity. The miscellany includes reproductions of paintings, folk arts, embroideries, sculpture, kilims (a woven decorative wall rug used for interior decorations), and, not least of all, the graphic arts. The seemingly incohesive selection of artworks representing so many art forms corresponds to the equally unusual heterogeneity of Der Blaue Reiter Almanach (The Blue Rider Almanach), published by Vasily Kandinsky and Franz Marc in Germany in 1912. The Blue Rider was a similarly disparate group of artists with whom Meller had been associated when he studied in Munich. Inspired by the Blue Rider circle, Meller upheld the claim that strict divisions between media of artistic expression would not hold up in the modern era. On the home front, Tsapok, too, waged a struggle against all elitist engagements in art. Avoiding exclusivity at all costs, Soiuz Semi proclaimed: ‘We are united only by youth! In unity is strength!’ The catalogue for the group’s first exhibition in 191736 reveals the intense involvement of these artists – mostly painters and graphic artists – with the stage, and makes evident the exuberance of theatrical life that Kharkiv was experiencing as the new post-Revolutionary capital. It was during the Berezil’s Kharkiv period that Meller, too, succeeded in making his most accomplished designs.37 Ukraine’s cities became cradles of innovative artistic tendencies that drew on the changing artistic attitudes of the previous two decades. Because of their distance from Moscow and Petrograd, they sheltered a home-grown and locally cultivated understanding of modernism that placed a universalist stamp on the regional life of the more typically conservative, agrarian population. Unlike in the West, this approach inherently tended not to overlook folk custom in the quest for modernity, but instead imbued this social culture with an updated visual idiom. The result was a curious duality of identifiers of national culture grafted onto an

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16.22 Mykhailo Boichuk and his students, 1910

internationalist formalist grammar. Such sources were scaled down to meet the qualities of the less ornate and drastically reduced structures of the modernist style. In the immediate years after the abolition of tsarist rule, the clearest evidence of a diametrically opposed ‘traditionalist’ bent in Ukrainian graphics (that is, one drawing on local traditions) and more ‘internationalist’ fervour that responded to the influx and appropriation of external influences since the Byzantine era, was instigated by the vision of Mykhailo Boichuk (1882–1937?) and his school of Boichukists.38 The ancient frescoes of Rus, combined with Ukrainian folk imagery, inspired the canonic Byzantinesque compositions of the Boichukists, influences that can be seen most especially in the graphic art of Oleksander Dovhal, Ivan Padalka, and Vasyl Sedliar. The Association of Revolutionary Artists of Ukraine (ARMU),39 one of the numerous organizations seeking to coordinate artists of similar views into more ideologically concentrated working units, was extremely important in consolidating the artistic front of the Boichukists, and supported their work through a series of programmatic exhibitions beginning in 1926. ARMU’s position was ‘the organization of a new lifestyle by means of art.’ It put forth ‘visual realism’ as its main stylistic objective, and the desire ‘to seek forms which respond to the national distinctions of the worker-peasant masses of Ukraine.’40 If modern Ukrainian art claimed a complete and total transformation of society at the expense of rejecting all nostalgia and shedding preserved romantic notions of an idyllic agrarian lifestyle, then forging this new life through an investment in

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16.23 School of Mykhailo Boichuk, cover design for Ivan Franko’s Velykyi shum-povist’ (Cherkasy: ‘Siiach,’ ca. 1920; TsDAMLMU)

national imagery was the program of the Boichukists. It required a visual tactic on the part of the artists to utilize familiar motifs, to tap into the spirit of the folk as an ordinary people, and to infuse a revitalized sense of entitlement to the euphoria of the modern world. The new artistic forms did not negate the past; rather they valorized the possibilities put forth by modern political theories. As painters, the Boichukists worked mostly in tempera, taking their cue from Byzantine and early Renaissance paintings and frescoes; but as graphic artists, executing engravings and woodcuts, they managed to restore the precise contouring and expressive linear values of the techniques that gave Byzantine and Renaissance monumentalism its reserved qualities. Ivan Padalka was a key force in translating Boichukist painterly values to the graphic medium. His primary source was naive peasant art, the dry linear manner of painting on glass, and especially crude folkstyle wood engravings. Among the Boichukists, two women distinguished themselves as prolific artists in the graphic medium – Sofia Nalepynska-Boichuk (1884–1937) and Maria Kotliarevska (1902–84). In 1921 Boichuk led a corps of his followers in decorating the new capital, Kharkiv, in preparation for the upcoming Convention of the Soviet. This was a significant moment in stabilizing and reconciling two very different aesthetics in Ukraine’s artistic culture. Here, two giants of Ukrainian modernism, Boichuk of Kyiv and Yermilov of Kharkiv, were brought together in a single project: to decorate the main streets of the city. The Boichukists worked in the tradition of easel art – illustrating themes of nature, the pathos of human suffering, and the resolve of those committed to the new socialist ideologies. By contrast, the Constructivists distilled those evocations into an abstract idiom disbursable in graphic form. Both responded to the agricultural and industrial vernacular that permeated Ukraine; both developed out of the context of the agrarian and industrial workplace and captured the vibrancy of the wholesome working life of the revolutionary proletariat through considerations of labour and progress. And although they might appear to have functioned along very clear oppositional lines, there is much that

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16.24 Unidentified Boichukist artist, Literacy, early 1920s

was common to these two artists because of the pluralistic nature of Ukrainian modern art and the many ideas that circulated around the question of what constitutes modernist expression. Generally, the graphics culture of twentieth-century Ukraine oscillated conspicuously between stylistic extremes: the seemingly rational and boldly severe on the one hand and, on the other, a totally impetuous expressionism, given over completely to affectation and sentient aims. The former was driven by the staid control of Constructivist aesthetics; the latter sustained a direct historical link with earlier dominant styles, most especially the Baroque. Constructivism, as the most vanguard of art currents of the 1920s, established a progressive system of art responsive to revolution and new technology. To embrace Constructivism was tantamount to embodying the revolution, the crucible of avant-garde reconstruction and of new hopes for national regeneration. It was a natural extension of the events surrounding the collapse of Imperial rule and the ensuing freedom in all aspects of Ukrainian political and cultural life; the Baroque was anomalous and unpredictable in this regard. But to embrace the Baroque meant to tie in to an aesthetic psyche deeply ingrained in Ukrainian art and culture which had disappeared since the eighteenth century. Both Constructivism and the Baroque propelled the artists towards abstract form: any severity contained in the Constructivist aesthetic was mollified by an infusion of a localized Baroque, making it possible to think of modern Ukrainian graphics as marrying a heroic cultural past with the spirit of a new, industriallyminded society. The pristine technological order of Constructivism established broader parameters for contextualizing the ever-present arcane features of Ukrainian modern culture. Early-twentieth-century Ukrainian graphics responded to the oppositional range of these two artistic drives. Individual artists, particularly Petrytsky, Semenko, and

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Yermilov, alternated comfortably between the two extremes and brought them into balance – making the effect of Baroque sensuality at once subtly implicit and fully materialized. Although Kurbas generally aligned himself with a modernist, specifically ‘expressionist’ re-making of theatre41 in the manner of his German contemporaries, his methods married the quintessentially subjective features of Kozak Baroque to more objective Constructivist solutions, fusing mime and dialogue, sculpture, music, and liturgical speech into one expressive totality.42 The classicizing regimen of Constructivism of the 1920s was thus complemented by the atavistic and untamed Baroque; the absolute geometric clarity of Constructivism and its precise relationships made room for the turbulent and effusive character of the Baroque.43 Both tendencies served their purpose: Constructivism established a spatial gestalt, a politicized format, framed by utopian connotations. Its minimalist character was metonymically tied to the physical reality of the post-Revolutionary era, reducing the unruliness of revolution to a succinct and clear orderliness. The Baroque opened the door for expression without restraint. It exemplified the national propensity for brash conduct, with all its viscerality, rooted in the mythic proportions of Kozak lore. And the interlude between the exuberant Baroque forms and the reasoned simplicity of the Constructivist forms was the classical – a conscious imitation of the ornamentation of ancient Greek models.44 Narbut’s ‘Ukrainianizing’ of the graphic arts were of critical importance in this regard. Classicism made its appearance in modern art as a symbol of a new renaissance after the devastation of war and revolution.45 In the case of modernist Ukraine, it also manifested an aesthetic necessity to restore dignity and cultural determinism and national well-being after generations of diminished status in the Russian Empire. About the time when Narbut returned to Ukraine from St Petersburg and began a new classicizing phase in his graphic work (heraldic motifs, escutcheons, shields, and the like), he revived the firm conviction that, coming on the heels of world war, classicism recovered the foundation of Western civilization towards which Ukrainian culture had always gravitated; the introduction of Greco-Roman principles symbolized the desire for instatement into the European community. Popularized through the graphic arts was the firm conviction that the truth of perfect harmony developed in classical antiquity was to be imitated if Ukraine was to claim historical legitimacy on a par with other nations of Europe. Semenko may have been conscious of this pan-Hellenic legacy when his poetry-paintings invoked the pictographs of Alexandrian poets, yet he lent his picture-poems qualities taken directly from native lore and created a pictorial typography informed by popular forms of expression and pedestrian exchanges. Avant-garde stage production of the early twentieth century had certainly been the domain of a number of innovative and daring stage directors of early-twentiethcentury theatre, among whom Les Kurbas emerges as an impressive, even if still not a well-known, figure. Like Meyerhold, Brecht, Aleksandr Tairov, and Erwin Piscator, Kurbas’s theatrical conceptions could not have become reality, nor could they have produced the stirring visual impact they did, had it not been for the involvement of artists trained in a variety of other art media to carry out visually the conceptual idea of the director. Kurbas’s most active designers, Meller and Petrytsky, were philosophically aligned with this artistic vision. They had been

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fully immersed in the spirit of the avant-garde that permeated visual culture throughout Ukraine in the aftermath of revolution and independence, and their work was confluent with an entire generation of artists dedicated to the transformation of visual culture in Ukraine of the 1920s. Radically translated into emblematic modes of representation – be it the triangular grape cluster of Narbut, the advertising grids of Yermilov, or the organic, robust contrasts of Petrytsky’s art – these synecdochal forms of expression stood in for the very transformation of life itself and signalled a full engagement with all of its current revolutionary aspects. The laconic nature of the graphic arts assisted in articulating the aspirations of revolution and change as they drew on the necessity of eradicating the distinctions between old norms and the requirements of the new age. The inherently conceptual nature of modern art was directed at reflecting a brighter (if still not yet completely utopian) future. Certainly, the graphic arts, thanks to their simplicity and easy dissemination, made for an efficacious transition into a new political and national consciousness. Indeed, theatre was the artistic watershed for the ultimate realization of new graphic conceptions of culture, for here the artist was not just a painter, an illustrator, or merely (or only) a stage decorator. The artist was an inventor for all forms of visual expression – a conceptualistturned-practitioner. Vadym Meller tried to make this clear in his seminal article in Berezil’s journal, Barykady teatru. His comments in an article entitled ‘The Present Is in Need of a Master’ make clear that ‘once easel painters and graphic artists came to the theatre, they brought with them an understanding of the issues of painting.46 Modern graphic design, while offering Ukrainian art a new face for a new era, had no intention of discarding familiar aesthetic habits, even if seemingly antiquated or anachronistic. This was a practice that resonated in every corner of society. By embracing folk culture, peasant craftworks, and apparently retrograde painting styles derived from the Byzantine, Baroque, and Classical periods, the graphic arts consolidated the typically hybrid nature of Ukrainian modernist art and laid wide open its application in every aspect of modern national life.

NOTES 1 Among the most productive Ukrainian publishers that came into being in Kyiv during this era and made a significant impact on the design of the book were ‘Ranok’ (est. 1906), ‘Lan’ (1909–14), ‘Dzvin’ (est. 1907), ‘Nasha kooperatsiia’ (est. 1912), ‘Siiavo’ (est. 1913), ‘Kvero’ (1913), ‘Grunt’ (1918), ‘Dniprosoiuz’ (est. 1917), ‘Krynytsia’ (1912–14, 1917–20), and ‘Knyhospilka’ (1918–20), to name only a few. 2 See Kyivs’ka kartynna galeriia. Kataloh 1-oi vystavky rysunka i hrarviury (Kyiv: Kyivs’kyi Khudozhnyi Instytut, 1926). 3 Ivan Vrona, ‘Vystavka hraviury i rysunka,’ Krytyka 10 (November 1928) 84–101. 4 Oleksander Bohomazov (1880–1930) wrote his treatise during the summer of 1914 in Boiarka, not far from Kyiv. Plans to publish the manuscript during the 1920s were finally approved in 1927 by the Kyiv Institute of Art, but were not realized owing to a lack of funds. See Bohomazov Archive at the Central State Archive–Museum of Art and Literature of Ukraine (TsDAMLU, Kyiv), fond 360.

436 Myroslava M. Mudrak 5 When historian Mykhailo Hrushevs’kyi gave a series of public lectures in Kyiv in 1908 (published in the Literaturnyi-naukovyi vistnyk of 1909) on the historical importance of the graphic arts for contemporary national Ukrainian culture, his popular lectures, focused on antique prints, the proliferation of the kunstbuch (artist’s guidebooks), and old graphics of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, probably went a long way towards restoring the graphic medium in Ukraine during the first decades of the twentieth century. Hrushevs’kyi’s lectures were collected and printed in 1912 in a book published by S.V. Kul’zhenko in Kyiv and L’viv under the title Kul’turnonatsional’nyi rukh na Ukraini v XVI–XVII vitsi (The Cultural-National Movement in Ukraine in the 16–17th Centuries). Vasyl’ Krychevs’kyi designed the cover for this publication based on the woodcuts used to illustrate Hrushevs’kyi’s text. 6 These ‘atmospheric’ representations would not disappear with the new century. Odesa-based artist Volodymyr Zauze (1859–1939), who enjoyed great popularity during this intensely creative period, executed etchings and lithographs during the 1910s and 1920s with striking Rembrandtesque effects reminiscent of Shevchenko’s engravings. This approach appealed to still lingering Romantic sensibilities and was countered by the avant-gardists, especially the Futurists, who, in their quest to rankle the bourgeoisie, supplanted this style with a more truculent and confrontational art specifically directed at disturbing the viewer’s inherited sense of aesthetic values and tastes. See Ie. Davydova, Volodymyr Khrystianovych Zauze (Kyiv: Mystetstvo, 1966). 7 Symbolist and Futurist poems would be constructed into unusual word-image layouts in dozens of self-made miscellanies beginning around 1910 until ca. 1916. David Burliuk and his brother Volodymyr tried to use the devices of ancient texts in conjunction with the modernist spirit of the twentieth century. This enterprise would lead to the notion of the ‘constructed’ book of the 1920s. See Gerald Janecek, The Look of Russian Literature: Avant-Garde Visual Experiments, 1900–1930 (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1984). 8 Dysput o noveishei literatury. Doklad D. Burliuka, ‘Izobrazitel’nie elementy ruskoi fonetyky’ (1913). Manuscripts Division, State Russian Museum, fond 121, item 13. Quoted in Oles’ Noha, Davyd Burliuk i mystetstvo vsesvitn’oho avanhardu (Lviv: Osnova, 1993) 65. 9 Mykhailo Zhuk (1883–1964) was a painter and a graphic artist. He studied at the Kyiv Art School, the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, and the KrakÓw Academy of Fine Arts. Today he is best remembered for his portraits of writers and other figures in Ukrainian culture, including his 1919 cubist-inspired portraits of Les Kurbas and Pavlo Tychyna. From 1925 to 1953 Zhuk taught at the Odesa Arts Schoool, where he continued to work on portraits of writers and painters. 10 Konstantin Rudnitsky, Russian and Soviet Theatre 1905–1932, trans. Roxane Permar (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc. 1988) 108. 11 A polygraphic faculty was organized after Narbut’s death at the Ukrainian Art Academy (renamed the Kyiv Institute of Art) to serve a rapidly growing publishing industry. By 1925 there were over forty-nine different publishers operating in Ukraine. Of these, seven were private, twenty-three belonged to the State or were governmentoperated, ten were cooperative, four belonged to the Communist Party, and five were organs of professional unions. See A[natoly] Shpakov, Khudozhnyk i knyha (The Artist and the Book) (Kyiv: Mystetstvo, 1973) 19, 66.

The Graphic Arts: From Page Design to Theatre 437 12 Narbut’s affiliation with the St Petersburg–based Mir Iskusstva group not only helped to crystallize the graphic clarity of his work, but also put him squarely in the middle of the polarized positions between the Westernizers and the Slavophiles in terms of Petersburgian aesthetic tastes. 13 What made this symbiosis remarkable was the boldness with which unadulterated classic norms were reinvigorated by Narbut’s nativistic sensibilities, a task not unlike the meshing of the universal classical with local tradition in the burlesque treatment of Virgil’s Aeneid which Ivan Kotliarevs’kyi turned into a spirited Kozak adventure in 1798. The literary parody was a milestone for introducing the Ukrainian vernacular as a literary language. 14 Both Narbut and Krychevs’kyi were natives of Slobodian Ukraine (Slobozhanshchyna or Slobids’ka Ukraina) – former territories of the Kozaks, populated to this day by their descendants. Historically, the region has been noted for its high level of culture and for its long-standing preservation of local lore. The first pedagogic institute in Ukraine was founded in Slobodian Ukraine. The region was also the birthplace of the Burliuks, a fact which was confirmed in David Burliuk’s painting My Kozak Ancestor (ca. 1908) rendered in the tradition of primitive Kozak Mamai paintings. See Camilla Gray, The Russian Experiment in Art 1863–1922, ed. Marian Burleigh-Motley (London: Thames and Hudson, 1998), illus. 76. 15 Unlike Narbut, whose entire professional life was devoted to the graphic medium, Krychevs’kyi’s graphic art was integrally related to his ‘architectural’ thinking. Even though he never formally trained as an architect, he managed to design the most magnificent example of a local arts-and-crafts modern style in Ukrainian architecture – the Poltava Zemstvo building (1903). 16 Rudnitsky 108. 17 Narbut’s ‘new look’ for the Ukrainian alphabet produced only fourteen letters, each infused with poetic fantasy and, in some cases, humour. The folios of the projected book, a primer entitled Ukrains’ka abetka (The Ukrainian Alphabet) included not just the letter itself, but images of subjects whose names began with that letter. Whimsy blended with didactic seriousness in this publication. 18 E. Gollerbakh, ‘Hrafika Marka Kyrnars’koho,’ Bibliolohichni visti 2:11 (1926) 68. 19 See Mytrophan Dovhalevs’kyi, Poetyka (Sad poetychnyi) (Poetics [Poetic Orchard]) (Kyiv: Mystetstvo, 1973). 20 This debunking of a single-point vision coalesced with Cubist principles that originated in relativistic and simultaneist viewing already adopted by Kyivan artists in the circle of Alexandra Exter and Oleksander Bohomazov. Since 1907 Kyiv had been an extremely vital centre for the dissemination of modern art, and the tenets of Cubism and Futurism were well assimilated by 1914, when one of the first collectives, ‘Kiltse’ (Circle), was formed. It brought together an assortment of artists who, each in his or her own way, sought to find expression within this newly interpreted visual language borrowed from the West, although not altogether unfamiliar to the Slavic artists who took their cues from the visual devices of icons, wherein theological narratives are displayed as discrete, yet coterminous, themes. Several key figures of these avantgarde circles, responding to an era that affected all aspects of life, from publishing to performance, would lay the ground for new styles and new conceptions of artistic form that fused both Western contemporary and Eastern (i.e., Byzantine) traditional

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practices. Bohomazov and Exter count among the key progenitors of this artistic revolution in Ukraine, the benefactors of which were Berezil’s stage and costume designers. A. Grishchenko, O sviaziakh russkoi zhivopisi s Vizantiei i Zapadom XIII–XX vv: Mysli zhivopistsa (On the Relations of Russian Painting with Byzantium and the West, 13th to 20th Centuries: Thoughts of a Visual Artist; Moscow, 1913). Oleksa Hryshchenko is known in art-historical literature by the French spelling of his name, Alexis Gritchenko. On this point, see Daniel Herwitz, Making Theory / Constructing Art: On the Authority of the Avant-garde (Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1993) 37ff. L. Boloban, ‘Dekoratsiia i osvitlennia na konu’ (Decoration and Lighting of the Stage), Sil’s’kyi teatr (Village Theatre) (Kharkiv) 8 (1930) 44–6. This caricatured treatment of universally recognizable characters carried over into stage productions. The staging of Kozak Holota, designed by Hryhorii Tsapok and executed in a naive village-painter style, as well as the Berezil’s production of Poshylys’ v durni (They Made Fools of Themselves), were typical in the use of the grotesque. Also, a play about the Ukrainian bourgeois, Narodnyi Malakhii (The People’s Malakhy, 1928) designed by Vadym Meller, was especially demonstrative of this carefully crafted feature. Meller’s presentation of the house of a bourgeois-kurkul landowner of the 1920s reified in exaggerated form the traditional setup of a bourgeois existence – a ‘super-sized’ samovar, an extremely large icon, grossly ornate wood mouldings with curtains, a cage with a canary, and, finally, an expansive picture-window view onto the village with its requisite windmill, poplar trees, and, of course, the ubiquitous stars, seemingly cut out of a template – all of which emphasized the artificiality of the ‘tabloid’ lifestyle. Meller reduced all these requisite details of an ethnographically saturated set to identifiable markers of colourful village life: sunflowers were converted to circles with spokes, lace curtains were exaggerated in scale to cover the full height of the stage, creating a gargantuan window that opens up onto the typical village landscape beyond, saturated to an extreme with organic forms of familiar foliage. Costumes were varied here, with dark linear emphases against bold linenwhite shapes of blousons and skirts. Like an ‘Alice in Wonderland’ fantastic world of domestic objects magnified in scale, one scene of jovial repartee – a flat tableau of busy energy and multifarious shapes and textures – was translated into a second tableau of a stark and far more austere set emphasizing repetitive verticals and grids in a multitude of sizes. Here (a psychiatric clinic) the windows were barred and turn inward, the external world inaccessible to its trapped inmates; the patients’ robes were uniformly consistent, cut of the same striped fabric. According to Konstantin Rudnitsky, ‘In designing The People’s Malakhy Vadym Meller was concerned that the details of everyday life should seem to refute Malakhy’s illusions and fantasies with their cruel, irresistible authenticity, and Kurbas brought him in contact with rough, earthy, full-blooded people, first of all Kum, a Ukrainian Sancho Panza played by Iosyp Hirniak.’ See Rudnitsky 199. As the son of a tailor-craftsman, physical labour was an observable phenomenon for Yermilov (Iermilov). In his autobiography the artist recorded how he frequently watched the workers going to and from work at the factory in his neighbourhood and how his sensitivity to industrial labour was heightened by peering through the

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windows of the electro-station near his home to view the workings of large machines. As a child, Iermilov dreamed of being a machinist, surrounded by a various hydraulic pumps, cranes, and implements, which he himself devised from various scraps of metal and wood. In his mature years, Iermilov brought these early impressions to a head in his art, both socially (by the products he made for mass consumption) and economically (by the kinds of materials he used), as well as by the frugal use of modest materials for maximum effect. El Lissitzky (Lazar Markovich Lisitskii) contributed his graphic works to Kyiv exhibitions of Jewish artists sponsored by the local ‘Kultur-lige.’ His illustrations of children’s books (e.g., M. Leiba’s Ingle-Cingle Chwat and graphics for the ‘Volksverlag’ are listed as nos. 77–90 in Ievreis’ka khudozhnia vystavka: Skul’ptura, hrafika, ta maliunky (Jewish Art Exhibition: Sculpture, Graphics, and Paintings), catalogue, February– March (Kyiv, 1920). Lissitzky stayed in Kyiv for a brief period in 1919, just before he was invited by Marc Chagall to teach at Vitebsk, where he was to direct the workshop of graphics and printing matters. As a ‘constructor of books,’ Lissitzky published at least one book in Kyiv – a 1919 folktale entitled Kizon’ka (Nannygoat). Another Russian Constructivist who contributed to Ukrainian graphics in the 1920s was Aleksandr Rodchenko, who, together with S. Senkin and G. Klutsis contributed photomontages to the Kharkiv-based journal Molodaia gvardiia (Young Guard), where Iermilov had served on the staff since 1924, and as vice-editor from 1927 to 1930. In a letter received by Mme Lissitzky on Sunday, 14 March 1928, Lissitzky wrote from Cologne: ‘The Ukrainian painter Meller arrived from Moscow today … Another load of exhibition stands has gone off. Meller thinks the work is going well.’ See Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers, El Lissitzky: Life, Letters, Texts (London: Thames and Hudson, 1968) 85. The journal Nova generatsiia (New Generation), founded by Mykhail Semenko as the premiere publication of Ukrainian progressive art of the 1920s (and for which Meller had been the key designer since the journal’s inception in October 1927), gave Iermilov and Meller stunning coverage about the Pressa-Köln design. Meller designed the layout of Nova generatsiia through the April 1928 issue, before taking on the Cologne project. Photographer Dan Sotnyk took over Meller’s duties and introduced photography as a new Constructivist art form. Meller turned his attention to designing for a rival journal, Chervonyi shliakh (Red Path). Vasilii Sontsvit, ‘Khudozhnyk industrial’nykh rytmiv,’ Avangard 3 (October 1929) 154. Iermilov began the construction of wall newspapers during his years at the Kharkiv Art Technicum, where he conducted the graphics workshop from 1922. It should be duly noted that the icon, too, has an inherent right and left side, read from the vantage point of the ‘interior’ of the icon, a spatial orientation that relates to theatre as well, where ‘stage left’ and ‘stage right’ are determined by the space contained within the theatre box. See Boris Uspensky, The Semiotics of the Russian Icon, ed. Stephen Rudy (Lisse: Peter de Ridder Press, 1976) 31ff. Bernard Kratko, ‘Yermilov oformliuie novyi pobut,’ Avangard 3 (October 1929) 158–9. Iermilov’s preoccupation with the ‘act’ of working was tinged by the current popularity of Taylor’s and Dalcroze’s ideas. Iermilov’s agit-trains, for example, serve as an almost literal interpretation of Dalcrozian eurhythmics: each wagon of the painted agit-train was conceived as if it were undergoing a pulsating, breathing process,

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reinforced by the rhythmic clamour of a passing train through the countryside. The separations between the individuals cars, moreover, could be construed as being the pauses, or (in terms of physical body functions) exhalations, that help to sustain a patterned rhythm. A puppet performance originating in the seventeenth century and performed during the Christmas season, the vertep (literally, the ‘cave’ where Jesus was born) signifies a philosophically inspired moment when the cosmic and the earthly intersect and the vulgar is pitted against the sublime. The stage space is usually divided into two zones (Heaven and Earth), but sometimes three (Heaven, Earth, and Hell), while the action can range from the sophisticated to the crude. In addition to Hryhorii Tsapok, the Kharkiv Union of Seven included Volodymyr Bobryts’kyi, Volodymyr Diakiv, Mykola Kal’mykov, Boris Kosariev, Mykola Myshchenko, and Boleslav Tsybys; Vasyl’ Iermilov was not part of the original ‘seven,’ but joined in 1917. That year Aleksandr Gladkov and Emmanuel Mané-Katz also joined the association, hence the additional ‘three.’ Vystav’ka Semi. Pervaia (Exhibition of the Seven. The First), catalogue (Khar’kov: Sem’, 1917). In Kyiv, Meller’s major designs for the Berezil’ included the productions of Georg Kaiser’s Gas and Upton Sinclair’s Jimmie Higgins – both in 1923 – and Macbeth, The Machine Wreckers, and The Secretary of the Labour Union in 1924, which won him the Gold Medal at the Paris Exhibition. In Kharkiv, he designed Fernand Crommelynck’s Tripes d’or (1926), Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado (1927), an unrealized production of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck (1927, based on Georg Büchner’s unfinished play Woyzeck), and Ivan Mykytenko’s Dyktatura (1930), as well as three plays by Mykola Kulish (1929–33). Mykhailo Boichuk and his brother Tymko (1896–1922) galvanized an entire pleiade of young artists around their ideas of reviving tempera as a modern technique for artistic rendering. Egg tempera, the stuff of ancient icons and mural painting, was, in Boichuk’s view, the most direct means by which to bring Ukraine’s millennial art-historical culture into the contemporary moment. For the Boichukists, the Byzantinesque treatment of figures paralleled the current influence of Orthodox iconography on abstract art; but this group of monumentalists never relinquished the necessity for the figurative. Guillaume Apollinaire first noticed this young, tightly knit, and idealistic group – which included Boichuk’s wife, Sofiia Nalepins’ka, and Sophia Baudouin de Courtenay – exhibiting in Paris in 1910, and baptized them the ‘Little Russian’ (cf. Maloros) school of Neo-Byzantine painting. When they returned to Ukraine, Boichuk immediately became a professor at the first Ukrainian Academy of Art, alongside Narbut, and continued to have a profound influence on subsequent generations of monumentalists. In the latter half of the 1920s, various groups of Boichukists worked as organized brigades on mural painting. Ironically, the tragedy of Boichuk’s demise (he was violently removed from Kyiv during the Purges of 1937 and executed) led to a generational renewal of his principles. Second- and third-generation Boichukists still cling to his methods and his teachings. Note: it is impossible to ascertain the exact death date of Mykhailo Boichuk. The Asotsiiatsiia Revoliutsiinoho Mystetstva Ukrainy (ARMU) was founded in 1925 and lasted until 1932. It was the largest organized group of artists during the Soviet

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period of the 1920s. Based in Kyiv, it had a number of chapters and branches throughout Ukraine and actively sponsored activities beyond the centre. A decade after the dissolution of Imperial rule, ARMU organized a major republic exhibition in Kharkiv and a landmark exhibition of ‘Engravings and Drawings’ in Kyiv in 1928. This latter exhibition showcased the graphic art of the RSFSR, the Belorussian SSR, and the Transcaucasian region. V[asyl] Sedliar, AKhRR ta ARMU (Kyiv: Vydannia Ts.B. ‘ARMU’ 1926) 8; see also Ivan Vrona, Mystetstvo revoliutsii i ARMU (Kyiv: Vydannia Ts. B. ‘ARMU’, 1926), appendix I, 57–9. Sil’uety (Odessa) 31 (1924) 11. Rudnitsky 109. Artists turned, in part, to a kind of Nietzschean dynamic to create heightened oppositional contrasts between a sphere of rational, calculated (Apollonian) sensibilities and sensorially overloaded (Dionysian) impulses. A single costume design by Kyiv artist Alexandra Exter combines these two polarities: a powerful whirl of centrifugal motion (an Exterian hallmark) generated by a solidly positioned and centrally balanced figure. Oleksander Bohomazov’s works play out this duality in his translation of Cubo-Futurism, as seen in his drawings and paintings of the period. For a detailed study of the interpretation of Cubo-futurism in Kyiv, see Olena Kashuba, ‘Kubofuturyzm v Ukraini,’ PhD diss. (Kyiv: Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences and the M.T. Ryl’s’kyi Institute of Art History, Folklore and Ethnology, 1997). Seen against this background, Kurbas’s selection of repertoire, when he embarked on the great classics in his Young Theatre in Kyiv, seems especially poignant. Among his first productions was Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex (1918). There was a general tendency in European art to return to the classics immediately after the First World War as the post-war art scene sought to find its place within the historic scope of Western civilization. See Elizabeth Cowling and Jennifer Mundy, On Classic Ground: Picasso, Léger and the New Classicism 1910–1930 (London: Tate Gallery, 1990), exhibition catalogue. Vadym Meller, ‘Suchasnist’ potrebuie maistra,’ Barykady teatru 2–3 (December 1924) 4.

Rhythm When two slender girls walk by – with red poppies in their hair – – somewhere far off! young planets! Flow. Stream. Atoms of weariness – to Earth, to light, out of darkness. Dance up a dust storm … Suns form a circle. And from them wisps float off throughout the universe. Two girls.

antistrophe She poured the hungry children some milk, – sat down and lost her way in thought … On the pitcher, two tears rolled down, as if from blind eyes. One quickly, ahead. The other, hesitant, following the first, in its tracks … Two girls. Pavlo Tychyna, Instead of Sonnets and Octaves, 1920

Translated from the Ukrainian by Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipp

17 Dissecting Time/Space: The Scottish Play and the New Technology of Film irena r. makaryk

The mere possibility that the cinema might become a great new universal art should earn it the attention of all who have the intellectual future of humanity at heart. Julien Luchaire1

In March 1922, almost at exactly the same time, the creation of two significant significant organizations was announced: the Berezil Artistic Association and the VUFKU-Vseukrainske fotokinoupravlinnia (All-Ukrainian Film Directorate). This conjunction of events was to prove propitious and even prophetic, since the artistic director and driving force of the Berezil theatre, Les Kurbas, was also soon to become one of the founding directors of the fledging Ukrainian film industry. Quite unlike the tsarist regime, which either dismissed film as trivial entertainment or spoke out against it2 (suggesting it was anything but trivial), the young Soviet government, as well as Ukrainian governments from 1918 on,3 enthusiastically embraced the new technology, immediately recognizing its ideologically useful potential. The VUFKU aimed to reorganize and exercise control over a nascent film industry in Ukraine and the Crimea, and promptly entered into negotiations concerning international collaborative endeavours with Kodak and Pathé, as well as with companies in Turkey – although these efforts were to be severely limited, when not completely scuppered – by Western powers ill at ease with the possibility of Soviet mastery of this medium.4 In these early years, Herbert Marshall claims, the VUFKU was a ‘very experimental and adventurous centre,’ which published a journal, Kino, that informed its readers of European, American, and Asian productions, and nourished such artists such as Dziga Vertov (born Denis Arkadevich Kaufman) and Alexander (Oleksander) Dovzhenko, who were to become internationally renowned.5 Ukraine quickly became a significant producer of films. By 1926, it was second only to the United States as a supplier of films to Germany. In the years 1928–9 the Ukrainian film industry became the most productive of the whole Soviet Union: 245 films of various genres were churned out.6 From 1929, Ukrainians also exported films to the United States, France, and Japan,7 and took part in various film festivals throughout Europe.8 This small fact provides the very faint hope that perhaps copies of Kurbas’s three films – Vendetta, Macdonald, and Arsenaltsi – may yet be uncovered somewhere outside Ukraine.9

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17.1 Vasyl Krychevsky, design for the VUFKU logo

The Ukrainian stage director Les Kurbas turned to creating films in 1924, immediately following his radical Macbeth (discussed below) and just after he founded the sixth studio of the Berezil in Odesa. He had already become a partial convert to the new medium, having made and effectively used film clips together with live actors in his highly praised stage production of Jimmie Higgins the previous year (discussed in Virlana Tkacz’s essay in this section).10 Kurbas’s assistant on his three films, Oleksander Perehuda, as well as Tkacz (a later commentator),11 have persuasively argued that film and filmic techniques deeply penetrated Kurbas’s stage practice; this influence is evident not just in Jimmie Higgins, which actually employed short filmed scenes, but also in his Macbeth. Kurbas’s actors uniformly attest to the fact that the Ukrainian director was entirely at ease in film, working comfortably and naturally in this new medium; they were struck by the ‘ordinariness’ with which he approached his daily work on film, since they had expected to observe some indicators of trepidation, or even of awe.12 Macbeth and the Principle of Montage In 1924, a little more than two months after the death of Lenin, Les Kurbas produced the most remarkable Macbeth of the whole Soviet period (1922–91). The theatrical event was broken down into its constituent, ‘atomic,’ parts – its building blocks. All the traditional aspects of the theatrical presentation were to be interrogated: live actors speaking and moving before an audience in a three-dimensional space, using gesture and props, accompanied by music. Like Edward Gordon Craig, who was interested in essence and images, Kurbas intended to reconceive more broadly – and abstractly – the basic ideas of theatre, breaking down surface reality and examining various aspects of it simultaneously, in the process creating the stage equivalent of a work of a Picasso or a Braque. We have already seen in previous chapters how Les Kurbas moved towards the creation of a conceptual theatre. His 1924 Macbeth marks the culmination of this journey: it is both his most extreme and least understood or appreciated production, as well as the most radical Shakespeare production of the early twentieth century. This production has been discussed in great detail elsewhere;13 here we will provide only a short summary of some of its most salient features. In this redaction of the play (his fourth), towards which he had been groping since 1919 (when he first introduced Shakespeare to the Ukrainian stage), Kurbas broke down all the ‘natural’ expectations of the traditional theatre event – among them concepts of character, time/space (already reconceived in Jimmie Higgins),

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17.2 Lenin’s decree about the nationalization of cinemas

differences between high and low, audience and actor – in a production which also assimilated and re-thought contemporary achievements in the related fields of the visual arts, dance, film, poetry, music, graphic design, and technology. Theatre was Kurbas’s alembic, in which, as alchemist, he reconceived his art and created something entirely new. The result was a modern, tragic-farcical, blood-soaked Cubist-Expressionist Macbeth – one unlike any other seen before anywhere in the Russian empire or, for that matter, in Western Europe. Macbeth caused a major scandal both because of its treatment of a world classic and because of its refusal to conform to audiences’ expectations. Kurbas employed a variety of techniques (notably, estrangement that Brecht would promote nearly a decade later) to shock his audience out of its complacency. The greatest assault was made on the notion of character. In addition to doubling and tripling roles (a revived English Renaissance practice), actors were required to reveal the ‘purity’ of the actor’s art and its direct effect on the audience by ‘engaging’ in their character only once they were onstage, then ‘disengaging’ before exiting. The audience would thus see the actor ‘working.’ So, for example, Liubov Hakkebush, who played Lady Macbeth, walked to centre stage, where she placed her candle, took off her mantle, shook her head until her long dark hair tumbled around her shoulders, and only then proceeded emotionally to ‘Out, damned spot!’ Completing her work as the sleepwalking Lady Macbeth, she then left the stage as ‘herself.’ This tactic was repeated throughout the production, thus ‘estranging,’ or isolating and drawing attention to, key moments in the play; these may be regarded as analogues of discrete scenes between inter-titles in silent films (as Tkacz suggests) or as ‘arias,’ which drew attention to the actor’s skill in directly affecting audience response (Kurbas also directed operas).

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17.3 Liubov Hakkebush as Lady Macbeth and Ivan Marianenko as Macbeth in Les Kurbas’s 1924 production

Experiments in abstract dance carried out by Bronislava Nijinska in Kyiv also left their mark on the production. Nijinska, like Kurbas, hoped that her choreography would release new energies and new spiritual depths; her ballets, like his stage productions, were aimed at transcending reality, and expressing rather than representing life. Constant movement, strong visual images, musical organization – these characterized Kurbas’s stage productions and also reflected his continuing contemplation of the concept of rhythm and, hence, of time. The new techniques and contrasting rhythms employed in this production forced both the audience and the actor to a cerebral, rather than an emotional, response to the play, and thus resisted the traditional pull of narrative.14 Vadym Meller designed the set: enormous green screens of stretched canvas painted with giant modernist red block letters announcing the locality. These were lowered, raised, or moved to create different spaces, affect mood, or interfere in the action set on a bare black stage. Fragments of furniture, chairs, and a throne were, like the screens, lowered and raised when needed. While the production intellectualized and distanced the play from the audience by stressing the banality of evil, it also simultaneously used various devices to draw it in. For example, by lighting the witches from behind, large shadows were cast on the spectators. It was to these that Banquo and Macbeth spoke directly, an effect which seemed to extend the evil heath world into the reality of the spectators. The closest link between actor and audience was provided by a major textual addition: three mimed interludes inserted in between the acts of the play and thematically linked to contemporary political events.15 These involved the figure of the Porter, renamed the Fool in Kurbas’s production (played by Amvrosy Buchma). The scandalous production was capped by an equally shocking ending: a representation

17.4 ‘Castle Gates’ printed in giant letters on the screen behind the murder of Banquo

17.5 Amvrosy Buchma as the Fool in Les Kurbas’s 1924 production of Macbeth

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of endless political betrayal and murder. The Fool appeared in the final moments of the play (when Macduff comes out carrying the head of Macbeth) still wearing his makeup (the mocking, grinning face), but now costumed as a bishop, in gold tiara and white soutane. He then crowned Malcolm, as solemn organ music played and was penetrated by the jeering intrusions of both the ‘feminine piccolo’ and the raucous harmonium.16 Just as the Fool/bishop crowned the new king, a new pretender approached, killed the kneeling Malcolm, and took the crown. Without pause, the bishop once again intoned the same words, ‘There is no power, but from God.’ As the new king was about to rise, a new pretender murdered him, and the ritual was repeated once again. Nothing could be further from the sub-operatic Shakespeare of the provincial Russian stage of past or present. The effects of the production, especially of its concluding scene, were felt for days and months to come. The Kyiv audience, which had recently endured similar rapid and bloody exchanges of power, was forced to exercise a Renaissance type of activity. The production induced the spectators simultaneously to apprehend Soviet Ukraine, Shakespeare’s England, and Macbeth’s Scotland. Time folded in upon itself. The devices which Kurbas employed in this production functioned as ways of analysing and dissecting, collapsing and comparing, time, at once creating both discrete, intense units of duration and a unity in their multiplicity. One of the obvious unifying features of the production was the principle of montage, employed and popularized by artists of various disciplines at the time17 (and, as Tkacz has shown in her essay in this section, one of D.W. Griffith’s film techniques already assimilated by Kurbas in his production of Jimmie Higgins). As David Bordwell explains, the fundamental principles of montage – an ‘assemblage of heterogeneous parts, juxtaposition of fragments, the demand for the audience to make conceptual connections, in all a radically new relation among parts of a whole’ – were applicable not only to film, but also ‘to drama, music, literature, painting, and sculpture.’18 Bordwell locates the roots of montage in pre-Revolutionary avant-garde art, particularly in the work of Malevich, Tatlin, and Burliuk (all Ukrainian-born artists discussed by Myroslav Shkandrij in this volume). Cut off from the rest of Europe and its influences by the First World War, they developed Futurism and the initial principles of montage during the years 1914–1917 – which also coincided with Kurbas’s first, early years in Kyiv. In its second stage, Futurism was split into two groups, one led by Tatlin and his Constructivist followers, and the other by Malevich and including those who were interested in non-objective, non-ideological art. Constructivism, which became prominent around 1922, when the Berezil was founded, included as its followers experimental artists from all disciplines who shared the idea that the artist was ‘a creator of socially useful and revolutionary products,’ not a member of the elite.19 We have seen in Myroslava Mudrak’s essay in this volume just such a widespread engagement of artists in the public sphere: in designing posters, books, clothes, graphics, streets, furniture, trains. We may also note the relative ease with which artists moved from one discipline to another. Montage’s best-known proponent, Sergei Eisenstein, offers one such example; he was first involved in the graphic arts and theatre before he turned to film.20 Others, such as Grigory Kozintsev, Sergei Yutkevitch, and Ivan Kavaleridze, also worked in other art forms

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17.6 Sergei Eisenstein

17.7 Ivan Kavalaridze

before they made films; Kozintsev and Yutkevitch as visual artists and as street puppeteers in Kyiv, Kavaleridze as a sculptor. Like these artists, the multi-talented Kurbas brought to his stage work the ‘languages’ of many other arts; in his case, one of his ‘languages’ included film. He is unusual in that, after turning to making fulllength films, he returned to the stage, bringing filmic techniques with him. In his case, the complicated web of cross-fertilizations is extraordinarily dense and rich. Following Bordwell, we may well wish to consider montage as the technique for the times. In its use of fragments, juxtapositions, and violent confrontations, in its creation of new rhythms and new syntheses, it would have spoken powerfully to Kyivan artists of the early Soviet period who tried simultaneously to recover old and suppressed traditions, revive, reuse, and rethink the local, folk, and popular, as well as the urban, experimental, and new. Much taken with the work of Cézanne and Picasso, Kurbas frequently referred to the influence of Cubism (it inspired his 1924 Macbeth) which, like many artistic movements of the time, also employed the technique of montage. In his director’s diary, as well as in his published essays, Kurbas provides ample evidence of his tendency to explore the tensions between word and gesture, text and body, role and character; these notes express a concern with abstraction rather than with the recreation of a facsimile surface of reality. In one diary entry, reflecting his fascination with time and rhythm, he predicts: ‘The greater the artist of the future, the more he will pay attention in his play or production to making all significant accents of the action follow each other in such a rhythmic succession that they will elicit an analogous rhythm in the spectator and will force his heart to beat more evenly, more quickly, or more irregularly ... Now, I consciously want to try this out in Macbeth, to place this problem as a foundation of the production.’21 While Kurbas was unable put his theories fully to the test in the earlier 1919–1920 redactions of Macbeth, as we have seen, he returned to these ideas in 1924, more

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radically working out the issue of rhythm and movement by ‘breaking down’ the classic text and experimenting with contrasting images, jarring dissonances, and sharp rhythmic juxtapositions. If the principle of montage is the general technique employed here, it is buttressed by philosophical underpinnings; more specifically, with the ideas of the French philosopher Henri Bergson, whose work Kurbas had admired since his student days in Vienna. Echoes of Bergson’s studies of time, motion, spirit, matter, and creativity are found throughout Kurbas’s diary, as well as in his published essays. Even some of Bergson’s phraseology seems to have embedded itself in Kurbas’s thinking. Thus, for example, the passage cited above from his director’s diary echoes passages such as the following from Bergson: ‘[Do] real movements present merely differences of quantity, or are they not quality itself, vibrating, so to speak, internally, and beating time for its own existence through an often incalculable number of moments?’22 Kurbas’s insistence that his actors reveal their maturity and professionalism by ‘fixing’ gestures and movement, and by their ability to repeat these exactly, may also have a relation to Bergsonian ideas. Bergson argued that there was no homogeneous time; it was ‘an idol of language, a fiction’: In reality there is no one rhythm or duration; it is possible to imagine many different rhythms which, slower or faster, measure the degree of tension or relaxation of different kinds of consciousness, and thereby fix their respective places in the scale of being ... In short, then, to perceive ... means to immobilize ... If there are actions that are really free, or at least partly indeterminate, they can only belong to being able to fix, at long intervals, that becoming to which their own being clings, able to solidify it into distinct moments, and so to condense matter, and by assimilating it, to digest it into movements of reaction which will pass through the meshes of natural necessity. The greater or less tension of their duration, which expresses, at bottom, their greater or less intensity of life, thus determines both the degree of the concentrating power of their perception and the measure of their liberty.24

Kurbas considered his best actors those who were able to achieve such ‘liberty’ by precisely and accurately ‘fixing’ and repeating ‘reality,’ thus endowing it with a condensed and maximal meaning. Montage and Kurbas’s Turn to Film The fundamental interrogation of all inherited theatrical conventions in Macbeth had brought Kurbas’s experimentation to a new level. He thoroughly parsed his medium and laid bare its parts, forcing his actors and audiences to rethink theatrical representation. Foregrounding image and gesture over vocal narrative, Kurbas brought theatre to its near breaking point; he now turned to film, which fixes and preserves the director’s choice of image. Towards the end of 1923, Kurbas was recorded as saying, ‘I use music in the theatre, I use the theatre of masses ... I see the theatre of the future as a theatre of stage images ... a theatre in which the director

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will be the dramatist who provides the scenario of the show. The actor will be the most important.’25 For a brief period of time, this imagined theatre of stage images would become images on film. In n retrospect, Kurbas’s turn to fi film lm appears to be a natural next step in his evolution as a director, all the more so since, as has been suggested, he had pushed the limits of theatre as far as they could go. As has also been noted, cross-over from theatre into film was not uncommon. At the time, however, Kurbas’s move inspired astonishment from some quarters (including a few of his actors) that ‘the Man Who Was the Theatre’26 had apparently abandoned the stage (as will be seen, this was not entirely true; he continued to work concurrently on both film and stage).27 We may suggest a few reasons for his desire to turn to film. First and foremost, as a constant experimenter and seeker of new forms, Kurbas must have been excitedly attracted by the possibility of exploring time in a different and still novel medium. Also, throughout his career, he had expressed the desire to reach out to a large, mass audience. Film held out that promise, as the results of extensive questionnaires, distributed to audiences at the end of the Berezil productions, revealed. In the over 55,000 questionnaires distributed in 1924 alone, film consistently appeared as one of the top preferred entertainments of a vast spectrum of audience respondents of different ethnicities and various educational backgrounds.28 Moreover, more than just appealing to a variety of audiences in Kyiv or across Ukraine, silent film could cut across national boundaries. The easy way in which films travelled from one country to another and were instantly re-appropriated (frequently re-titled and their characters’ names changed) suggests the fluidity and ‘universality’ of silent film. (Oleh Sydor-Hybelynda’s essay in this book suggests just such a ‘universal’ repertoire.) For Kurbas, who had repeatedly voiced the desire to fling open the windows of Uncle Tom’s colonialist cabin of Ukraine, and who wished to ‘astonish the world’29 – not just the Ukrainian or the Soviet world – film must have seemed if not an irresistible, then at least an attractive, medium. The ambitious actor Vasyl Vasylko, himself later a director, but, best of all, a wonderful diarist (he is the Samuel Pepys of the early Soviet Ukrainian theatre), tracked Kurbas’s peregrinations and achievements on stage and film. He recorded that ‘contemporary artistic circumstances made it necessary for Kurbas to shift the centre of his attention to the VUFKU (film).’ With some excitement, he noted that Kurbas was in Odesa: ‘Ukrainian films are being made there and they represent Ukraine beyond its boundaries. There isn’t a single director who could imitate a ‘Uke’ (khokhol [a derogatory term]) and represent the Ukrainian nation and Ukrainian art with dignity. With the arrival of Kurbas and his actors, the manager of the VUFKU exclaimed that a new era has begun at the VUFKU. Who knows, maybe the Ukrainians/students of Kurbas and his system will create a new school of film.’30 As these comments suggest, Vasylko shared the enthusiasm of others for this ‘universal art’ and considered it possible that Kurbas might create more than a few films. Kurbas did indeed briefly dream about creating a film-factory with the Berezil;31 although this was never realized, he became one of the founders of Ukrainian cinema, educating hundreds of actors, as well as directors, and designers in the Berezil.

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17.8 Anatol Petrytsky, portrait of Vasyl Vasylko, 1931

17.9 Yosyp Hirniak

Yosyp Hirniak, one of Kurbas’s favourite actors, provides another, more pragmatic, explanation for Kurbas’s turn to film. The Commissariat of Education and the Odesa-based VUFKU had spent a considerable amount of time persuading Kurbas to film a number of ‘kinokartyny’ (literally, film-pictures or picture shows) with his Berezil actors. In the opinion of the VUFKU, it was high time that this industry also began to be ‘ukrainianized.’32 Ukrainian films (starring Ukrainian actors and using Ukrainian subtitles) were still a great novelty, as Vasylko’s diary entry for 23 March 1924 confirms. On this day, he saw his first such film: Ostap Bandura. While noting that ‘it was high time that VUFKU was finally doing something useful,’ he opined that it was ‘too bad that it is not a good film.’33 Vasylko, like the administration of the VUFKU and many others, hoped that Kurbas would bring his many talents to this new technology and would thus help found an innovative Ukrainian film industry. For Kurbas, who was living in penury, it was also undeniably a way of making some money. His whole company was barely surviving and was literally hungry. Thus, after some deliberation, Kurbas decided to include film as part of the scope of the aesthetic interests of the Berezil and agreed to direct three films within four months: Vendetta, Macdonald, and Arsenaltsi (The ‘Arsenal’ Workers). These were intended to be a series of short, thematically linked films about the working classes to be grouped under the title ‘Makhovyk’ (The Flywheel) and, likely, shown together as well. The last of the three films would, in fact, itself take two months to film. If, by today’s standards, this appears to be a short time frame for the creation of a film, we should recall that a great many Hollywood films were being churned out one week at a time. One other thread needs to be examined. Was there more to Kurbas’s continuing interest, if not obsession, with rhythm, tempo, and vibrations? Yuri Tsivian makes some suggestive comments about theosophical booklets highlighting ‘vibration’ as ‘the first among the three types of motion created by nature,’ and that ‘invisible “penetrating oscillations” are the way the Cosmic Will is communicated to earthly souls.’ He suggests that ‘the ground for the “flickering movies”’ was ‘prepared by

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17.10 Scene from the film Ostap Bandura. Maria Zankovetska in the centre

the doctrines of occult science.’ Thus, theosophists sought out cinema in order to experience the ‘refined ecstasy of vibration.’34 From his days in Vienna, Kurbas was fascinated by the work of Christian theosophist Rudolf Steiner and the concept of a fourth dimension. In this, he was like many artists in the early part of the twentieth century who were gripped by theosophy, including director and actor Michael (Mikhail) Chekhov, composer Aleksandr Scriabin, visual artist Vasily (also known as Wassily) Kandinsky, as well as even a few communists such as Anatoly Lunacharsky. The discovery of electricity, energy, behavioural nervous systems, and the excitement about Einstein’s theory of relativity, the fascination with oscillation and vibration, seen and unseen worlds, all resulted in the desire to create an artistic ‘language’ which could express and reveal these new concepts. Film – with its manipulation of time both through editing and through varying the speed and direction by which it was passed through a projector – offered one way to probe the various dimensions of time and seemingly liberate it from some of its usual constraints. Kurbas as Filmmaker As far as we know, none of Kurbas’s three films has survived, a fact which makes it difficult to analyse his achievements with any real certainty. In place of the film reels, we are dependent upon the type of information available for theatre productions, including photo stills, published and unpublished accounts, and memoirs. On the general effect of Kurbas as a filmmaker, we find a number of pointed, though brief, observations. The archives of actor Ivan Marianenko (born Ivan Petlyshenko) yield

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17.11 Boris Zavelev

17.12 Piotr Chardynin

one such small but not insignificant remark. A ‘late bloomer’ to the avant-garde who had already been an established actor and director for thirty-five years, at age fifty Marianenko played Macbeth in Kurbas’s 1924 production. He was one of the few older actors in the company able to cast off traditional, ethnographic training and embrace experimentation, although not without some anxiety. His memoirs indicate his growing concern with Kurbas’s ever more radical directorial decisions about the Scottish play, and then, later, delighted surprise at its outcome: astonishing success and exhilaration. Among other recollections, Marianenko jotted down his conversation with Ivan Kavaleridze (later himself a filmmaker), who exclaimed that he ‘was utterly “floored” by Kurbas’ as a filmmaker – a remark that Marianenko evidently thought significant enough that it was worth preserving.35 The already mentioned Vasylko noted in his journal on 14 June 1924: ‘Les Kurbas is in Vinnytsia shooting his first film about priests [Vendetta]. He feels great [perhaps a reference to the improved state of his health; Kurbas suffered from angina; or to his domestic situation – his wife was having an affair], and has already conquered the techniques of filmmaking. The actors say that they’ve now really understood what a great director Kurbas is.’36 Such comments are also supported by those outside of Kurbas’s immediate circle. Boris Zavelev, the cameraman who worked simultaneously on films by Kurbas and the director Piotr Chardynin, noted that his preconceived, patronizing attitude to the Ukrainian director quickly vanished when he recognized that Kurbas possessed a full understanding of the creative possibilities of film and approached the medium with an easy assurance.37 Such remarks confirm the claims of Kurbas’s film assistant, Perehuda, and suggest that Kurbas must have been thinking in filmic terms for some time; he was now applying methods learned from film to the very medium from which he had acquired them. Vendetta More precise details about Kurbas’s films come from two basic sources: Oleksander Perehuda and Yosyp Hirniak; the latter was invited to be one of the lead actors in Kurbas’s first film, Vendetta (also known as Oko za oko – An Eye for an Eye).38

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17.13 Aleksei Granovsky

Hirniak’s published memoirs provide a condensed narrative of events, supply some film stills, and offer a few useful details about the process of early film production. At the time, the multi-ethnic city of Odesa served as a kind of incipient Soviet Hollywood, attracting filmmakers and actors from across the Soviet Union. The city had taken an early and immediate shine to film, having had Francis Doublier, a young employee of the Lumière brothers, demonstrate the invention merely one year after it had been shown in Paris.39 It was thus a logical place for the VUFKU to set up one of its two studios (the other was in Yalta). Hirniak encountered a mixture of people making films there, including foreign cameramen, directors on contract, and ‘newbies,’ mandated by VUFKU like Kurbas and his artistic designer, Vadym Meller. Others included Aleksei Granovsky, who arrived in May 1925 accompanied by seventy-two actors from the GOSET (State Jewish Theatre from Moscow), including Solomon Mikhoels, with whom Kurbas would later work on King Lear.40 Proportionally, Odesa had a large Jewish population; as a consequence, the city itself became known for its particular brand of satiric Jewish humour.41 Perhaps such a context may have had some influence on Kurbas’s first film comedy. It should also be noted (as Oleh Sydor-Hybelynda insists in this volume) that film was then viewed primarily as an entertainment, thus comedy seemed its logical generic partner. Before arriving in Odesa, Hirniak first travelled to Vinnytsia, where a number of outdoor scenes were to be filmed. There, he found that Kurbas’s film crew (or ‘brigade,’ as he called it) was already fully formed and ready to go,42 although he was surprised that the practices of the day meant that a number of films were being created concurrently by different directors in the same location. Zavelev, the cameraman who worked on ‘our poor little Vendetta’ (as Perehuda referred to it, probably because of its tiny cast),43 did so in between takes on two other films directed by Chardynin: Ukraziia (also known as 7 + 2), and Lisovyi zvir (Forest Beast). Ukraziia, a two-part film which has since disappeared (1925; scenario by Heorhy Stabovy and M. Borysov), was, it was claimed, the first Bolshevik detektyv or ‘detective’ – the Soviet catchword for any films deemed ‘mysteries,’ including adventure and chase films. As Vance Kepley explains, the Soviets ‘admired the vitality and frenetic activity of these “naïve” films’ and hoped to rework their intensity of action and dynamic of construction into ‘an aggressive, revolutionary cinema.’44

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17.14 Scene from the film Ukraziia

Hirniak and Perehuda’s description of the process of filming mimics that which was happening in film companies around the world. The film script or, more accurately, scenario (by no means something as grand as a screenplay) of Vendetta by Borysov and Stabovy provided the most general of plot outlines. According to Perehuda, the scenarios were imposed on Kurbas by the manager of the film studio, M. Kapchynsky (first name unknown). Thus, one of the major challenges faced by the director was how to transform banal subject matter into something more interesting and of greater impact.45 The director possessed the only copy of the text and hence was the single person who knew the whole content of the film, a fact which made anything resembling a Stanislavsky or Method system of acting unthinkable. The Berezil actors, however, were well prepared to work under such conditions. As in Kyiv in preparation for Jimmie Higgins and Macbeth, they were required, on the spot, to prepare études – short scenes – embodying the ideas which Kurbas threw out at them; and, as in Kyiv, these were presented as discrete units which had to be performed and repeated exactly. So without knowing the context, the beginning, or the ending of the film, Hirniak carried out Kurbas’s directorial commands, practising his discrete études many times until the appropriate gestures and actions were fixed precisely and they pleased the director; then, they were immediately filmed. Kurbas took an active part in inventing and adding comic business, revising camera angles, and essentially experimenting with the genre and the ‘text.’ The type of work he was engaged in was analogous to the commedia dell’arte style in the

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17.15 Heorhy Stabovy

theatre: the slender plot was built upon the equivalent of lazzi (bits of comic business) and stereotypical characters who evoked laughter through expected behaviour and repeated gags. Much depended upon the spontaneous, clever invention of the intelligent and daring actor. At the end of the day, rushes were examined by the whole crew and whatever was ineffective was discarded. Experimentation continued to be the theme, but always coupled with the precision of delivery of ideas.46 It was pressured work, since all the filming had to be completed within two weeks, after which the cast and crew were to head off to Odesa, where sets were being prepared for the interior shots. There, the fragments were assembled to create the whole. It was an experience which, for the first time, utterly persuaded Hirniak of the real value of the work at the Berezil on the études – the ability to create scenes – which had formed such a significant part of the actors’ training in the Berezil theatre. Focus, the ability to ‘engage’ and then ‘disengage’ from a scene without elaborate consideration of motivation, ‘fixing’ gestures and expressive movement, and repeating them with precision – these were exactly the techniques that were highly prized in the process of creating film.47 According to Oleh Babyshkin, the subject of Vendetta was taken from Kaidasehva simia (Kaidash’s Family), a novel by nineteenth-century writer Ivan NechuiLevytsky, transferred in time to the 1920s.48 Vendetta’s scenario consisted of a series of ‘battles’ between Sylvester, an old, scraggly priest, and Hordy, a huge, redhaired deacon, over a fruitful cherry tree which straddled their properties. Forgetting about dignity and their calling as representatives of God on earth, they took up a bitter, escalating quarrel. When the priest successfully warded off the deacon from a sally on ‘his’ tree, the deacon initiated a vendetta by cutting off the elder’s cabbage heads and throwing them into his pond. Stripping off his clothes, Father Sylvester dived in to save his valuable vegetables. Amvrosy Buchma had a very effective and hilarious small cameo role as the night-watchman who acted as a ‘judge,’ mediating between the two clergymen.49 Outrageous gags, and exaggerated and repetitive behaviour were the hallmarks of the comic films of that period. Kurbas’s debut film employed such devices, but also managed to exceed the merely banal, comic expectations set up by the scenario and typical of films of that time. Employing satirical, grotesque, and parodic

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17.16 Yosyp Hirniak in Kurbas’s film Vendetta (YHOD)

elements to give the film an ideological edge, Vendetta included some of the same elements as the 1924 Macbeth with its jarring dissonances and anti-clerical ending. Satirical views of religion were, naturally, encouraged by Soviet ideology. They were also in tune with Kurbas’s own anti-clericalism that derived from his family circumstances and his place of birth.50 Still, the choice of comedy for such a philosophically inclined director seems odd until one considers that this was not only a convenient but probably the best vehicle for an initial exploration and dissection of time in the new technology. The wacky nature of silent comedy, with the manic behaviour of its characters and seemingly gravity-defying tricks, would have been a useful opening into the world of film editing and, more broadly speaking, the manipulation of time/space. One of Vendetta’s most inventive moments came in the opening scene, which immediately set the comic-satiric tone: A gigantic chicken sat comfortably ‘enthroned,’ then unperturbedly hatched not one, but two, eggs, which tumbled out and rolled towards the camera. As they did so, the eggs began to crack; out hatched the priest and the deacon – the stars of the film.51 The idea was that two equally ‘inflated,’ self-important clerics were derived from the same epic-size, outlandish source. The lead roles of the young deacon and the old priest were played by Stepan Shahaida and Yosyp Hirniak, Mutt and Jeff in size: one big and burly, the other short and wiry. With their newly shaved heads covered with appropriate wigs, they also resembled two famous comedians of the day: Pat and Patashon.

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17.17 Hirniak as the Priest in Vendetta

Vendetta received positive, even enthusiastic, reviews. The Kharkiv newspaper Vechernee radio of 15 March 1925, for example, described the film as technically well executed and very funny, though it questioned the need to show a naked priest on screen.52 Soviet comedies were not easy to make. As Denise Youngblood and David Gillespie have pointed out, it was relatively easy to turn historical, adventure films, even melodrama, into ideological vehicles, but most difficult to do so with comedy, since insertions of serious ideology usually deprived the films of their essential ingredient, laughter.53 Gillespie observes that ‘Soviet comedy filmmakers needed to tread a fine line between making people laugh, on the one hand and being ideologically acceptable to the vigilant critics on the other.’54 Kornienko confirms such a view when, in his discussion of early film comedies written during the Khrushchev era, he contemptuously dismisses the genre and notes, happily: ‘Not a trace of them was left.’ The reasons for their disappearance, he suggests, are the ‘vulgar’ aspects of this genre: their silliness, their tricks, and conventions.55 Only one kind of laughter was acceptable: ‘contemptuous laughter,’ derived from class antagonism. Such ‘appropriate’ laughter was promoted by Anatoly Lunacharsky, Commissar of the Enlightenment, in 1924, the year in which Vendetta was made. Contemptuous or satirical laughter, however, was ‘hardly the stuff of knockabout comedy or slapstick farce.’56 Kurbas, however, seems to have succeeded at making a comedy which included both knockabout comedy and an ideological message of the ridiculousness and

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17.18 From left: Trauberg, Yutkevitch, and Kozintsev

small-mindedness of the clergy.57 His success may perhaps be attributed to his mastery of tempo. As he observed, ‘I think that the motto of film is tempo: and that which it organizes is, precisely, tempo. When you leave the cinema, your molecules are vibrating twice, three times, more quickly than after another kind of show. And everything is built on this [principle]. This is the issue and it has a relationship to our present times, to our aims, to that which we must do – this is the question to which we have to find an answer.’58 Kurbas’s attentiveness to tempo was most evident in his fascination with the editing process. His assistant, Perehuda, described him as being completely taken with the task of editing; when he was engaged in it, he seemed like a captain on his bridge. He confidently threw away, shortened, or joined together fragments, making an entirely new creation with its own distinct rhythm. The results, noted Perehuda, were films of clarity, accessibility, and logic; nothing in them was extraneous or unnecessary.59 In his focus on the importance of editing in order to concentrate on rhythm and movement, Kurbas reflected the spirit of the times. As a teenage resident of Kyiv and would-be artist, Grigory Kozintsev (not yet a filmmaker), experienced similar thoughts about rhythm as the shaping force of the times: [A] preponderant place was accorded to rhythm, because the novelty of things was initially felt not in themes or characters, but in rhythm. Art had changed rhythm. The new epoch had found its first expression in rhythm. This was extremely interesting, because there was a sort of contradiction in it; and that is why all comparisons made between the avant-garde movements of the West and ours, seem to me to be false, and not merely in respect of the conditions of our life. What we were doing then we were doing in the cold and the famine of a devastated country. The conditions of life were very hard ... Yet the dominant sentiment was the affirmation of life ... In the middle of

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17.19 Directors’ lab, Odesa, 1925 every kind of privation a sort of fair was going on ... If this atmosphere is forgotten or neglected, then the art of those times remains incomprehensible.60

This fascination with rhythm is also found in Eisenstein and Lev Kuleshov, who used montage for rhythmic and narrative purposes, juxtaposing shots as a way of bringing out ‘the shape and nuances of the story.’61 It is useful both to note that Kuleshov was introduced to montage effects through Nicholas Foregger, who had come from Kyiv to Moscow,62 and to recall that Eisenstein had spent some time working in theatre in Kyiv before he returned to Moscow and to film. Perplexingly, studies of Eisenstein entirely omit his Kyivan period, but it is possible that this impressionable early period of his life left as indelible a mark on his later creativity as it did for other artists. Macdonald Although working on Vendetta, Kurbas had not abandoned the theatre. Indeed, film continued to serve as an additional ‘studio’: a place of experimentation which would yield results for the theatre.63 While in Odesa, Kurbas divided his time between filming in the morning and working with the directorial lab of the Berezil in the afternoon, helping them prepare for the next, 1924–5, season, returning again in the evening to the film studio and staying well into the night in preparation for the next day’s early shoot when the lighting conditions were best. Interestingly, the bilingual (Russian-Ukrainian) Odesa journal Siluety (October 1924) dedicated a number of articles as well as a special issue to the Berezil company without referring to Kurbas’s daytime work on film64 – suggesting that theatre work was considered

17.20 The journal Siluety announces the Berezil in Odesa

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17.21 Scene from Les Kurbas’s film MacDonald

of paramount artistic importance. Kurbas’s desire to maintain this link, even at the cost of a punishing schedule, reveals how intimately tied to the theatre he continued to be. If film provided him with opportunities to study tempo, rhythm, and time/space, it also allowed him to eat. Nor was he alone in this; other Berezil company members such as Favst Lopatynsky, Borys Tiahno, and Pavlo Dolyna also tried their hands at directing film, while the actors who worked in both media included (in addition to Hirniak and Shahaida), Amvrosy Buchma, Vasylko, Hanna Babiivna, and Natalia Pylypenko.65 Kurbas’s next film, Macdonald (1924; also known as Pryhody Makdonalda – Macdonald’s Adventures – and as Istoriia odniiei uhody – The History of One Agreement),66 continued to use circus and music-hall techniques. In a scenario apparently created by Kurbas himself, the film was, on the surface, a satire about the English political scene: the first labour prime minister, Macdonald, and George V. It was a more ambitious venture, with a cast of 200, unlike Vendetta, which had only five characters.67 The cameraman on this production was F. Feldman (first name unknown), and the designer Vadym Meller, who created an accurate model of London required for some of the scenes. The actors were delighted by this and by the fact that their efforts to resemble their real counterparts worked: an English journalist visited the set shortly after filming began and, seeing Buchma in make-up and costume, exclaimed with surprise, ‘Oh! Macdonald! Where did he come from?’68

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Perehuda and others have referred to Macdonald as a ‘political pamphlet’ that echoed the mood of recent events in England: labour unrest, strikes, and a concomitantly unsympathetic response from the ruling classes;69 in fact, it was a veiled critique and caricature of early, corrupt Soviet society.70 Once again, Kurbas was inviting the audience to collapse space and time, Soviet and English reality. For this film, Kurbas employed elements associated with, but parodying, the popular detektyv: chase scenes, destruction, and general mayhem that would best emphasize the main idea of Macdonald as a puppet of the English bourgeoisie and only a pretended friend of labour. Amvrosy Buchma played Macdonald and Vasyl Vasylko, the king, who was concerned, above all else, with his little white dog. In one frequently remarked-upon scene, the king sits with his dog on a throne propped up by pompous, self-important industrialists. All goes well until the industrialists begin to argue among themselves, the throne begins to tremble, and then collapses; down come crown, king, dog, and captains of industry – all scattered in different directions. O. Shymon makes the intriguing claim that Macdonald was planned as a film analogue of a periodical magazine, thus drawing upon a variety of elements to serve its purposes, including caricature and chronicle-documentary.71 Such use of juxtaposed generic ‘fragments’ or discrete units once again points to the possibility of a ‘montage’ structure at work. Indeed, the principle of the montage may be found in liberally used expressive movement, exaggeration and, more generally, in aspects of the grotesque. As Macdonald, Buchma ‘flew’ in airplanes, attached himself to their wheels, jumped from three-storey buildings and high hedges, clambered up steep roofs and ran across them. His fellow actors nicknamed him Harry Peel,72 a German actor renowned for his action movies and, especially, explosion scenes. Buchma performed his own stunts and in his nimble acrobatic movements, inventiveness, and relationship to mechanical objects recalls other comic films stars of the silent era, especially Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd. A ‘rubber’ man, Buchma continued to build on the successful work he had done for Kurbas’s Macbeth, in which he played the Fool (Porter). In that production, his acrobatic leaps and clownish tricks caused actress Natalia Pylypenko to remark that any circus performer would have been envious of his techniques. In her memoirs, she compared his antics to those of a rubber ball that flew across the stage, seemingly weightless and unpredictable in its movements.73 Working on Macdonald, Kurbas continued to busy himself with experimentation of all kind: speeding up shots, slowing them down, splicing scenes, crosscutting, foreshortening, filming vertically and horizontally. He attempted to endow each scene with maximum meaning. All these efforts, insists Perehuda, were aimed not at clever invention, but at getting his ideas across to the spectators more quickly, more effectively, and more directly.74 Swept up by the new technology, Kurbas expressed plans to travel to Germany to better familiarize himself with the industry. Upon officially presenting Macdonald to the management of the VUFKU, Kurbas was told that it was the best film that had been made in that studio.75 Not all audiences agreed. It received a stormy reception in Kharkiv, where it was condemned as ‘too left-wing’ and ‘Futurist.’76

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Arsenaltsi Kurbas continued to test and expand the possibilities of the medium in his third film, Arsenaltsi (Workers in the ‘Arsenal’; also known as Chervonyi Arsenal – Red Arsenal; scenario by Georgy Tasin; completed in December 1925).77 It was Kurbas’s last film and his most complex, both conceptually and technically. An ‘adventure fable’ about the Bolshevik uprising in Kyiv in January 1918 and the defence of the arms factory, it centred on the relationship between a beautiful widow (Kurbas’s wife, Valentyna Chystiakova) and a young lathe-operator/clandestine Bolshevik (Buchma), whose task was to mediate between the workers of the factory and the Red Army. The action took place against an epic-like backdrop of mass scenes, battles, attacks, and counter-attacks, and included cannon fire, explosions, and other pyrotechnics. Filmed on the streets of Kyiv, Arsenaltsi was the first film in Ukraine to employ the technique of the panorama in a new way. Hitherto, it had served the sole function of indicating location. Kurbas wished to endow it with more meaning and emotional value. For example, he allowed the camera to pan the field of battle after Denikin’s cavalry attack. The devastation was made more dynamic and poignant through this use of panorama, which immediately infused the scene with emotion. Kurbas also established clear rhythms in the film by, for example, working on the principle of alternation: first showing the confident preparation for the attack by Denikin’s troops, then cutting to the workers’ serene preparations for the defence of the factory. Such juxtapositions were also a hallmark of many of his earlier stage productions, especially Jimmie Higgins and the 1924 Macbeth. He was now returning film techniques by way of his stage experience to the new technology of film. Kurbas’s greatest innovation, however, was to divide the screen vertically into two, the first time this was done in the USSR. It was an especially effective way to show the simultaneity of time, and an ideal method by which to elicit tension.78 (In this, the split-screen technique mirrored the effect he had achieved in his stage production of Jimmie Higgins, when he used live actors and film clips.) Here, rather than going back and forth between live and screen actors, he had the camera move between two different groups, juxtaposed, side by side on the screen. Thus, in one scene, the factory workers rush forward towards the camera on one side of the screen, while, on the other, the Whites, on horseback, begin their terrible charge against them. The audience’s gestalt made the clash imaginable, inevitable, and awful. Perehuda viewed this technique for the first time in his life and recorded in his memoirs that, even many years later, he was still moved by its vivid recollection. There was, he noted a ‘perfect connection between the screen and the audience.’79 Although his output was not large, Kurbas’s influence on the Ukrainian film industry was not negligible. Exacting critics like I. Turkeltaub and Hridasov (first names unknown) made note of his innovations.80 Kurbas was in demand as a film instructor; in March 1925, for example, he was invited to lecture at the Odesa technical film school, alongside more experienced directors such as Chardynin and Aksel Lundin. The great filmmaker Alexander Dovzhenko, whose films of the late 1920s– 1930s are of international repute, would later acknowledge his debt to Kurbas. Dovzhenko used many of Kurbas’s well-trained, expressive actors for his great silent

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17.22 Les Kurbas and designer Vadym Meller in Odesa

17.23 Alexander Dovzhenko

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17.24 Scene from Les Kurbas’s production of October Revue

trilogy (Zemlia, Zvenyhora, Arsenal; the last of these, perhaps in tribute, took up the same topic as Kurbas’s Arsenaltsi). Dovzhenko used the Berezil still photographer Danylo Demutsky as his cameraman, and employed Kurbas’s designers, too. Vadym Meller worked both on Kurbas’s Arsenaltsi and on Dovzhenko’s Arsenal. As Raymond Uzwyshyn has explained, ‘Because Kurbas, Kulish and Berezil were subsequently liquidated and banned, connections between Dovzhenko and this grouping became muted. Pronouncing connections between Berezil and Dovzhenko was less than desirable in Soviet publication and lost on western film historians who would follow the lead of Soviet Moscow Art Theatre prescription.’81 Kurbas’s film career ended here, although scholars have argued that he brought back filmic techniques with him to the stage and that he made a few short films later on (the latter claim has not been substantiated).82 Shymon, for example, asserts that Kurbas and Meller used a ‘montage of attractions’ in their theatrical production celebrating the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution. This show, Zhovtnevyi ohliad: Urochyste ihryshche na dva rozdily i 26 iav (October Revue: A Festive Play in Two Parts and 26 Scenes), influenced by the French revue, used a text composed of fragments from Ukrainian, Russian, European, and other playwrights, poets, and writers, and employed dance numbers, gymnastic exercises, as well as a choir in order to contextualize the events, significance, and consequences of the October Revolution.83 In its use of a variety of generic fragments, it also seems to have once again harkened back to the idea of montage. In any case, Arsenaltsi was Kurbas’s last complete film. His full-time return to the theatre may have been hastened by a number of factors, including his frustration at not being able to choose his scenarios. Surprisingly, the studio had not given him the task of filming his own Jimmie Higgins, which went to another director, Georgy Tasin

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17.25 Amvrosy Buchma in the 1928 film of Jimmie Higgins

17.26 Georgy Tasin

17.27 VUFKU logo

(1928).84 The difficulties of working within the studio system were evident to other directors, too. As Cavendish has observed about the early (not particularly memorable) work of Dovzhenko, the studio system was constraining since it aimed at exploiting genres that were popularized by foreign (especially Hollywood) competition.85 Other issues may have been involved, as well. Internal politics, as much as jostling over artistic control, may have played a part; the brief period of the Ukrainianization of the arts was nearing its end. Vasylko claimed that Kurbas began to describe the VUFKU as a ‘cesspool of intrigue.’86 J. Hoberman has pointed out that anti-nationalist purges in the VUFUK occurred in 1927–8; perhaps Kurbas had felt some of their first rumblings.87 It is curious, however, that just as Kurbas had decided to leave Odesa for Kyiv, so the VUFKU studios also decamped to that city. Taking over Mykola Tereschenko’s old sugar factory and the surrounding extensive grounds, they began building the largest film studio in all of Europe88 – a reflection of their faith in the new industry and their (illusory) hopes for the future.

The Scottish Play and the New Technology of Film 469 NOTES 1 Relations of the Cinematograph to Intellectual Life. Memorandum submitted to the International Committee for Intellectual Co-operation, 28 July 1924. Julien Luchaire (1876–1950?), Inspector-General of Public Education, France. Quoted in William Marston Seabury, Motion Picture Problems: The Cinema and the League of Nations (New York: Arno Press, 1978 [New York: Avondale, 1929]) 239. 2 Liubomir Hosejko, Histoire du cinéma ukrainien, 1896–1995: Istoriia ukrains’koho kinematohrafa, 1896–1995 (Kyiv: Kino-kolo, 2005) 12. Hosejko notes that in 1912 the tsarist regime closed down three cinemas because they showed a film of the funeral of the Ukrainian composer Mykola Lysenko. Showing the funeral was considered an aggressive nationalistic move. 3 For example, General Pavlo Skoropads’kyi (proclaimed Hetman of Ukraine on 29 April 1918) decreed the Ukrainianization of film in August 1918. With German technical help, a number of short films were made, including Declaration of Ukraine’s Independence (Proholoshennia nezalezhnosty Ukrainy), The Residence of the Hetman (Rezidentsiia hetmana), and Minister of the Army M. Hrushevsky (Ministr viis’k M. Hrushevs’kyi). Hosejko 16. 4 Ibid. 21. 5 Herbert Marshall, Masters of the Soviet Cinema: Crippled Creative Biographies (London, Boston, Melbourne, and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983) 102. Jay Leyda, Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film (1973; 3rd ed., London: George Allen and Unwin, 1983) 217, notes that the Ukrainian monthly magazine Kino was a bold endeavour and ‘in any country at that time would certainly have been labeled avant-garde, aesthetically and politically. Not only were foreign films reported, but film-experiments, too, in Germany and France; and the experimenters themselves were sometimes its foreign correspondents.’ 6 Hosejko 21. The same point is made by O. Shymon, Storinky z istorii kino na Ukraini (Kyiv: Mystetstvo, 1964) 142. 7 Hosejko 25. 8 Shymon (143) mentions Leipzig, Milan, Paris, Königsburg, Köln, Vienna, Prague, Marsailles, and Madrid. 9 Liudmyla Pukha, Kinematohraf i Les’ Kurbas (Cherkasy: Siach, 1999) speculates that Kurbas’s films may still be extant, since they provided, in part, ‘evidence’ of his nationalistic and formalist tendencies (80). This may be optimistic. Films needed to be periodically rolled and re-rolled in order to maintain their flexibility, otherwise they cracked. An interested party, such as a projectionist, a film aficionado, or (most probably) a government agent, would have had to have a reason to preserve Kurbas’s films in order that they survive. So far, there has been no indication that they still exist. 10 Borys Berest, Istoriia ukrains’koho kina, vol. 7 (New York: Naukove Tovarystvo Shevchenka, Ukrainian Studies, 1962) 46, claims that Kurbas had already made a short film in 1922 based on a Chekhov story, ‘The Swedish Match.’ The film, made in Russian and using Russian actors, was called Shveds’kyi sirnyk (Swedish Match) or Dvorians’ke boloto (Courtly Mud); it was a satirical-grotesque view of the Russian upper classes. Berest draws on Leonid Poltava, ‘Les’ Kurbas i ukrains’ka kinematohrafiia,’ Moloda Ukraina 47–8 (1958), who first made this claim. Shymon repeats this claim (98) and, in addition,

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Irena R. Makaryk improbably attributes a film called Son Tovstopuzenka (Fatbelly’s Dream) to Kurbas. The first of these claims is dismissed by Hosejko, who has discovered that the director and actor Mykola Saltykov was actually responsible for Swedish Match (26). Berest’s work, while valuable, should be used advisedly; he makes various errors, including those of attribution (for instance, he attributes the direction of Vendetta to H. Stabovyi). Oleksander Perehuda was an actor and stage and film director, who worked with Kurbas from 1922 to 1925 and was his assistant on all three of his films. His memoirs were published as O. Perehuda, ‘Les’ Kurbas i kinematohrafiia,’ in Vasyl’ Vasyl’ko, ed., Les’ Kurbas: Spohady suchasnykiv (Kyiv: Mystetstvo, 1969) 178–86. A detailed study of Kurbas and his use of film language may be found in Virlana Tkacz, ‘Les Kurbas’s Use of Film Language in His Stage Productions of Jimmie Higgins and Macbeth,’ Canadian Slavonic Papers 36:1 (March 1990) 59–76. Perehuda 178. Sergei Eisenstein first used film combined with live action in 1923, at the same time that Kurbas created his Jimmie Higgins. Eisenstein’s reworking of Ostrovsky’s play Enough Simplicity in Every Wise Man included a short, four-minute filmed version of the play ‘Glumov’s Diary,’ and ended with the actor bursting through the screen holding a reel of film. A similar effect had already been achieved by as early as 1905 by Meliès and was repeated by the wildly popular film star Max Linder in 1913 at the Zon Theatre in Petersburg. The film showed Linder’s manic journey to the theatre in a racing car, then the screen gave way to Linder’s descent on a rope. See Yuri Tsivian, ‘Early Russian Cinema: Some Observations,’ in Richard Taylor and Ian Christie, eds Inside the Film Factory: New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema (London, New York: Routledge, 1991) 30. For more on Max Linder, see Oleh Sydor-Hybelynda’s essay in this volume. The enormous difference in the treatment of space/time and in emotional tonality between Eisenstein’s use of film and Kurbas’s may be gauged by Tkacz’s essay ‘The Invisible Made Visible’ in this volume. For a detailed reconstruction of this extraordinary production, see chapter 2 of Irena R. Makaryk, Shakespeare in the Undiscovered Bourn: Les Kurbas Ukrainian Modernism, and Early Soviet Cultural Politics (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2004). Tkacz, ‘Les Kurbas’s Use of Film Language.’ On Nijinska, see Nancy van Norman Baer, Bronislava Nijinska: A Dancer’s Legacy (San Francisco: Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, 1986) 41; on time and photography, William R. Everdell, The First Moderns: Profiles in the Origins of Twentieth-Century Thought (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1997), esp. chap. 5, 64–5, and chap. 15. Kurbas and Nijinska’s experiments with rhythm also echo some of the ideas of Rudolf Steiner: ‘At first, people are inclined to regard the tone eurythmy as dance, but eurythmy is not dance. It is really singing-in-movement, in which the singing is not done by tone but by movement ... In eurythmy, human movement in the physical world is pushed back into the spiritual, etheric world. The movement is ensouled.’ Rudolf Steiner, An Introduction to Eurythmy. Talks Given before Sixteen Eurythmy Performances (Spring Valley, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1984) 63, 71. Tkacz has pointed out the fact that Kurbas was fascinated by the films of D.W. Griffith and by his Intolerance (1916) in particular. (See Tkacz, ‘Les Kurbas’s Use of Film Language.’) This film weaves together four narratives from different periods of history, beginning with Babylonian times and ending in the present. All four plots are linked by the same theme: intolerance. One may see in Kurbas’s Macbeth this same

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effort to link thematically – though more obliquely – a number of historical moments. The Odesa journalist St Radzyns’kyi (first name unknown) may have been one of the first to compare Kurbas to Griffith, in his article ‘Zustriv liudynu,’ written in the 1920s (cited in Perehuda 178). This disjunction was to become typical of much Soviet music; one thinks, for example, of the work of Shostakovich, which often has the ability to be joyful, jeering, and tragically melancholy at the same time. As William Everdell usefully comments, ‘Irony was the literary equivalent of multiple exposure in photography, or cubist and futurist perspective in painting, not to mention Cézanne’s ... multiplication of point of view.’ Everdell 345. I. Kornienko, Kino i roky: Vid nimoho do panoramnoho (Kyiv: Mystetstvo, 1964) 25, notes that montage – the composition of images, foreshortening, using different focal points of interest, special effects, a rhythmic creation of images – was a popular technique used by many types of artists. The classic definition of montage is offered by Sergei Eisenstein, ‘Montazh attraktsionov,’ Lef 3 (June–July1923) 70–1, 74–5; trans. Richard Taylor as ‘The Montage of Attractions’ (1923) in Richard Taylor and Ian Christie, eds, The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1988) 87: ‘An attraction (in our diagnosis of theatre) is any aggressive moment in theatre, i.e. any element of it that subjects the audience to emotional or psychological influence, verified by experience and mathematically calculated to produce specific emotional shocks in the spectator in their proper order within the whole. These shocks provide the only opportunity of perceiving the ideological aspect of what is being shown, the final ideological conclusion’ (italics in original). David Bordwell, ‘The Idea of Montage in Soviet Art and Film,’ Cinema Journal 11:2 (2003) 10. Bordwell finds the principles of montage at work, for example, in Cubism, in the graphic designs of the Dadaists, and the music of the Italian Futurists. Ibid. 13. Ibid. 11. Bordwell concludes his suggestive essay by remarking, ‘And (most speculative but most intriguing of all) we need inquiries which place the history of film-making and film theory in the history of modern art as a whole; the problem is to trace both formal and stylistic similarities and precise historical relationships. In short ... if we are to write adequate film history, we need to study more than just film’ (17). Les’ Kurbas, Rezhysers’kyi shchodennyk, Bila Tserkva, 26 June 1920, excerpts reprinted in M.H. Labins’kyi, ed., Berezil’: Les’ Kurbas iz tvorchoi spadshchyny (Kyiv: Dnipro, 1988) 32. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (London: George Unwin Ltd, 1911; rpt. 1962) 268. Ibid. 274–5, 279. Vasyl’ Vasyl’ko, Shchodennyk, 15 December 1923, State Museum of Music, Theatre and Film Arts (Kyiv). Aleksandr Deich’s turn of phrase. See his ‘Chelovek, kotoryi byl teatrom,’ Les’ Kurbas. Stat’i i vospominaniia o L. Kurbase. Literaturnoe nasledie (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1987) 186. According to Vasyl’ Vasyl’ko, another reason that Kurbas left Kyiv was some kind of argument with two members of the Berezil’: Hnat Ihnatovych and Favst Lopatyns’kyi. Vasyl’ko, Shchodennyk, 7 August 1924.

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27 Of course, the lines between film and stage were quite porous. D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance begins with a screen that announces the film as ‘this play.’ It was also not uncommon for stage directors to turn to film. 28 The other top two choices were revolutionary theatre and – perhaps oddly – opera. For a detailed analysis of this subject see Irena R. Makaryk, ‘The Perfect Production: Les Kurbas’s Analysis of the Early Soviet Audience,’ Gramma: Journal of Theory and Criticism 15, special issue: Shakespeare Worldwide and the Idea of the Audience, ed. Tina Krontiris and Jyotsna Singh (2007) 89–109. 29 Les’ Kurbas, ‘Zadyvuvaty svit (Lysty L. Kurbasa do Hnata Khotkevycha),’ intro. and ed. Mykola Shudrii and Mykola Labins’kyi, Sotsial’na kul’tura 2 (1987) 28–31. 30 Vasyl’ Vasyl’ko, Shchodennyk, 16 July 1924. 31 Ibid., 15 August 1924. 32 Following the Twelfth Party Congress in April 1923, a Council of Nationalities was created that proposed the use of ‘indigenous languages by state agencies serving the national minorities.’ Thus, the first Azerbaijani film was made in 1924; Ukrainian, Georgian, Belorussian, Uzbek, and Chuvash films followed. See J. Hoberman, Bridge of Light: Yiddish Film between Two Worlds (New York: Museum of Modern Art and Schocken Books, 1991) 123. 33 Vasyl’ko, Shchodennyk, 23 March 1924. 34 Yuri Tsivian, Early Cinema in Russia and Its Cultural Reception, ed. Richard Taylor, trans. Alan Budget, foreword by Tom Gunning (Chicago, London: U of Chicago P, 1991) 109. Linda Dalrymple Henderson observes that artists in nearly every major modern movement in the early twentieth century were taken with the idea of the fourth dimension, which ‘was primarily a symbol of liberation’ and lent itself to the idea of a ‘higher dimension’ – thus encouraging artists to reject one-point perspective for a higher, four-dimensional reality, often reflected in an ‘objectless’ or abstract art. Henderson, ‘The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art: Conclusion,’ Leonardo 17:3 (1984) 205. A similar point about theosophy as a ‘new cult of the intelligentsia’ is made by Karl E. Meyer and Shareen Blair Brysac, Tournament of Shadows: The Great Game and the Race for Empire in Central Asia (Washington: Counterpoint, 1999) 449, who also add Boris Pasternak, Nikolai Berdyaev, Maxim Gorky, and Andrei Bely to the diverse list. 35 ‘Honta Mar’ianenka i Kurbasa,’ typescript, Ivan Mar’ianenko Archive, inv. 10043, State Museum of Theatre, Music, and Film Arts (Kyiv) 2. Kavalaridze’s film By Water and Smoke (Koliivshchyna, 1933) was made for Ukrainfilm and released in the USA as Mass Struggle. See J. Hoberman, ‘“A face to the shtetl”: Soviet Yiddish Cinema, 1924–36,’ in Richard Taylor and Ian Christie, eds, Inside the Film Factory: New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema (London, New York: Routledge, 1991) 146. 36 Vasyl’ Vasyl’ko, Shchodennyk, vol. 6: 23, inv. 10358/2c, State Museum of Theatre, Music, and Film Arts (Kyiv). 37 Perehuda makes the same point (178–9). Zavelev, Kurbas’s first camera operator, was full of admiration for the Ukrainian director and often exclaimed, ‘Just like Bauer!’ (a reference to the Russian film director Evgenii Bauer; see Sydor-Hybelynda’s essay). Kurbas retorted, ‘No, not at all like Bauer! But, like Kurbas!’ 38 Iosyp Hirniak, Spomyny, ed. Bohdan Boichuk (New York: Suchasnist, 1982), esp. 203–10. Berest provides the following details about the film: 3 reels (924 m); VUFKU

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(Odesa), 1924; scenario, M. Borysov and H. Stabovyi; operator, V. Zavelev; art director, V. Miuller [Meller]; director, H. Stabovyi; starring H. Babiivna, N. Pylypenko, S. Shahaida, and Io. Hirniak. Hoberman, Bridge of Light 13. Granovsky (born Abraham Azarkh) came to Ukraine to make a number of films, including Jidische Glickn (1925; known in the USA as Jewish Luck; based on the novel Menachem Mendel by Sholom Aleichem). Mikhoels (born Solomon Vovsi) starred in the main role of Menachem Mendel. (The film is treated in detail in Hoberman, Bridge of Light.) Aspects of Granovsky’s vision for a ‘universalist’ Yiddish theatre as a ‘temple of shining’ and of ‘joyous creation’ (Hoberman 51) mirror Kurbas’s aspirations for the Ukrainian theatre. Also like Kurbas, Granovsky was a leading experimental modernist and used avant-garde principles to rework classics. Like the Ukrainian director, Granovsky’s GOSET parodied religion and the old (in this case, Yiddish) theatre. (See Hoberman, Bridge of Light 90.) The similarities between the Yiddish and Ukrainian experimental theatres are to be expected, since over 60 per cent of the entire Soviet Jewish population lived in Ukraine and the two groups had been equally repressed under the tsarist regime. As J. Hoberman notes: ‘During the brief and bloody interlude of Ukrainian independence, Jews had enjoyed a measure of national autonomy and there was even a ministry of Jewish affairs. Although the first few years of Soviet rule were characterized by a negative attitude towards Yiddish (and Ukrainian) cultural activities, restraints relaxed after the Twelfth Party Congress in April 1923.’ See J. Hoberman, ‘A Face to the Shtetl: Soviet Yiddish Cinema, 1924–36,’ in Taylor and Christie, eds, Inside the Film Factory 129. The relationship between Kurbas and the Yiddish theatre, including his relationship with Mikhoels, is dealt with by Vasyl’ko in his diary. He frequently records a number of instances of his concern that Kurbas might be lured away from Kyiv to Moscow by Mikhoels. See, for example, Shchodennyk, entries for 29 April 1924 and 27 May 1924. Vasyl’ko notes that Kurbas travelled to Moscow to work out an agreement with the Jewish theatre Habima. Parenthetically, he also records that Kurbas decided to work on film (27 May 1924). In April 1925 the GOSET performed at the Berezil theatre, just before they travelled to Odesa to begin filming. See Vasyl’ko’s entries in his Shchodennyk for 15 April 1925 and 24 April 1925. These many meetings between the two great theatre artists suggest their close relationship, which culminated in Mikhoels’s later offer to direct him in King Lear. Hirniak 204. Perehuda 179. Vance Kepley, ‘Intolerance and the Soviets: A Historical Investigation, ’ in Taylor and Christie, eds, Inside the Film Factory 52. Ukraziia, which depicted the revolutionary struggle of the Red Army with the Whites in southern Ukraine, represented Ukraine at the Paris Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels in 1925, where it won a medal (the Exposition is discussed in Irena Makaryk’s essay following). While the film’s achievements were praised, Soviet film scholar I. Kornienko, writing in the 1960s, observed that it could hardly be regarded as innovative, since films such as Macdonald had preceded it. Macdonald, Kornienko argued, revealed the director’s proficiency and skill in filmmaking, his artistic

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Irena R. Makaryk professionalism, and innovation. Not yet fully ‘rehabilitated’ in 1964, Kurbas’s name as the director of this film had to be suppressed by Kornienko. See Kornienko, Kino i roky 90. Leonid Poltava, writing in North America, went further: in his view, by omitting Les’ Kurbas from history the Academy of Sciences of the USSR committed one of the most egregious and ‘unforgivable examples of falsification of the history of Ukrainian film.’ Leonid Poltava, ‘Les’ Kurbas i ukrains’ka kinematohrafiia,’ Moloda Ukraina 47–8 (1958). Cited in Berest 46. Perehuda 179. Ibid. 180–1. It is important to note that Kurbas disliked actors ‘emoting.’ He insisted upon an intellectual actor. In this respect, it is interesting that Grigorii Kozintsev, born in Kyiv and living there while Kurbas was creating his experiments in the theatre, also spoke derisively of ‘feeling’ when he began to teach ‘cine-gesture’ at FEKS (Factory of the Eccentric Actor) in Moscow. Like Kurbas, he insisted on a kind of ‘mathematical precision’ of gesture. Sergei Gerassimov believes that Kozintsev’s technique was based on American comic and detective films, but it certainly could also have been influenced by Kurbas’s work. See Sergei Gerassimov [sic], ‘Out of the Factory of the Eccentric Actor,’ in Luda and Jean Schnitzer and Marcel Martin, eds, Cinema in Revolution: The Heroic Age of the Soviet Film, trans., with additional material, David Robinson (London: Secker and Warburg; New York: Da Capo Press, 1973) 114. Phil Cavendish, ‘Zemlia/Earth,’ in Birgit Beumers, ed., The Cinema of Russia and the Former Soviet Union (London, New York: Wallflower Press, 2007), notes that Dovzhenko’s actors since his film Zvenyhora (1927) came from the experimental Berezil – not a surprising choice since the theatre collective emphasized mime and expressive movement, the defining features of silent film. Cavendish also notes that Danylo Demuts’kyi, who worked as a still photographer for the Berezil, ‘had demonstrated a fashionable interest in the “fixing” of moving human figures on celluloid.’ Later, he became Dovzhenko’s cameraman. Cavendish 63. For his film Zemlia (Earth, 1929), Dovzhenko also turned to the Berezil. In the famous dance scene of that film, the main character, Vasyl’ (played by Semen Svashenko), was urged to have in mind a song composed by Reingol’d Glier (Reinhold Glière) for the Berezil’ production of Haidamaky. Ibid. 64. Oleh Babyshkin, Amvrosii Buchma v kino (Kyiv: Mystetstvo, 1966) 16. Shymon 98. At the beginning of the twentieth century, anti-clericalism was widespread in Halychyna (Galicia), Western Ukraine, where Kurbas was born and grew up. Kurbas’s own anti-clerical views were shaped by the fact that his father had been disinherited by his grandfather (a Uniate Catholic priest) for choosing acting as his profession. This scene is echoed, doubtless by coincidence, in the Marx brothers’ opening sequence of Monkey Business (1931), when the barrels of an ocean liner’s cargo mysteriously begin to move, roll towards the camera, and then out pop, or ‘hatch,’ the stowaway brothers. Cited in Pukha, 79–80. Denise J. Youngblood, Movies for the Masses: Popular Cinema and Soviet Society in the 1920s (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1992) 72–3. David Gillespie, Russian Cinema (Harlow, UK: Pearson Education Ltd, 2003) 36. Gillespie 36.

The Scottish Play and the New Technology of Film 475 55 Kornienko 231. 56 Gillespie 37. 57 Berest, however, claims that the ideological effect of the film was the opposite and, as a result, the film was attacked for a series of political ‘sins,’ including the fact that it ‘did not live up to the Party’s demands’ (46). It was removed from screens and prohibited. Berest also claims that the official censor of the VUFKU constantly demanded a ‘sharpening’ of the political agenda of the film during its production. I have been unable to find independent confirmation of any of these claims. 58 Les’ Kurbas, ‘Teatr aktsentovoho vplyvu,’ in Berezil’. Iz tvorchoi spadshchyny, ed. M. Labinsk’kyi (Kyiv: Dnipro, 1988) 64. 59 Perehuda 186. 60 Grigori Mikhailovitch [sic] Kozintsev, ‘A Child of the Revolution,’ in L. and J. Schnitzer and Martin, eds, Cinema in Revolution 100. 61 Bordwell 10. 62 Mikhail Yamposky, ‘Kuleshov’s Experiments and the New Anthropology of the actor,’ in Richard Abel, ed., Silent Film (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1996) 50, notes that Kuleshov was first introduced to the Delsarte system through Ilyin and through Foregger, the creator of machine dances. While the task of establishing who was ‘first’ is unnecessary and, in any case, difficult to prove, it is important to insist upon the way in which various artists were simultaneously thinking and creating along similar lines, since they were also responding to similar influences. As early as 1961, John B. Kuiper had noted that the stage antecedents of Eisenstein’s theory included his familiarity with the Kabuki theatre and the concept of ‘monism of ensemble’; that is, ‘each element of a Kabuki performance seemed to have equal significance with every other element’ while, at the same time, contributing in a unique way to the whole (‘The Stage Antecedents of the Film Theory of S.M. Eisenstein, Educational Theatre Journal 13:4 [Dec. 1961] 259–63). Kurbas was also interested in Eastern forms of theatre, including Noh and Kabuki. Similar interests were shared by theatre artists such as Gordon Craig and W.B. Yeats, who also opposed a theatre of surface realism. It should be noted that the ‘monism of ensemble’ is also a feature of Cubism. 63 Perehuda 186. 64 M. Chap, ‘Maisternia “Berzil,”’ Siluety 37 (1924) 4. 65 At the same time, Kurbas was also working on his own scenario, titled ‘Hryts’ko Plakyda,’ never realized in film (see Vasyl’ko, Shchodennyk, 7 August 1924). Kurbas’s subsequent difficulty in getting permission to film his own scenarios may be one of the reasons for his decision to return to full-time stage work. Vasyl’ Vasyl’ko, Shchodennyk, 4 September 1924. Borys Berest provides the following details: Macdonald (Pryhody Makdonalda; Istoriia odnoi uhody), (1644m); VUFKU (Odesa), 1924; scenario and director, Kurbas; operator, D. Fel’dman; art, V. Meller; starring A. Buchma (Macdonald), V. Vasyl’ko (King), M. Liarov [no role assigned]. 66 Teatral’naia gazeta, 14 October 1924: 4; cited in Pukha, 78. Of course, these are still minuscule numbers in comparison with what someone such as Griffith could command. Intolerance advertised the fact that it employed 125,000 extras and 7500 horses. 67 Perehuda 182. A slightly different version of this moment is recorded by Oleh Babyshkin. The English journalist is described as an English lady on a motorcycle. Babyshkin 19. 68 Perehuda 182.

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69 Berest, 46, claims that spectators left the movie theatre with the certainty that it was not a foreign regime that was being critiqued but rather the local, Soviet regime. He also claims that the film was, soon after, taken off the screens for this reason. 70 Shymon 98. 71 Perehuda 182. Harry Piel (known internationally as Harry Peel, 1892–1963), best known for playing the role of Joe Deebs in detective-thrillers, was also a director and producer of the silent screen. 72 Natalia Pylypenko, Zhyttia v teatri (New York: [Nakladom avtorky], 1968) 15. 73 Perehuda 183. 74 See Vasyl’ Vasyl’ko, Shchodennyk, 3 October 1924. Despite agreeing with the fact that the film was a success, Vasyl’ko thought that the effort of making films was not worthwhile and continued to prefer stage work. 75 Thus, Kurbas reported to his actors. See Vasyl’ko, Shchodennyk, 7 October 1924. This reception of the film confirms Youngblood’s assertion that, throughout the 1920s, audiences markedly preferred ‘the basest’ of bourgeois genres (71–2). A similar point is made by Richard Stites, Russian Popular Culture: Entertainment and Society since 1900 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1992) 31–2. Iurii Boboshko makes the point that the Kharkiv response was led by the author of the scenario, who was annoyed at the political spin with which Kurbas endowed it. Iurii Boboshko, Rezhyser Les’ Kurbas (Kyiv: Mystetstvo, 1987) 109. 76 Berest provides the following details: Arsenal’tsi (Chervonyi Arsenal): 3 reels (792 m), VUFKU (Odesa), 1925; scenario, H. [Heorhii or Georgii] Tasin; director, Oleksander Perehuda; operator, D[imitrii] Fel’dman; art, V. Miuller [Meller]; producer, L. Kurbas; starring A. Buchma and V. Chystiakova. Babyshkin mentions that Buchma played the role of the old general in the film and that he also played a Cossack general in Ukraziia (21). 77 The split screen continues to be very effective for such juxtapositions, as may be seen in the enthusiastic reception of the 2006 FIFA World Cup soccer documentary Zidane, which played in, among other venues, the National Gallery of Canada. 78 Perehuda 186. Vasyl’ Vasyl’ko, however, saw the film for the first time on 28 April 1925 in Kyiv and thought that it was rather dull; his impressions seem to have been coloured by his general sense of unhappiness with Kurbas and the Berezil’ at that time. 79 I. Turkel’taub, in Teatral’naia gazeta (Kharkiv), 24 November 1924: 3, cited in Pukha, 30. Pukha also observes that ‘Comrade’ Hridasov, in his introduction to the April 1926 issue of the journal Radians’ke kino, notes that Kurbas’s films served as models for Dovzhenko (cited in Pukha, 80). Kurbas’s use of the split screen may also have been influenced by Griffith’s Intolerance. 80 Raymond John Uzwyshyn, ‘Between Ukrainian Cinema and Modernism: Alexander Dovzhenko’s Silent Trilogy,’ PhD thesis, Columbia University, 2000; online version: ‘Icons or Dreams: Alexander Dovzhenko’s Silent Trilogy,’ p. 90, at http://uwf.edu/ ruzwyshyn/dovzhenko/Conclusions.htm. 81 Perehuda relates that Kurbas revised Borys Tiahno’s acclaimed production of Sekretar profspilky (The Secretary of the Labour Union) by introducing the film technique of naplyv (dissolve), which significantly contributed to the dynamics of the mass scenes and endowed them with meaning. Having proved its effectiveness at the rehearsal stage, it was thereafter incorporated into the final production. In the absence of any

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more detailed descriptions of this particular feature of the production, one may only hazard a guess at what this was. Perhaps the ‘dissolve’ was achieved primarily through lighting effects, accompanied by a ‘freezing’ of the action. Perehuda 185. Shymon 104–5. Also known as G.M. Tassin and George Tassin/Tasin. Tasin’s version fell flat. See Khanan Shmain, ‘Rezhyser, pedhoh, uchenyi,’ in Vasyl’ko, ed., Les’ Kurbas 141. Cavendish, 58, notes that the scenarios of Dovzhenko’s first films, like those of Kurbas, were dictated to him and thus were Harold Lloyd–style comedies and international espionage thrillers. Thus, according to Vasyl’ Vasyl’ko. Shchodennyk, 15 August 1924. Hoberman also alludes to this, when he notes that the VUFKU studio underwent an ‘anti-nationalist’ purge a short time later (1927–8). Hoberman, Bridge of Light 128. Pukha 84. At that time, the Party was also able to have a greater control over the VUFKU in Kyiv than it could in Odesa.

We’ll not die in Paris (excerpt) I will die in Paris on Thursday night. Cesar Vallejo … we’ll not die in Paris I know now for sure but in a sweat and tear-stained provincial bed no one will serve us our cognac I know we won’t be saved by kisses under the Pont Mirabeau murky circles won’t fade too bitter we cried abused nature we loved too fiercely our lovers shamed too many poems we wrote disregarding poets they’ll not let us die in Paris and the alluring water under the Pont Mirabeau will be encircled with barricades Natalka Bilotserkivets

Translated from the Ukrainian by Dzvinia Orlowsky

18 On the World Stage: The Berezil in Paris and New York irena r. makaryk

Influence, influence on. Rubbish. Only pressure can be on, Influence is always into, like one river merging into another. Marina Tsvetaeva, On Art1

Kyiv to Paris Visible from as far away as the English Channel, a red flare topping the Eiffel Tower enticed visitors to come and experience one of the most important artistic events of the twentieth century. Between April and October of 1925, an astonishing number of people – over fifteen million – heeded the siren call to visit the Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes, whose shortened title provided the name for what we now call Art Deco.2 Tourists and journalists, artists, designers, architects, manufacturers, and retailers, as well as official delegations jostled together to get a glimpse of the new art of the new century. The Berezil Artistic Theatre Association, along with other major Soviet theatres, including the Moscow Art Theatre, Tairov’s Kamerny Theatre, and Meyerhold’s Theatre of the Revolution, participated in ‘Classe 25’ (Theatre Arts) of this mammoth show at which Vadym Meller garnered a gold medal for his model of the Berezil production of The Secretary of the Labour Union.3 The world was watching. In its special garb – 200,000 electric lamps connected by thirty-five miles of wire, its electricity supplied by a special electric plant funded by Citroën – the Eiffel Tower proclaimed the extraordinary nature of this large venture.4 Taking over seventy-two acres5 and occupying both temporary pavilions as well as some permanent structures, the exhibition formed, in effect, a little city within the heart of Paris, with exhibitions spilling out over both sides of the Seine. The centrality of the Exposition’s location – essentially, the core of Paris – was the best indicator of the Exposition’s importance for France. Explaining what the visitor should take away from the show, Yvanhoé Rambosson exalted the fair’s role as marking a new Renaissance of the applied arts, a revolution which celebrated ‘Logique, vérité, harmonie’ (Logic, Truth, Concord). Routine and repetition were to be thrown aside here. Modern art was to be fully lived and understood as everything that surrounds us.6

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18.1 Poster for Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels

With some astonishment, the press observed that the focus of the exhibition was entirely on the new: ‘No replica of the art of another generation will be admitted, not even the repetition of classical designs.’7 Nearly two dozen countries, most of which were European, took part. The most notable absence was France’s main rival, Germany, deliberately invited too late in 1924 to assemble an exhibit;8 the most conspicuous presence (excepting, of course, that of France), the USSR. The governments of Canada and the United States felt that they had nothing to contribute and consequently did not take part.9 In addition to their own pavilion, the Soviets also occupied six rooms in the building facing them, the Grand Palais, the heart of the fair and the location of all formal ceremonies and receptions. The thousands of visitors who made their way

18.2 Map of the Exposition

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18.3 North view of Exposition. Lalique fountain and Esplanade des Invalides (contemporary postcard)

through its halls every day were thus exposed to the new Soviet art, which presented the USSR as a modern, dynamic, industrial state, not a backward agricultural country. Over twenty drawings, photos from major Berezil productions, as well as photo-portraits of some of its directors and designers, formed part of the display, thus fulfilling Les Kurbas’s long-held desire to ‘astonish the world.’10 Ephemeral yet lasting, the Paris show would leave these massive numbers of visitors with arresting images of innovative theatrical displays and would hasten the worldwide dissemination and acceptance of the modernist style. At the same time, these visitors would come away with the idea that the Berezil was one of the many dynamic Russian companies revolutionizing the theatre.11 The huge role which the fledgling Soviet Union played in this exposition implicitly conveyed a sense of its political legitimacy and speeded up the process of normalization of relations by which the new Bolshevik regime was accepted into the world’s fold.12 (France had recognized the USSR on 28 October 1924.) Its participation and leading role in the Exposition also significantly contributed to establishing the consequently widespread and long-lived myth of a necessary correlation between the Revolution and avant-garde art. Ironically, at the very moment that the world was toasting Soviet avant-garde design in Paris, in Russia Anatoly Lunacharsky called for a return to the classics, and The People’s Commissariat of Education (Narkompros) prepared to ‘regulate’ the complete ‘anarchy’ of Soviet theatres. The following year, in 1926, the Central Committee of the Communist Party ‘implicitly condemned

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18.4 Soviet pavilion designed by Konstantin Melnikov

experimental productions, claiming that problems of revolutionizing both form and content led to problems of comprehension.’13 But no one in the West seemed to be aware of these developments. Through its central presence in the exhibition, the USSR appeared to be very much connected to trends in Western Europe; it was not only completely in tune with, but was also one of the great leaders of, the growing worldwide infatuation with modernism and the avant-garde. The Paris exhibition was organized with the intention of restoring France to the centre of spheres of influence in the artistic and fashion world, and drawing attention to the mutually enhancing relationship of art and industry in a time of peace and social reconstruction. More importantly, however, the exhibition became the key event which drew world attention to, and disseminated, the syntax of the international modernist style. The exhibition embraced all aspects of daily life and needs, from letter boxes and garden urns to architecture, fashion, jewellery, film, and theatre design. The wide-reaching influence of the Paris exhibition is hard to overestimate. The sheer number of visitors and the extensive press coverage which it received around the world brought attention to the new aesthetic, to say nothing of the posters, numerous guides, catalogues, and other publications describing it. Not only France, but other nationalities were spurred on to review the state of their art, especially those who were excluded from the show.14 Americans, for example, were grudgingly and belatedly forced to acknowledge the importance of the event and analyse the reasons for their absence. Like his British counterparts in the Department

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18.5 Paris, view of Right Bank pavilions (contemporary postcard)

of Overseas Trade, American Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover was sufficiently perturbed by the implications of the Exposition that he appointed a special committee to visit and report on the show and, in particular, to study the significance of machine-made art,15 hitherto considered an oxymoron. The exhibition had a trickle-down effect on all aspects of style around the world. Fashion-conscious American women were encouraged to be truly chic by wearing modernist colours and shades inspired by the exhibition, as featured in the Textile Color Card Association of the United States, Inc.16 Modernist furniture and kitchen designs were taken up shortly after the Exposition.17 Although the Architectural League of New York hotly debated the pluses and minuses of the new architecture, its members nonetheless agreed that, whatever the outcome, the Exposition would have a lasting effect on architectural design. Favouring the modernist preference for geometric shapes on display in Paris, a number of them strongly urged Americans to move away from backwardness and embrace the future. Melancholically, they acknowledged that America ‘could not enter the French exposition because she failed to create a single original design’18 Raymond Hood approvingly noted that the one thing about the new architecture exemplified at the Paris Exposition was ‘the game of the parasite was discouraged’; everything was original and new.19 This was an overstatement. In fact, there was much that was conservative about the Exposition, including many displays of traditional craftsmanship rather than modern industry. In the domain of architecture, only two buildings fulfilled the modernist criteria: Le Corbusier’s Pavillon de l’Esprit Nouveau (Pavilion of the New

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18.6 A guidebook to the Exposition. Russian entry with Melnikov’s pavilion is illustrated

Spirit; famously too modern for the French, who, up until the last minute, were reluctant to have it displayed)20 and Konstantin Melnikov’s Soviet pavilion, which reflected ‘an image of the style of the future’ (‘une image du style de l’avenir’).21 By common consent, however, the most impressive and radical sections of the whole fair22 were the Soviet stage designs. These would inspire many Europeans and would soon have a direct influence on the American stage and drama. While Sir H. Llewellyn Smith, in his ‘Introductory Survey’ to the British Reports on the Present Position and Tendencies of the Industrial Arts as Indicated at the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts, Paris, 1925 seemed relieved that the ‘more extreme forms’ of modernism were generally absent from the show, he also noted that ‘the principal Russian works shown, including the Pavilion, offered the most extreme example of the effort to break with the past, and to create a completely novel Art, immune from all outside influence, even at the sacrifice of intelligible meaning and purpose.’23 Of these, displays of the ‘Russian’ theatrical arts ‘showed, perhaps, the most marked impress of “Modernism.”’24 At the same time, Llewellyn Smith acknowledged that it was ‘difficult to analyze the exhibit of the Union of Soviet Republics in respect of its relation to national tradition and to modern or foreign influence.’25 Flummoxed by the Soviets exhibits, unable to construct a framework, terminology, or even a familiar context for their ‘extreme’ modernism, Llewellyn Smith, like others who reported on the Paris Exposition, were nonetheless impressed by

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this art which was so far removed from comfortable old categories. Lacking awareness of the different cultural and historical traditions which underpinned the Soviet contributions to the Exposition, Llewellyn Smith homogenized them as ‘Russian,’ even though he seemed dimly aware of differences among them. Rare were more knowledgeable observers such as Henri-Marcel Magne, who advised viewers to distinguish among the many varieties of Soviet theatre art. Indeed, Magne attempted to underscore the fact that the theatres of the USSR were very diverse and not at all of a single line of design.26 But few commentators ventured beyond the old language of empires or attempted to distinguish between the theatres of the various republics of the USSR. This should not come as a surprise, since the USSR was still a relatively new political entity. The international community automatically reverted to old, familiar categories and descriptors. Moreover, as a consequence of Woodrow Wilson’s inability to believe that Ukrainians formed a nation (and post–Treaty of Versailles, 1919), there was little reason to make distinctions between Russians and Ukrainians. Such generally held views were bolstered both by the apparent confusion of their French hosts as well as by the Russian participants in the Exposition. Official catalogues and guides, of which there were many, conflated ‘Soviet’ with ‘Russian.’ The new name of the old empire was still unfamiliar and did not appear to have a stable French translation. Thus, a visitor consulting the alphabetically organized general guide to the Exposition would have searched in vain for the entry on the USSR, which instead appeared under ‘Russie,’ followed by the apologetic phrase, ‘Ou plus exactement U.R.S.S., Union des Républiques socialistes soviétiques’ (Russia. Or, more exactly, the USSR, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics).27 In the Soviets’ own catalogue of their pavilion, the name of their country appears in a slightly different and very awkward translation as ‘République Socialiste Federative Soviétique Russe’ (Socialist Federative Soviet Russian Republic), an indication of the onomastic instability of this new political entity. To such lack of precision may be added the confusion of the territories which the USSR encompassed. Guides and catalogues occasionally referred to the ‘nations’ which constituted the Soviet Union; at other times, regions were mixed with national minorities.28 To the French hosts, the oddity of the new name and political structure was of a piece with that country’s exhibition of stage designs: ‘cette exposition très importante, parfois curieuse’ (that very important, sometimes strange, exhibition).29 Since no one from Ukraine had been permitted to travel to Paris, it was natural to assume that the Soviet Russian participants who made up the full composition of the organizing committee of the Soviet pavilion ‘spoke for’ Ukrainian art. A Monsieur ‘Vetrov,’30 who authored the section on the Soviet theatre displays, persistently referred to ‘Russian’ exhibits throughout his text, a fact which contributed to the impression of the synonymity of ‘Soviet’ with ‘Russian.’ Such conflation worked in favour of the new Bolshevik regime, but also had ‘local’ and long-standing justification in the tradition of world’s fairs. As John Findling and others have observed, ‘world’s fairs have consistently demonstrated a strong streak of nationalism, or the notion of boosting the national image, and the people’s pride in it.’31 Like its predecessors, the Paris Exposition showcased the best talents of each nation. More specifically, it offered revolution-weary Russians the unique opportunity of

18.7 Soviet exhibit at the Palais de Justice (photo: Henri Manuel)

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18.8 Cover of Soviet catalogue of the Exposition (Paris edition)

showing that Russia had not only survived major political and social upheaval, but that it had also surpassed the rest of the world with its achievements. Despite the internationalism of communism (and the policy of Ukrainianization in place at the time), there was little inclination on the part of Russian Soviets to inform themselves or others about the state of the Ukrainian theatre, traditionally only a ‘provincial’ theatre in the Russian empire.32 If the different cultural-national traditions making up the Soviet exhibits were terra incognita to most viewers and commentators, the immediate effects of their theatrical innovations were less difficult to perceive. Llewellyn Smith’s colleague, A.P D. Penrose, provided a receptive and thoughtful response to the set models, drawings, and photos of the Soviet displays. In his section of the British Reports, on ‘Art of the Theatre,’ Penrose speculated on both the origins of this art and on its implications. Recognizing the general dissatisfaction of the new stagecraft with the realistic aims of the nineteenth century,33 he correctly identified its connections to medieval and renaissance traditions. Creating new stage spaces comparable to the Elizabethan ‘apron,’ the Soviet designs, Penrose understood, necessarily created a new relationship between actors and audiences. Such experiments, he astutely observed, would lead towards ‘a very different theatre’ with a new logic of

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18.9 Vadym Meller, set for Secretary of the Labour Union

acting, production, ‘decoration’ [stage design], and theatre construction – a ‘whole new process of re-orientation.’34 Penrose also located one of the distinguishing features of the Soviet theatre and drama in its new attitude to the classics: Old plays are freely adapted to express sentiments approved in official circles, and in order that they may become understandable to audiences of workpeople. Such methods sometimes involve the mutilation of great works of art, but they are at least constructive in aim, in so far as they make for the creation of new modes of expression relevant to the particular needs of the time. In England the re-action against the highhanded methods of the old actor-managers has often resulted in a too timorous respect for the works of Shakespeare and the old dramatists. It has sometimes been forgotten that the theatre is a living art and not a department of archaeology.35

Indeed, as we’ve seen in earlier chapters in this volume, a rigorous examination of the past and the classics in particular formed a significant aspect of Kurbas’s modernist theatre. (For example, Kurbas had insisted that the director’s aim should not be to revive a pseudo-classical Shakespeare; rather, the director should represent the work ‘as it is fractured by the prism of the contemporary revolutionary worldview,’36 thus anticipating Jan Kott’s idea of ‘Shakespeare, our contemporary,’ by three decades.) Penrose responded to the freshness of this approach and the liberation it offered; yet he also acknowledged his own compatriots’ deeply ingrained conservatism. Some, he suggested, might consider the Soviet designs on display in Paris ‘crude or childish,’ but no one could deny their ‘vigour’ or the fact that they were ‘the result of thought … a certain liveliness of imagination and, above all, a sense of the theatrical, which was certainly not present to the same degree in any other body of work to be seen elsewhere in the Exhibition.’37

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A similar acknowledgment of the attraction-repulsion response to the Soviet exhibits was made by M. Vetrov, the author of the section on Soviet theatre written for the catalogue of the Soviet pavillion. In presenting these exhibits, Vetrov noted, il est peut-être encore trop tôt pour apprécier à leur juste valeur les recherches audacieuses des réformateurs du theatre russe. Mais qu’on les accepte ou qu’on les repousse, on est bien obligé de reconnaître qu’elles marquent une étape considérable dans l’évolution de l’art théâtral moderne. [It’s perhaps still too early to appreciate the exact value of the audacious pursuits of the reformers of the Russian theatre. But whether one accepts or rejects them, one is obliged to recognize that they mark a significant stage in the development of modern theatre art.]38

If the foreign public could not completely come to terms with the radical reforms of the Soviet stage, those living in the USSR were much less ambiguous in their response. News of Meller’s gold medal reached Ukraine, where it was proudly trumpeted in various journals. B. Chatsky exclaimed that the Berezil success at the Paris show was ‘not accidental. Clearly, not!’ Employing the collective’s triumph to praise the state of theatre arts in Ukraine more generally, Chatsky rhetorically asked, ‘How many more of these talented artists are there whose exhibits were never seen at the Paris exposition?’39 It was time, he urged, for a pan-Ukrainian fair to celebrate its masters. Kurbas himself was more sanguine about Meller’s gold medal, the Berezil’s Parisian success, and the company’s participation in an upcoming exhibition to be held in New York. In his article ‘Shliakhy i zavdannia Berezolia,’ he despairingly complained that ‘the political “organs” of Ukraine did nothing at all to showcase Ukrainian art abroad … I have no idea how our set models and photos were displayed. There wasn’t a single representative from the [Berezil] theatre at the exposition. Everyone in Moscow who wanted to, received a visa for the Paris trip. We couldn’t get anything except passports. Nothing has been done in preparation for the American show, and we still haven’t received any information.’40 His longstanding desire to ‘astonish the world’ had been fulfilled, but at the price of near anonymity. Bureaucracy and politics had played their part. While hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, had seen the work of his Berezil and were struck by its innovations, none of them identified Les Kurbas as its founder and creative leader. Few had any idea that this was a Ukrainian company.41 Paris to New York The Soviet theatre exhibits completely stunned American viewers, among them Jane Heap, then editor of the influential art and literature magazine The Little Review, perhaps best remembered for first publishing James Joyce’s Ulysses. The arresting nature of the set and costume designs, photos, set models, and drawings, unlike anything seen in the United States, inspired her to bring the ‘foreign’ and ‘radically modernistic’42 section of the Exposition to New York. She was assisted by Dadaist Tristan Tzara and a number of American organizations including the

18.10 Vadym Meller surrounded by his designs for the Berezil (VT)

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18.11 Vadym Meller and Berezil actresses in his costumes for Hello, on Radio 477, 1929

Theatre Guild, Provincetown Playhouse, Greenwich Village Theatre, and Neighborhood Playhouse – the ‘rebel’ theatres of New York, as Kenneth MacGowan called them.43 Austrian stage designer and director Friedrich Kiesler was contracted to bring the exhibits to America. Americans were astonished when, expecting a small show, Kiesler arrived with twenty-eight crates of material, making this the largest exhibition of theatrical arts in the world. In all there were well over 1500 items. In addition to ‘practically all’ the theatre material at the Paris Exposition, Kiesler also brought with him on the aptly named ship ‘Leviathan’ selected material from an earlier exhibition in Vienna, as well as works directly acquired from leading designers.44 Kiesler surprised his audience with an explosion of ‘new names’ (which included, among others, his own as well as that of Alexandra Exter). To MacGowan, these new names seemed to ‘smother’ ‘all the familiar and famous designers of Europe,’ a fact which ‘ought to suggest that here is still another revolution to be heard from.’45 Works from eighteen countries were represented: Austria, Belgium, China, Czechoslovakia, France, Germany, Holland, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United States, Yugoslavia, and ‘Russia.’ An American jury, consisting of Lee Simonson, Robert Edmond Jones, Cleon Throckmorton, and Aline Bernstein, selected forty-four American designers to participate in the New York exposition to showcase American talents and to assert that America was not, as its absence at the Paris Exposition implied, old fashioned but decidedly modern.

18.12 Title page of The Little Review, Winter 1926

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The Exposition, held on two floors of New York’s Steinway Building from 27 February to 15 March 1926, and open from 10am to 10pm,46 made for an extraordinary two weeks of theatrical and related activity. An article in the New York Herald Tribune published a week before the exhibition warned American students of the theatre that they ought to be prepared for ‘the shock of their lives,’ because nothing in America, not even the biggest innovations on Broadway, had anything to match what they were about to see.47 Kiesler created special ‘Constructivist’ backgrounds for the New York exhibition to properly display the modernist material (as much later he would undertake for Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century Gallery), which MacGowan characterized as three ‘heresies’: Constructivism from ‘Russia’ and Germany; Futurist and Cubist scenery from ‘Russia’ and Italy; and actorless theatre from Italy, Germany, and France. Included in the New York International Theatre Exposition were drawings, sketches, photos, masks, models of costumes, stages, and full-scale examples of whole theatres, and ‘actual setting units.48 Among the many works were those by Fortunato Depero, Picasso, Kiesler, Alexandra Exter, Georges Braque, Fernand Léger, Nathan Altman, Aleksei Granovsky, Anatol Petrytsky, and Vadym Meller. Gilbert Seldes, a minor player in the huge organizational machine of the show, explained that the International Exposition brought together ‘the best work done in the theatre during the past twenty years, without regard to school and movements, but naturally emphasizing to an extent the novelty of constructivism which lends itself particularly to an exhibition of models.’49 The complete winter issue (1926) of The Little Review was dedicated to the Exposition and also served as its exhibition catalogue. Its table of contents proudly announced in bold font, ‘With 75 reproductions … presenting the work of the foremost theatre-artists in fifteen countries.’50 Another large and influential audience of thousands of artists, writers, and readers was exposed to the work of the Berezil. Eight images from the Berezil were reproduced in the small twenty-sixpage special issue of The Little Review, second in number only to those of the Russian theatres. Among these were a number of photos taken from some of the Berezil’s best shows, including Kaiser’s Gas, Kurbas’s Jimmie Higgins (based on Upton Sinclair’s novel), and Ernst Toller’s Machine Wreckers.51 Photo-portraits of scenographers Vadym Meller and Anatol Petrytsky, as well as the Berezil directors Favst Lopatynsky and Borys Tiahno dotted the magazine, providing some sense of the personnel behind the extraordinary productions, but there was no photo of Kurbas, a fact which must have grated or at least deeply disappointed its founder and artistic director (if he ever saw its catalogue). In addition to the images reproduced in the magazine, the Exposition itself also included ‘large cartoons and photographs,’ costume drawings by Petrytsky, and Meller’s set model of The Secretary of the Labour Union.52 But replicating the problems of the Parisian show was the consistent identificaidentification of the Berezil artists with Russian theatres, and the designation of Kyiv as ‘Kiew, Russia.’53 Names were mangled or misspelled. The Berezil became Beresil; Vadym Meller, Vadim Mueller; Borys Tiahno, Tiaguno; and Favst Lopatynsky, Lapatynsky.54 Carelessness was extended to the descriptive titles of the stills (including two images from Jimmie Higgins which were not identified). Where the

18.13 Page from The Little Review

18.14 From The Little Review: photo portraits of Borys Tiahno and Vadym Meller. Note the misspelling of their names and of the Berezil

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authors of the French catalogues and guides had made some attempt to acknowledge the new political entity of the USSR, Heap simply used the old names associated with empire, and consequently grouped all the Soviet theatres and designers under the rubric ‘Russian.’ The listing of ‘Russian’ artists, directors, and theatres appeared as the tailpiece to S. Ignatoff’s article on the Moscow Kamerny Theatre, thus clinching the impression that the Berezil was a Russian company.55 Compounding these problems, S[amouil] Margoline, in his extensive overview article on ‘The Russian Theatre of Today’ for The Little Review (accompanied by photos from the Berezil productions), laconically and patronizingly referred to the achievements of Jewish and Ukrainian scenographers on display: ‘Ber-Rybak [Sukher (Isaachar) Ber Ryback] has demonstrated his resources as a genius typical of his race [Jewish], while Vadim Meller has been equally successful with the theatre in the Ukraine [sic], where, in collaboration with the director Oles Kourbas, he has created new forms.’56 This was the only reference to Kurbas in the exhibition. Viewers, readers, and journalists could hardly be faulted for not distinguishing among the Soviet displays and for assuming that all of them were a part of the massive accomplishments of the Russian theatre. As with the Paris Exposition, so in New York only the striking images, not their creators, could speak for the Ukrainian theatre, its methods, theories, and philosophies. Nonetheless, visitors to the New York show came away astonished by the Berezil’s achievements. e.e. cummings, in his brief role as contributor to ‘The Theatre’ section in The Dial, wrote in May 1926 of the International Exposition as one of the events of ‘extraordinary theatric import’ which had occurred in New York in the last two months. Among this huge display of theatre arts, only a dozen were truly great: From copious chaff much authentic wheat separates quickly itself [sic]: Jean Hugo’s inspired costumes for that Joy Forever, Cocteau’s Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel; the linein-relief-against-plane ‘construction Der Wagen Der Prosperina,’ whose all scrawlish vitality and purely velocitous spontaneity mention the irrepressible Picasso; Rabinovitch’s now famous Lysistrata, Theatre Beresil; gorgeous turbine flangings for Lohengrin per Fedorovsky, and an exquisite thing by Vialoff; Depero; dolls by Remo Bufano; Mrs. Hansell, B. Aronson, Cleon Throckmorton.57

Dismissing the old proscenium stage as a ‘peep show’ in which ‘Scene and actor negate each other,’ and where ‘No organic cohesion is possible,’ cummings lauded the new stagecraft in which everything worked together. At length and approvingly, he cited Kiesler. In a series of articles for Theatre Arts Monthly, Sheldon Cheney praised the achievements of the new theatre artists in whose structures he found directness, freshness, honesty, ‘naked emotion and expressive form.’ Such constructions afford ‘wonderful freedom of action, its nudity is a virtue in the greater opportunity afforded for spatial composition.’58 On the whole, however, Americans, like their British counterparts at the Paris show, were generally unprepared for what they saw. As in the British Reports on the Paris Exposition, so in American articles modernism appeared in quotation marks, an indication that many had no clear idea of what modernism was.

18.15 From The Little Review: mentioning Meller’s set model and listing Meller under ‘Russian’ theatre designers and artists. Also images and models by Isaak Rabinovitch (Rabinovich)

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18.16 From The Little Review: two sets by Vadym Meller

Doubtless for this reason a twenty-one-member lecture committee was established, which included such luminaries as Barrett H. Clark, Aline Bernstein, Oliver Sayler, and Sheldon Cheney (among others), who augmented the vast exhibition with daily lectures about the modern theatre. As this group suggests, the organizational machine of the New York Exposition was formidable, a fact which contributed to the relatively easy dissemination of information about the show and the tenets of modernism as a whole. If some, like Cheney, criticized American theatre practitioners, Kiesler, speaking through an interpreter at the exhibition’s opening, drew attention to the reciprocal, or what he called the ‘bidirectional,’ nature of the new stagecraft, and especially to America as its muse: In bringing this exhibition to New York, I represent the youth movement in the theatres of Europe. There is a special fitness in this, because we who consider ourselves architects in the theatres look to America as the originator of a new-world architecture, and therefore in a sense the originator of the new types of staging that are here demonstrated. We are bringing you a thing that is in a sense new to you, and yet it is yours. Especially it is your spirit that has brought this new art into the theatre.59

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18.17 Vadym Meller, set for Machine Wreckers

Influence, confluence, echo, continuity: the circle was complete. Just as Kurbas had hummed jazz melodies and was inspired by Taylorism, American efficiency, energy, technology, literature, and thought, so American critics, scholars, writers, and all those connected with the theatre were deeply stirred by this new art. Praise was most frequently heaped on the ‘constructivist’ models and photos. So, for example, J. Brooks Atkinson, writing in the New York Times, called these ‘the most interesting stage designs in the exhibition,’ which ‘abandon representation for purely abstract creations, usually made of pillars, stairs, circles, affording three dimensions. What they may achieve in actual use with actors peopling the stage only the most imaginative workers in the theatre can define.’60 Although squirming at the term ‘constructivist’ (which he didn’t find particularly helpful), Atkinson was very much taken with the practical aspects of constructivist design. As he astutely observed, the conceptual, ‘unembellished’ nature of these sets made it possible to ‘multiply the resources of dramatic representation by abolishing scene shifting,’ serving for the whole play, or even for many plays. The result is that the design yields everything to the centrality of the actor. How many actors, queried Atkinson, would be ready for such a ‘perilous opportunity’?61 In addition to the attraction of the abstract qualities of the stage design, the sense of a ‘synthetic,’ unified design appealed to many. Writing in The Dial, Gilbert Seldes, for example, described his delight at the ‘new unity’ which the ‘foreign’ theatre

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18.18 From The Little Review: the set for Gas by Vadym Meller, director Favst Lopatynsky, and Pavlo Dolyna as America in Jimmie Higgins

had: what was truly special and surprising for him was that everything worked together. He speculated further that, should this method assuredly eliminate the star-actor, then everyone would accept these changes ‘without a murmur.’62 As Kiesler himself observed, ‘Nothing is accessory: everything is a complement, a sequence, a development, a conclusion. The energies of the components heighten one another; they grow and crystallize beneath the eyes of the public … The performance is orchestral.’63 The succès de scandale of the New York show went far beyond the boundaries of the city. Thanks to Heap’s magazine and far-flung contacts, a glittering list of writers, arts, and intellectuals, both in America and elsewhere, became familiar with the new Soviet stagecraft and with the images of the Berezil productions. Toronto’s The Globe (27 February 1926) announced ‘Exhibition of Stagecraft: Remarkable Display of Theatre Art Opens Today in New York – Most Complete Collection of Advanced Models and Designs Ever Assembled.’64 The exhibition of over 1500 ‘widely-diverse models or plans of stagecraft or theatrical art’ from eighteen different countries is described as ‘remarkable,’ ‘unusual,’ ‘extraordinary.’ The reader is commanded to pause and contemplate the magnitude and diversity of the event: ‘Think about it!’ – The Globe reader is admonished. Whereas the Toronto audience

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18.19 From The Little Review: pictures of Meyerhold and Tairov

was familiar with only one model of theatre (The Royal Alexandra), and only one type of drama (realism), here – the reviewer gasped – was an unimagined wealth of possibilities. Not all were as enthusiastic. Many focused on the ‘curiosity’ aspect of the show, as the titles of these newspaper articles suggest: ‘Stagecraft Shows Its Newest Heresies,’65 ‘To Exhibit Novelties in Stage Scenery,’66 ‘Actors and Actorless Theatre – New Stage Designs,’67 ‘Play and Actor Count Not the Stunty Scenery,’68 and ‘Theatre of the Future May Have No Actor.’69 Some well-informed critics, such as Kenneth MacGowan, carefully separated the exhibition hype from reality, historicizing the achievement of the works on display by invoking their forerunners, Appia and Craig in particular. MacGowan also distinguished three major trends among the many displayed items, two of which (the actorless theatre and futurist scenery) he dismissed, while taking up the third, constructivism, as ‘the most interesting and the most hopeful of the three heresies of the new stagecraft.’ Indeed, he recognized in this third, most ‘radical’ theory one which made the greatest demands on the actor, who ‘must develop the bodily skill of a gymnast as well as achieve studied effects in vocal expression.’ Sharing Kurbas’s insight, MacGowan recognized that this would require a special training which was ‘sorely’ lacking ‘since the coming of “naturalism” to our stage.’70 He also suggestively argued that

On the World Stage: The Berezil in Paris and New York 503

18.20 From The Little Review, with set by Boris Aronson (lower right)

constructivism provided the solution to the requirements of many of the new playwrights, including Eugene O’Neill, who in Desire Under the Elms ‘unconsciously [set] a problem only the constructivist could properly solve. Always an experimenter and a pioneer, he was writing our first constructivist drama.’71 Still others responded to the shock of the innovative displays with cries of ‘bolshevism’ in stagecraft.72 Opposing the onslaught of European and ‘bolshevist’ ideas and troubled by the possible contamination and corruption of American letters, a small group of Americans established The Theatre Creative later that same year. With its executive office on posh Fifth Avenue, the group aimed to oppose ‘the creative inspiration and intellectual stimulus from the dramatists of Europe.’73 It was to prove a futile gesture. Influence and Confluence Left-leaning Americans writers and many stage designers fully supported the techniques, if not always the underlying ideas, of the modernist theatre. Some, such as Eugene O’Neill, Elmer Rice, Michael Gold, and John Howard Lawson, were already well aware of German Expressionism in film, as well as some Russian developments

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in the theatre (Tairov and his Kamerny Theatre). They responded deeply to the concern with inner experience rather than facsimile surface that could be found in such German films as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919) and in plays, such as Georg Kaiser’s Gas trilogy or Ernst Toller’s Man and the Masses (1921). The latter plays, of course, had been very successfully staged in ‘Russia,’ as The Little Review observed. What was not noted was the fact that these were Berezil productions.74 Before the New York show had taken place, only a handful of Americans had been exposed to or influenced by the European avant-garde. After the International Theatre Exposition’s two-week presentation of stage and costume designs, thousands had seen it, read about it, and were moved by its striking, fresh images. For Americans, these were the images of the theatre of the future. For the Berezil, they were images of their theatre at that moment.75 The exhibition’s role as catalyst for change was paramount. Critics of American stagecraft and play-writing used this opportunity to vent their disappointment at the current state of affairs and to urge young talents to innovate. Mournfully observing that the American drama lagged far behind in ‘evening clothes,’ Atkinson hoped that the Exposition would be recognized as a call to arms for American playwrights to respond with ‘vitality’ and imagination.76 More colloquially, e.e. cummings asked, ‘And now may we suggest some genuine home-brew?’77 The consequences for American theatre and stagecraft were immediate, tangible, and wide-ranging. Some of the energy came from new sources, others from transplants such as Kiesler who, on 14 March 1926, announced that he was setting up a ‘laboratory of the modern stage on 2 East Seventy-eighth Street for the development of the “fourth dimensional theatre.”’ Arguing that the ‘old theatres’ were ‘born in the spirit of imperialism’ and therefore were inappropriate for America, the land of freedom and democracy, Kiesler explained the necessity of creating a new theatre ‘of the people’ (though, sensitive to American interests, he pointedly denied any Bolshevik connections). He went on to announce the imminent establishment of three labs or ‘chairs’: the psychological, scientific, and artistic, to be filled by Princess Matchabelli, Dr Bess Mensendieck, and Kiesler himself. The psychological would ‘develop the power of the actors and also of the audience,’ avoiding mere mimicking and encouraging creativity. The scientific department would train the body ‘through knowledge of the origin of movement. It will strive to intellectualize the flesh. It will impart fundamental preparation for the dance, the ballet, and every form of expressive movement.’ He himself would deal with the full aspect of theatre design: the building, stage, costumes, lighting, scenery, and ‘everything mechanical.’ Kiesler declared, ‘We will make all the elements of the theatre function together to the last result which will be fourth dimensional.’78 The resemblance to Kurbas’s program of activity for the Berezil is striking (although Kurbas did not and could not publicly acknowledge any mystical aims). Most important, the exhibition encouraged and inspired American playwrights and designers to embrace experimentation. The short-lived Workers Drama League was founded in that year, followed soon after (in the winter of 1926–7), by the creation of the he New Playwrights Theatre, which gathered together fi five ve experimental, left-leaning dramatists: John Lawson, John Dos Passos, Francis Edwards Faragoh, Em Jo Basshe, and Michael Gold. They wrote plays and articles deeply

On the World Stage: The Berezil in Paris and New York 505

18.21 Les Kurbas on the cover of Sovremennyi teatr, nos. 32–3 (1928)

influenced by the techniques they saw at the International Theatre Exposition.79 In the spirit of the Exposition and on its first anniversary, they issued a manifesto on 27 February 1927 which proclaimed ‘a theatre where the spirit, the movement, the music of this age is carried on, accentuated, amplified, crystallized. A theatre which shocks, terrifies, matches wits with the audience … In all, a theatre which is as drunken, as barbaric, as clangorous as our age.’80 As Lawson revealed in personal interviews with Mardi Valgemae, ‘the impact of the exposition on him and his soon-to-be colleagues at the New Playwrights’ Theatre was tremendous.’81 In wondering where the American playwright could have discovered his ‘Brechtian,’ ‘epic’ techniques before he had ever encountered Brecht, Valgemae missed the fact that Les Kurbas had used these very same techniques nearly a decade before the German director.82

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Others who fell under the spell of the International show included Michael Gold (who had recently returned from a trip to Russia), whose Strike! (1926), which takes as its topic textile workers in Passaic, New Jersey, has a working-class hero not unlike Jimmie Higgins. Another was e.e. cummings, who created his expressionistic drama Him with its surreal language and dreamlike images, as well as its chorus of three Miss Weirds (Fates). Paul Green’s Tread the Green Grass: A Folk Fantasy in Two Parts with Interludes, Music, Dumb-Show, and Cinema, written in 1927–8 and in preparation in the fall of 1929 by the Provincetown Players (though never staged), echoed the techniques which Kurbas used in his productions of Jimmie Higgins and in his 1924 Macbeth: a synthesis of film, mime, interludes, and expressionist and grotesque techniques. Written at about the same time, Green’s Supper for the Dead, The Man on the House (later, Shroud My Body Down) appeared to bear the impress of similar influences.83 Perhaps most spectacularly, the great American scenographers – Boris Aronson (born in Kyiv to the chief rabbi of that city), Robert Edmond Jones, Donald Oenslager, Lee Simonson, Cleon Throckmorton, Aline Bernstein, Louis Lozowick, Jo Mielziner – could hardly escape some influence from the powerful work of the Soviet designs.84 In this mighty river of modernist influences or, more accurately (as Marina Tsvetaeva has reminded us), of confluences, the work of Les Kurbas and the Berezil must be taken into account, for it nuances and expands our current understanding of the range and extent of the modernist enterprise. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the concomitant opening up of hitherto closed archives, and the rise of postcolonial studies, a re-visiting of foundational myths and ‘great narratives’ has become possible. The individual and distinct contributions of the various Soviet republics and their theatres, like those of the great Berezil, can now be investigated and acknowledged. As we have seen, modernist influence was not unidirectional – neither from West to East nor from North to South. Aesthetic and philosophical cross-fertilization came in all directions from international exhibitions, newspaper and journal reviews, art magazines, catalogues, books, and music. No particular group singly created modernism. A product of a broad community of international artists, it most certainly included Les Kurbas and the Berezil Theatre, who re-drew the shape of theatrical and cinematic art in Ukraine, and forged a new aesthetic that astonished and inspired both at home and abroad.

NOTES 1 Marina Tsvetaeva, Ob iskusstve (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1991) 170. Conference papers and talks based on earlier versions of this essay were presented at the World Congress of the International Council on Central and East European Studies (Berlin, 30 July 2005); Ukrainian Modernism in Context Symposium (Harvard University, 3 April 2007); Celebrating Les Kurbas (New York, Ukrainian Museum, 28 April 2007); Comparative Literature Luncheon Series (Pennsylvania State University, 21 April 2008); and at the Ukrainian Literature Program (University of Alberta, 15 October 2008).

On the World Stage: The Berezil in Paris and New York 507 2 Charlotte Benton, ‘The International Exhibition,’ in Art Deco 1910–1930, ed. Charlotte Benton, Tim Benton, and Ghislaine Wood (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 2003) 155. The World’s Fair magazine, 8:3 (1988), puts the number at a little over 15 million, still a staggeringly high figure for a seven-month exhibition (reproduced at www .retropolis.net/exposition/index.html). By comparison, the most successful North American exhibition, ‘The Treasures of Tutankhamun,’ attracted slightly fewer than 8 million when it toured America from 1976 to 1979. See http://www.gophila.com/Go/ PressRoom/pressreleases/tut/Tut_Exhibition_Recap.asp. 3 Sekretar profspilky, incorrectly translated as ‘The Professor’s Secretary’ in various official documents, was based on Leroy Scott’s 1905 novel The Walking Delegate, dramatized by Borys Tiahno. 4 ‘Eiffel Tower Now a Sky Sign. Lighted for Arts Exhibition,’ New York Times 30 August 1925: xxi. 5 Although detailed site maps show the extent of the Exposition and the location of each of the pavilions, the actual acreage seems under dispute. Charlotte Benton and Susan M. Matthias, ‘Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes,’ in John E. Findling, ed., Historical Dictionary of World’s Fairs and Expositions, 1851–1988 (New York: Greenwood P, 1990) both agree on 72 acres, as does the World’s Fair magazine. By contrast, Erik Mattie, World’s Fairs (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural P, 1998) 139, calculates fifty-seven acres. Whatever the exact area, the fact remains that, for six months, central Paris was overtaken by the pavilions of the Exposition. 6 Yvanhoé Rambosson, ‘Conclusion. Ce qu’il faut retenir de l’Exposition,’ in Art décoratifs; Guide de l’Exposition (Paris: Ministère du commerce et de l’industrie des postes et des télégraphes, 1925) 363–4. The guides to the Exposition were legion and were printed in a variety of formats, from pocket-sized and brief to extensive and large (e.g., Catalogue Général Officiel). A twelve-volume encyclopaedia (see note 26) documented the whole fair. Individual countries also published their versions of the catalogues. The Soviets published a pocket-sized Catalogue des oeuvres d’art décoratif et d’industrie artistique exposée dans le Pavillon de L’URSS au Grand Palais et dans les Galeries de l’Espalande des Invalides (Paris: Section de l’URSS, Académie des Sciences de l’Art) and L’art décoratif et industriel de l’URSS, ed. P[iotr Semenovich] Kogan, Victor Nicolsky [Viktor Nikolskii], and J. Tugenhold [Ia. Tugenkhol’d] (Moscow: Édition du Comité de la Section de l’URSS à l’Exposition Internationale des arts décoratifs, 1925). 7 ‘Art in Industry,’ New York Times, 20 March 1925: 18. 8 Mattie claims that Weimar Germany was not invited at all. See World’s Fairs 140. 9 Wendy Kaplan, ‘“The Filter of American Taste”: Design in the USA in the 1920s,’ in Benton et al., Art Deco 335. Cf. ‘Changing Styles in Architecture,’ New York Times, 21 February 1926: RE2: ‘America could not enter the French Exposition because she failed to create a single original design.’ John Findling, by contrast, attributes the American absence to isolationism and ‘nonentanglement with the Old World.’ ‘Introduction,’ in Historical Dictionary of World’s Fairs and Expositions, ed. Findling, xviii. 10 Les’ Kurbas, ‘Zadyvuvaty svit’ ( Lysty L. Kurbasa do Hnata Khotkevycha), ed. M. Shudrii and M. Labins’kyi, Sotsialistychna kul’tura 2 (1987) 29. 11 As the descriptive subtitles of the exhibits suggested, for instance, ‘Kiew, Russia,’ ‘Beresil [sic], Russia.’

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12 It was the first cultural exchange between France and the Soviet Union since the re-establishment of diplomatic relations in 1924. 13 Irena R. Makaryk, Shakespeare in the Undiscovered Bourn: Les Kurbas, Ukrainian Modernism, and Early Soviet Cultural Politics (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2004) 154, 158. 14 In Germany, for example, a large exhibition of the current status of theatrical art was to be arranged for 1926, but didn’t take place until the spring of 1927 in Magdeburg. German announcements of this future event chose to focus on continuities in German theatre exhibitions, linking the prospective one to two previous ones (1898 in Vienna and 1910 in Berlin). Without repeating exactly the terms of the French exhibition, the German mimicked its focus by insisting on the contemporary moment and the connection between theatre and ‘social-economic factors.’ Historical material would be displayed only when it had not formed part of the last (1910) exhibition. The major part of the exhibition – the practice of theatre – was to be divided into three categories: ‘theatre culture, the art of theatre, and the technique of theatre.’ Publications and graphic art were to be part of a separate subsection. A huge interest was aroused by the building of a model theatre under the direction of architects Defke and Linbach, the latter a professor from Munich. See, for example, ‘O. N.,’ ‘Magdeburs’ka teatral’na vystavka,’ Nove mystetstvo (Kharkiv), 2 March 1926: 6. Only Tairov’s Kamerny Theatre was sent to represent the USSR at the Germany exposition, much to the chagrin of Kurbas, who faulted Ukrainian authorities for not taking enough interest in promoting their art abroad. Les’ Kurbas, ‘Pro zakordonne teatral’ne zhyttia,’ in M. Labins’kyi, ed., Les’ Kurbas: Filosofiia teatru (Kyiv: Osnova, 2001) 698–700. 15 ‘Art in Industry,’ New York Times, 20 March 1925: 18. One of the consequences of the Exposition was that, for the first time, the Metropolitan Museum of Art purchased and displayed machine-made art. See John Cotton Dana, ‘Art in Industry: Products of Machines Now Shown in Museums,’ New York Times, 15 April 1926: 26. 16 ‘New Color Card for Spring,’ New York Times, 15 October 1925: 38. 17 Évelyn Possémé, Le Mobilier Français: 1910–1930 Les Années 25 (Paris: Éditions Massin, 1999) 173. 18 ‘Changing Styles in Architecture. Debate Discloses Considerable Favor for the New and Drastic Methods,’ New York Times, 21 February 1926: RE2. 19 Ibid. 20 The Soviets made much of this. See, for example, Ia. Tugendkhol’d, ‘Stil’ 1925 goda. (Mezhdunarodnaia vystavka v Parizhe),’ Pechat’ i revoliutsiia 7 (1925) 29–66, esp. 41–2. 21 Gaston Varenne, ‘La Section de l’Union des Républiques Soviétistes Socialistes,’ Art et décoration. Revue mensuelle d’art moderne, 48 (July–December 1925) 113. 22 John Findling distinguishes among the terms ‘fair’ (associated with commerce), ‘exhibition’ (show but not sale), and ‘exposition’ (which straddles both, but is more intensive and usually more formally organized than a fair). In the end, Findling chooses, as I do, to use these terms interchangeably, since this is how they appeared to be employed in reference to both the Paris and New York shows (xviii–xix). 23 Sir H. Llewellyn Smith, ‘Introductory Survey,’ in Reports on the Present Position and Tendencies of the Industrial Arts as Indicated at the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts, Paris, 1925, ed. Sir H. Llewellyn Smith, Sir Reginald Blomfield, Eric Maclagan, and Sir Frank Warner (Editorial Committee of the Department of Overseas Trade of Great Britain, 1927) 30–1.

On the World Stage: The Berezil in Paris and New York 509 24 Ibid. 18–19. 25 Ibid. 30–1. 26 Henri-Marcel Magne, ‘Arts du Théâtre,’ in Encyclopédie des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes au XXeme Siècle, vol. X (rpt. New York: Garland, 1977) 2. 27 Guide de l’Exposition (Paris: Ministère du commerce et de l’industrie des postes et des télégraphes, 1925) 266. 28 Ibid. 266–7. Thus, the general guide lists ‘Union des Républiques russes: République du Caucase, de l’Asie Centrale, de la Russie Blanche, de la Crimée, de l’Ukraine et du Pays tartare. In other places and guides, the list varies, sometimes taking in more, sometimes fewer regions/national minorities. Ukraine occasionally appears separately from the ‘Russian’ republics. 29 Ibid. 309. A much sharper critique came from Eugène Marsan, who issued a biting attack on the whole Exposition in his specially printed satirical Souvenir de l’Exposition, and singled out the architecture of the Soviet pavilion as having ‘l’air d’une blague d’atelier’ (the appearance of a workshop joke). As grating for him was the propaganda distributed in the face of the French government and the ‘Société française.’ See Eugène Marsan, Souvenir de l’Exposition (Paris: À l’Ensigne de la Porte Étroite, 1926) 26, 44. 30 Unfortunately, I have not been able to track down biographical details about Vetrov. The general editor of the catalogue of the Soviet pavilion was Piotr Semionovich Kogan, a literary historian, critic, and president of the State Academy of Arts Studies, who was later faulted for his ‘simplified and distorted sociological views.’ See the third edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia 12 (Moscow: Sovetskaia Entsiklopediia Publishing House, 1973; New York: MacMillan, 1976) 563. 31 Findling xviii. Eva Weber makes a similar point, noting that world’s fairs are traditionally vehicles for both nationalism and commercialism. Art Deco (Emmaus, PA: JG Press, 1989; rpt. North Dighton, MA: World Publications Group, 2003) 8. 32 As we have seen elsewhere in this volume, the ukases and memoranda of the nineteenth century effectively destroyed the Ukrainian theatre. Its rebirth (post-1905, and especially during the civil war, First World War, and two revolutions of 1917) under Kurbas and others took place in such chaos, when areas were cut off from each other, that it is not surprising that Russians knew little about what was happening in Kyiv. The absence of information about the ‘provincial’ theatres and the Russian intelligentsia’s unwillingness to interest itself in Ukrainian theatre (and, beyond that, its ‘boycott’ of Ukrainian theatres) are noted in A.A. Bartoshevich, ‘Teatr v provintsii,’ in Teatral’nodekoratsionnoe iskusstvo v SSR 1917–1927. Sbornik statei. Vystavka v zalakh Akademii Khudozhestv. Leningrad. Katalog, ed. E.F. Gallerbakh, A.Ia. Golovin, and L.I. Zheverzeev (Leningrad: Komitet vystavki teatral’no-dekoratsionnogo, 1927) 124. Such general ignorance apparently spurred the creation of the first ‘Ukrainian year in art’ (1925–6) in the major Soviet (i.e., Russian) cities, though little is known about that event. By 1927, the greatness of Ukrainian theatre designs was recognized. They formed a prominent part of a theatre-arts exposition in Leningrad, where Kurbas was referred to as a Ukrainian ‘Meyerhold’ (a term he would have despised) and his Berezil as an innovative, intensely focused theatre (Bartoshevich 123). Three images from unidentified Berezil productions accompany Bartoshevich’s contribution to the catalogue, as well as three from the First Studio. The photos from the Berezil productions are taken

510

33 34 35 36 37

38 39 40 41

42 43

44 45 46

47

48 49 50 51 52

Irena R. Makaryk from Macbeth and Jimmie Higgins. Also see Katalog iubileinoi vystavki iskusstva narodov SSSR, vol. 1, Izobrazitel’noe iskusstvo, teatr, kino (Moscow: Izdanie Goz. Akad. Khudozh. Nauk, 1927) 29. A.P.D. Penrose, ‘The Art of the Theatre’ 174. Ibid. 175. Ibid. 176–7. Les’ Kurbas cited in Anon., ‘Do postanovky Makbeta v 4 maisterni M. O. B,’ Bil’shovyk 73 (971), April 1924 (Kyiv) 6. Penrose 176–7. The British were not the only conservatives. The French subsequently organized an Exposition des Arts au Théatre, from 23 November–24 December 1925, in Paris at the Hotel Jena Charpentier. Instead of an exposition of contemporary theatre arts, this was a pointedly historically organized show which began with a drawing of actors from the 16th century. In the preface to its catalogue, Charles Oulmont not-too-obliquely refers to the poverty and decadence of the current art: ‘Ils verront que nous ne sommes guère en progrès, malgré les apparences, et malgré les prétentions de certains, sur ce que faisaient nos aïeux. C’est une leçon de modestie et de sagesse précieuse.’ See the eponymous catalogue of the show published under the patronage of the President of the Republic of France, 21. Vetrov, cited in Magne 44. B. Chats’kyi, ‘Pro teatral’nu vystavu,’ Nove mystetstvo 8 (February 1926) 2. Les’ Kurbas, ‘Shliakhy i zavdannia Berezolia,’ in Les’ Kurbas, ed. Labins’kyi, 629. The Ukrainian émigré community in Paris also seemed unaware that the Berezil’ was a Ukrainian company. See, for example, M. Shumyts’kyi, ‘Mizhnarodnia vystava dekoratyvnoho mystetstva i modernoi industrii v Paryzhi,’ Tryzub/Trident. Tyzhnevyk/ revue hebdomadaire ukrainienne (Paris) 3 (1 November 1925) 13–18. Shumyts’kyi observes that Ukraine did not participate in the exhibition and generally attacks the Soviet exhibits as ‘hooliganism’; the Soviet pavilion is referred to as ‘awful’ (17). ‘Theatre Exposition Today,’ New York Times, 27 February 1926: 12. Kenneth MacGowan, ‘Stagecraft Shows Its Newest Heresies: International Theatrical Exposition to Display Models of Constructivist and Cubist Scenery from Europe,’ New York Times, 14 February 1926: SM9. ‘Exhibition of Stagecraft,’ The Globe (Toronto), 27 February 1926: 18. MacGowan, ‘Stagecraft Shows Its Newest Heresies.’ The executive committee included Helen MacGowan, Jane Heap, Bella Blau, Paul Moss, Eleanor Fitzgerald, and Lawrence Langover. Otto Kahn was the honorary chair. The larger committee included such influential people as Ralph Pulitzer, Amelie Rives Troubetzkoy, and George P. Baker. Reprinted as part of the article ‘Exhibition of Stagecraft. Remarkable Display of Theatre Art Opens Today in New York – Most Complete Collection of Advanced Models and Design Ever Assembled,’ The Globe (Toronto), 27 February 1926: 18. ‘Theatre Exposition Today,’ New York Times, 27 February 1926: 12. Gilbert Seldes, ‘The Theatre,’ The Dial (March 1926) 258. Although The Little Review mentions that the work of fifteen countries was reproduced in the magazine, other sources counted sixteen and eighteen in the exhibition. Translated in the magazine/catalogue as Destroyed by Machines. Incorrectly translated as The Professor’s Secretary.

On the World Stage: The Berezil in Paris and New York 511 53 This is as true today as it was in 1925. John Bell’s important essay, like that of many writers on this subject, continues to use the term ‘Soviet’ and ‘Russian’ interchangeably. See his otherwise very fine ‘“Another Revolution to Be Heard From”: Jane Heap and the International Theatre Exposition of 1926,’ in Experimenters, Rebels, and Disparate Voices: The Theatre of the 1920s Celebrates American Diversity, ed. Arthur Gewintz and James J. Kolb (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003) 157–66. 54 In a slightly later publication, Russian Exposition of the Soviet Union (New York: n. p., February 1928) 30, appears the most mangled of the attributions: ‘Décor by Weller Theatre Bresil, Kiew.’ 55 The ‘Russians’ included in the exhibition according to the list published in The Little Review are (spelling retained as published, first names not always included): Nathan Altmann, Michel Andreenko, Léon Bakst, Boris Bilinsky, Chestakoff, Chtchouko, Egeroff, Erdmann, Alexandra Exter, Fedorovsky, Ferdinandoff, Gontscharova, Jakouloff, Kardovsky, Komardenkoff, Konstodieff, Larionow, Lentouloff, Libakoff, Simon Lissim, Meller, Meierhold Theatre, Moscou Art Studio, Nivinsky, Henriette Pascar, Petritsky, L. Papova, Popova [doubtless the same person, Liubov Popova], I. Rabinovitch, Rodtschenko, Slovtsova, Somoff, V. and G. Sternberg, K. Medounetsky, Stepanova, Alexander Tairoff, Theatre Beresil, Theatre for Children, The Revolution Theatre, The Imperial Theatre, Pavel Tchelietcheff, Vesnine, Vialoff. See pp. 68–91. From this list, it is apparent that Meyerhold (items 1152–1204), Exter (1069–87), and the Berezil’ (1363–82, as well as Meller’s maquette, 1151, and Petryts’kyi’s costumes designs, 1271–3) were the best represented. 56 S[amouil]. Margoline, ‘The Russian Theatre of Today,’ The Little Review (Winter 1926) 19. Sergei Yutkevitch [Iutkevich] describes Margoline as a ‘fiery’ theatre critic who wrote ‘enthusiastic articles about the “Leftist” theatre’ and then decided to become a director. He entered the Third Moscow Art Theatre Studio under Evgenii Vakhtangov. See Sergei Iosipovitch Yutkevitch, ‘Teenage Artists of the Revolution,’ in Cinema in Revolution: The Heroic Era of the Soviet Film, ed. Luda and Jean Schnitzer, and Marcel Martin, trans. David Robinson (London: Secker and Warburg, 1973; New York: DaCapo Press, 1973) 25. 57 e.e. cummings, ‘The Theatre,’ The Dial (May 1926) 432. Is a semi-colon missing here or is cummings confusing theatre alliances? 58 Sheldon Cheney, ‘Constructivism,’ Theatre Arts Monthly 11 (1927) 858–9, 862. Also see his ‘The Theatre in the Machine Age,’ Theatre Arts Monthly 10 (1926) 504–11, and ‘The International Theatre Exhibition,’ Theatre Arts Monthly 10:3 (March 1926) 203. 59 Kiesler cited in J. Brooks Atkinson, ‘Exposition Reveals New Theatre Ideas. Show Representing Sixteen Countries Has a Wide Range of Subjects,’ New York Times, 25 February 1926: 16. 60 Ibid. 61 J. Brooks Atkinson, ‘Affairs of the Week. Actors and the Actorless Theatre – New Stage Designs,’ New York Times, 7 March 1926: X1. 62 Gilbert Seldes, ‘The Theatre,’ The Dial, March 1926: 258. 63 F. Kiesler, ‘Debacle of the Modern Theatre,’ The Little Review, Winter 1926: 69–74. This, among other passages, is cited approvingly by cummings in ‘The Theatre,’ 434. Similarly, in the April 1926 issue of The Dial, cummings lauded the ‘mobile theatre’ that presented a whole new ‘aesthetic continent’ and eliminated the ‘pennyintheslot peepshow parlour’ (344).

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64 ‘Exhibition of Stagecraft: Remarkable Display of Theatre Art Opens Today in New York – Most Complete Collection of Advanced Models and Designs Ever Assembled,’ The Globe, 27 February 1926: 18. 65 MacGowan, ‘Stagecraft Shows Its Newest Heresies.’ 66 ‘To Exhibit Novelties in Stage Scenery,’ New York Times, 4 January 1926: 17. 67 Atkinson, ‘Affairs of the Week. Actors and Actorless Theater.’ 68 ‘Play and Actor Count Not the Stunty Scenery,’ Toronto Daily Star, Saturday, 20 February 1926: 10. 69 ‘Theatre of the Future May Have No Actor,’ The Globe (Toronto), 2 January 1926: 27. 70 MacGowan 23. 71 Ibid. 72 As reported in the Toronto Daily Star, Saturday, 20 February1926: 10, ‘Play and Actor Count Not the Stunty Scenery.’ 73 The notice appeared in New York Times: ‘Theatre Creative is All-American,’ 20 September 1926: 21, and ‘Creative but Native,’ New York Times, Editorial, 21 September 1926: 28. Cited in Mardi Valgemae, Accelerated Grimace: Expressionism in the American Drama of the 1920s (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois UP; London and Amsterdam: Feffer and Simons, Inc., 1972) 123 n. 1. 74 The lone, later North American commentator on this point, Mardi Valgemae, observed that German Expressionism had spread far and wide to almost all of Europe, including Ukraine: ‘In the Ukraine, for example, the staging of Kaiser’s Gas in a Kiev theatre started a controversy that lasted for a year.’ This point is corroborated by Iosyp Hirniak in his memoirs, Spomyny, ed. Bohdan Boichuk (New York: Suchasnist, 1982) 156. Iona Shevchenko, who visited Germany and saw over 50 productions, the first of which was Kaiser’s Gas under Jessner’s direction, felt that the play had been ‘castrated’ by Jessner and excised of all its ‘sharp conflicts’ and ‘deeply social issues.’ According to Shevchenko, Kurbas’s productions far outshone the Germans’. Kaiser himself, it was said, preferred Kurbas’s interpretation of his play. Iona Shevchenko, ‘Teatry v Nimechynni (vrazhennia z podorozhi) [Theatre in Germany (Impressions from a Trip)],’ Literatura i mystetstvo 12 (23 March 1927): 2. 75 Arriving in the USA in 1923, scene designer Boris Aronson was dismayed by the backwardness of the American theatre, in which even the psychologically realistic theatre of Stanislavsky was still unknown. See Frank Rich with Lisa Aronson, ‘He Made the Stage Come Alive,’ New York Times Magazine, 11 October 1987: 52–60. 76 Atkinson, ‘Affairs of the Week. Actors and the Actorless Theatre.’ 77 cummings, The Dial, April 1926: 345. Among many others, Sheldon Cheney, ‘The International Theatre Exhibition,’ Theatre Arts Monthly 10:3 (March 1926) 203, attacks the Americans for lagging behind the Europeans both in play-writing and in scenography. 78 ‘Plans Laboratory of Modern Stage. Former Vienna Director Says He Will Develop “Fourth-Dimensional Theatre,”’ New York Times, 15 March 1926: 19. 79 A point noted by both Bell and Valgemae (79f.), and in recent dissertations, including Richard P. Benoit, ‘A Hegemonic Analysis of John Howard Lawson and The New Playwrights Theatre,’ PhD diss., Kent State University, December 2000. 80 Cited in Valgemae, 85. 81 Ibid. 86.

On the World Stage: The Berezil in Paris and New York 513 82 Ukrainian actors and theatre critics visited Germany. Iosyp Hirniak and Les’ Kurbas had visited Piscator’s theatre (Hirniak 260). Iona Shevchenko, ‘Teatry v Nimechynni (Vrazhennia z podorzhi),’ Literatura i mystetstvo 12 (23 March 1927) 2, mentions meeting and speaking with Piscator. Doubtless Les’ Kurbas did, too. It is instructive that Piscator later escaped to the ‘socialist paradise’ (as Hirniak ironically called it) and spent some time in Odesa in the 1930s (where the Berezil spent their summers preparing the repertoire for their upcoming season), where he attempted, but failed, to make a film. Shevchenko’s journalistic memoirs of the Germany excursion of Ukrainian theatre artists are very helpful in their facts as well as in their suggestiveness. For example, he notes that ‘the German theatre is slowly politicizing itself, said the director E. Piscator (himself the author of political-agitational shows) in conversation. But it’s important to note that Piscator’s own theatre didn’t open this year (it closed because of a deficit), so one must conclude that there are no “political” shows at the moment in the large theatres.’ Throughout Shevchenko’s articles, we see his conviction that the Germans lag far behind the Ukrainians in creating effective political theatre. Kurbas himself mentioned meeting with German theatre artists, and later, during his exile in the Russian far north, talked about having met Brecht and Piscator. Since these were younger men and since the Ukrainians seemed to have regarded themselves somewhat as mentors, neither Kurbas nor others may have felt it significant to describe in any detail conversations with two men who had not yet achieved wider theatrical fame: Piscator and Brecht. 83 The giant missing here is Eugene O’Neill. Away at his recently purchased home in Bermuda in 1926, O’Neill seems not to have attended the exhibition; his Great God Brown had opened earlier that year in New York to mixed reviews. He certainly would have known about both the Paris and the New York shows, since the press and his friends were full of talk about the ‘Russian’ constructivists; moreover, the Provincetown Playhouse, with whom he was so closely associated, was one of the sponsors of the exhibition. 84 A point also made by Bell, 163.

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PART FIVE Elegies: Reflections on the Future Past

KIEV/KYIV/KɂÏB/KɂEB/KIJÓW/ʥʥʲʩ ʷ

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The End of Ukrainian Syllabotonic Verse they once lived in this building1 see the fading red paint blistering on the window frames it’s from those times when someone decided to house them all in one building so that their breath could be heard in the entry ways breath like wind structured in fear as you look into the yard you can see soldiers laying asphalt and planting pines they were led out at night their dreams scattering from their shoulders like rats from window sills their grey shirts were soaked with sweat and yellow piss hid in their bodies like contraband those who led them out enjoyed the scent of the night scene the grey underwear wet with the sudden awakening the women with their faces smeared with make-up and fear at the corner newspaper stand there’s warm lemonade with sticky violet drops of syrup that pull your skin and stick to your fingers and lips bees brush against your clothing and eyelashes with their heavy tails and the shadow of the building creeps up to your feet like a great flood

Translated from the Ukrainian by Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipps 1 The ‘Slovo’ (Word, Logos) Building was built in 1930 in Kharkiv, which was then the capital of Ukraine, to house its best-known writers and artists. During the Stalinist purges of Ukrainian culture, many of the occupants were arrested and died in labour camps. Les Kurbas lived on the top floor in the last apartment.

if only you could get home sooner and shut the door tight turn the heavy black lock and fasten the chain listen to how the wind rattles the door jamb and with your cheeks feel the sun beat against the bare window they were led out quickly through the street before the black automobiles swallowed them so for a moment they were still breathing oxygen the oxygen of the building, holding it trying not to let out the smallest drop of freedom the smallest drop of hysteria when you decide to separate words into those you used at least once and those you’ve never touched you will feel the silence that ripped apart the heart of that night – the tortured circle you sense each time you return to this place because long ago fragments of hot lexemes grew cold in mouths filled with fear and the man with the serious expression with his dark notebook and lead pencil left behind only silence that fell like a dead bird simply, such buildings exist where the final border is particularly grim where hell and veins of underground ore are unexpectedly close where time sticks out like lumps of coal from the ground where death begins and literature ends Serhiy Zhadan, Ballads of War and Reconstruction, 2000

19 Vsevolod Meyerhold and Les Kurbas béatrice picon-vallin (in collaboration with veronika gopko-pereverzeva)

The work of Vsevolod Meyerhold will never cease to generate interest. The closure of his theatre left no direct heir; he was condemned and assassinated on 2 February 1940 by Stalin’s henchmen. His work, new and radical, will continue to be the focus of study. Some of Meyerhold’s innovations were later taken up by Konstantin Stanislavsky, who incorporated them, in a modified version, in his theory of Physical Actions. Other Soviet actors and stage directors who had a closer relationship with the Master did not wish to see his rich heritage disappear without a trace. In order to preserve some elements of his work, they fused them with others, thus losing some of their original acuity. Fortunately, thanks to the courage of those close to him, including Sergei Eisenstein, his disciple and ‘lab assistant’ from 1921 to 1922, the theatre archives and Meyerhold’s personal records were saved. ‘The Treasure’ (so Eisenstein referred to the records in a poem written in memory of his Master) was protected, and hidden. Today, these records give us great insight into the work of the director who, in production after production, forged the theatre of the future in the first quarter of the twentieth century. It is almost certain that some documents are missing from the archives. Maia Sitkovetskaia, a long-time archivist at the Russian Archives of Literature and Art (RGALI),1 and also in charge of Meyerhold’s collection, has information that reveals that in the mid-1930s, and perhaps even earlier, Meyerhold ordered the ‘cleansing’ of his records. He asked a secretary to destroy the archives containing potentially compromising names, especially the names of men who were politically ‘dethroned,’ such as Trotsky. This is probably why there are almost no documents concerning André Malraux and the adaptation of his novel La condition humaine that Meyerhold had begun working on in 1934.2 Without a doubt this is the reason why there are almost no references to Les Kurbas, the Ukrainian stage and film director, with whom Meyerhold obviously maintained ties. In 1930 Meyerhold visited Berlin while his theatre, the Meyerhold State Theatre (GosTIM), was on tour there after having fought vigorously for the authorization to do so from the Soviet government. In Berlin Meyerhold met the great actor Mikhail Chekhov, whose work he admired. In 1928 Chekhov had decided not to return to the USSR. Now Meyerhold and Chekhov discussed the question of Meyerhold’s own return to Moscow and the danger that awaited him. Despite the risk, Meyerhold returned to the Soviet capital and, for a number of years, attempted

520 Béatrice Picon-Vallin with Veronika Gopko-Pereverzeva

19.1 Les Kurbas, 1929

to convince Chekhov to play the role of Hamlet at the GosTIM. In the Book of Farewell (Kniga proshchhanii), Yury Olesha wrote that in 1930, after his return from Berlin and Paris, Meyerhold confided in him on several occasions. While working on the production of Olesha’s play List of Benefits (Spisok blagodeianii), Meyerhold revealed he was certain that one day he would be assassinated. It is in this context that we must imagine what Meyerhold must have felt when he heard the news about the so-called Ukrainian Meyerhold: Les Kurbas was arrested in Moscow on 26 December 1933. In 1937 the same destiny awaited Meyerhold as Les Kurbas. Much like Kurbas, he was at first separated from the collective during the debates, when he was left to stand alone. In January 1938 the GosTIM was closed. Earlier, in October 1933, Kurbas’s Berezil Theatre was forced to adopt a different name and was assigned a new director. In 1938 Stanislavsky took Meyerhold under his wing by inviting the ousted stage director to join the Opera Studio. In a similar fashion, Kurbas accepted Solomon Mikhoels’s invitation to direct him in King Lear at the GOSET (The Moscow State Yiddish Theatre). After his arrest in June 1939 in Leningrad, Meyerhold was sent to Butyrka prison in Moscow, where he was tortured in order to extract ‘confessions’ and the names of others; he was then summarily tried and executed seven months later in 1940. Arrested in Moscow in 1933, Kurbas was tried and was first exiled for five years to the Special Purpose Labour Camp on the White Sea Canal and the Baltic Sea in Medvezhia Gora in the Arkhangelsk region. Later, he was sent to Vian Guba, further north, and, finally, in 1935 to the Solovetsky Islands.3 On 3 November 1937 he was executed together with hundreds of other camp prisoners; however, the exact date of his execution was only recently discovered.4 For a long time, numerous encyclopaedias and reference books provided an inaccurate date, suggesting 1942 as the year of Kurbas’s death, the same as Meyerhold; in both cases, the purported dates connoted a wartime death. With courage and determination, Kurbas continued to organize theatre productions in the labour camps, which only provoked the authorities to transfer him to camps with harsher conditions. It is perhaps this story which contributed to the rumour that circulated for some time in the theatre community that ‘Meyerhold’ was not dead, but only sent to a labour camp, where he was staging productions.

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19.2 Death certificate that states Les Kurbas was shot, 1937

After Stalin’s death in 1953, both stage directors were ‘rehabilitated.’ First, Meyerhold was rehabilitated in 1955 when, at the instigation of the prosecutor Riaisky, Meyerhold’s granddaughter Maria Valentey gathered numerous testimonials. Then, in 1956, the process of rehabilitating Kurbas began. One of his close collaborators and actors, Yosyp Hirniak, kept his memory alive in the West. Hirniak had been arrested in 1934, survived his three-year sentence, and eventually successfully emigrated to the United States. His memoirs, publications, and particularly his extensive ‘Birth and Death of the Modern Ukrainian Theatre’5 provided the first analysis of Kurbas’s work in English. One of Kurbas’s last shows (at the camp in Vian Guba), entitled The Dream in Vian Guba, was an operetta credited to one of his co-detainees, the Ukrainian writer Myroslav Irchan (born Andry Babiuk).6 Based on music by a Czech composer,

522 Béatrice Picon-Vallin with Veronika Gopko-Pereverzeva

Urbanek, the play focused on an old clown – played by Kurbas himself – who is forbidden to play the piano, but still manages to create music despite all obstacles and prohibitions. One of Meyerhold’s last productions (at Stanislavsky’s Opera Studio) was Verdi’s Rigoletto, in which the old jester refuses to submit to the king’s power and then falls, ripping and bringing down a heavy, golden curtain. The two plays demonstrate how the tragic can be expressed by employing circus-style effects and the balagan (‘fairground booth’). Despite the different historical contexts of 1933 and 1939, the two innovators shared a tragic ending. Both were accused by their respective tribunals of being ‘aliens to the Soviet reality.’ For his part, Kurbas was accused of creating a nationalist and bourgeois theatre, of not understanding the demands of socialist realism, and of resisting the directives of the Party. He was named a fascist, an enemy of the people, and a conspirator against the regime. Meyerhold was attacked on the grounds that his theatre was harmful to the Soviet people. He was labelled a Trotskyite; he was accused of conspiring against the regime and furthermore, of being a spy for the Japanese and the English. During the 1930s, ‘Kurbasism’ was denounced in Ukraine, while ‘Meyerholdism’ was excoriated in Moscow. Thus, the two narratives ended on the same tragic note. However, the essential link between Meyerhold and Kurbas is found not in their biographies but in their objectives and their interests as stage directors. Both had a great passion for the theatre; Meyerhold used to say: ‘One must give all to the theatre or nothing at all.’ Kurbas lived this sentiment, as may be seen in the comments of essayist and theatre critic Aleksandr Deich, who referred to him as ‘the Man Who Was the Theatre.’7 We will now focus our attention on this aspect of their lives. Kurbas (1887–1937) was younger than Meyerhold (1874–1940). He began his theatre career eleven years after the Russian director; and, like Meyerhold, he started as an actor but later devoted his time to stage directing. They both shared a multicultural background. Meyerhold was of German origin; in his early years, he left Penza for Moscow and abandoned his law courses in order to study under Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko. Kurbas hailed from Western Ukraine (then under AustroHungarian rule); he spoke many languages, including German, Polish, and Yiddish, as well as Russian and Ukrainian. Like Meyerhold, he translated from the German. He studied philosophy and philology at the University of Vienna, but his calling was the theatre. Both his parents were actors. His interest in the theatre further developed during his studies in Vienna, where he was able to experience European theatre, particularly at the Burgtheater. He attended performances by Reinhardt, admired Moissi and especially Joseph Kainz, read Fuchs and Craig. Similarly, these performances and influences also represented the parameters of European culture for Meyerhold. Both artists borrowed from the popular and carnivalesque culture and blended those elements with their creations. Meyerhold appropriated the Russian balagan (‘fairground theatre’), which regenerated the theatre there. Kurbas combined many elements in his productions, including the Ukrainian vertep (puppet theatre), Expressionism, Constructivism, film techniques, and others. Kurbas travelled several times to the West before founding the Young Theatre in 1916; he was also a popular actor and a well-known interpreter of Khlestakov (the main character of Gogol’s The Inspector General), whom he played as the ‘Tragic Pierrot.’8 After the Soviets came to power in 1919, he organized the Kyidramte,

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19.3 N. Ulianov’s portrait of Vsevolod Meyerhold as Pierrot, a role he played in Aleksandr Blok’s Balaganchik (The Little Fairground Booth). Mise-en-scène, Meyerhold. (Rights respected)

then the Berezil Theatre in Kyiv in 1922. In 1925 the company was relocated to Kharkiv – then the new capital of Soviet Ukraine. After several years of successful work as an actor with the Moscow Art Theatre (MKhAT), Meyerhold founded his first theatre company in the provinces, the Brotherhood of New Drama, and toured in the Ukrainian cities of Kherson and Poltava between 1903 and 1905. The young Meyerhold was therefore not a complete unknown in Ukraine. After carving out his place as a stage director in St Petersburg at Vera Komisarzhevskaia’s Theatre (Kyiv would later remember his interpretation of Pierrot in Aleksandr Blok’s The Little Fairground Booth [Balaganchik] during one of the theatre’s tours) and in the imperial theatres, he organized his own theatre after the Revolution in 1920 under different names (RSFSR First Theatre, TIM, GosTIM). The Meyerhold Theatre toured Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Minsk on several occasions, specifically in 1924 and 1925. Kurbas visited Moscow for the first time in 1923; but Moscow never hosted a single performance by the Berezil Theatre.

524 Béatrice Picon-Vallin with Veronika Gopko-Pereverzeva

Kurbas’s artistic biography is shorter and more concentrated than Meyerhold’s. Different creative periods seem to overlap and be quickly transcended: Symbolism, Expressionism, Constructivism. Kurbas spoke out against Naturalism and Realism, which he called ‘the most anti-artistic phenomenon of our times.’9 He maintained that literature ‘killed the theatre and the actor.’10 Highlighting the theatrical nature of theatre, he aspired to establish a language of gesture that would oppose ‘psychologism;’ the perfect actor for him was a ‘wise Harlequin.’11 He commented, ‘Gesture has died, the word has died, elements through which the actors display their art have died, and what remains is a chaotic deadly “life-likeness” for the presentation and illustration of literary sentiments and grimaces.’12 This citation, taken from his ‘Theatrical Letter’ published in Kyiv in October 1918, is reminiscent of the radical stand Meyerhold took in his book On the Theatre (1913). In 1918 Kurbas believed that it was possible to revive the theatre with productions jointly created by stage directors and actors – as was the case during the great periods of theatre (such as the Greek or Renaissance theatre). Furthermore, he believed that it was necessary to work closely with scene designers, composers, musicians, and artists – as did Meyerhold.13 Following the writings of Edward Gordon Craig, Kurbas went as far as to speculate about the theatre of the future: ‘Perhaps there will be almost no words … Perhaps what will replace them will be the wealth of primitive sound. Perhaps the theatre of improvisation will be reborn.’14 There is no doubt that Meyerhold’s audacious theatrical revolution – and the strong reactions it generated – spread beyond the borders of Soviet Russia. How much it influenced Kurbas (if at all) is debatable. The works of both ‘theatre artists’ (to use Craig’s words) were deeply political and revolutionary. For both, the stage was a place for experimentation, and it was in their nature to act as experimenters, inventors.15 Both artists worked for the present and for the future of the Russian and Ukrainian theatre, and the European theatre in general. Under the direction of the two innovators, the theatres demanded a new and more expansive format. The Berezil Theatre was created to produce plays, carry out theatre research, experiment with stage design, performance, and audience response, publish a journal, Theatre Barricades, and set up a theatre museum, the first in Ukraine. At its height, the Berezil included six studios (three in Kyiv, one each in Bila Tserkva, Boryspil, and Odesa), as well as a Yiddish and a children’s theatre group. With close to four hundred members, the Berezil established a number of research committees, including a ‘psycho-technical’ committee studying applied psychology in order to develop new teaching methods in the theatre. At various times, Meyerhold’s theatre included the Scientific Research Laboratory (NIL); it also maintained close relations with Red Army amateur groups; housed a school of acting and directing,16 a museum, a journal,17 and a publishing house. Kurbas seems to have organized a relatively complex structure rather quickly, while Meyerhold encountered great difficulties in the early 1920s trying to preserve his place and resist consolidation with other groups.18 However, both directors believed in a theatre-laboratory structure where the idea of the studio that originated in the 1910s was expanded and improved. In 1927, Kurbas claimed that his theatre was the only place in the USSR that offered stage-directing training.19 He appears to have been unaware of the fact that the first stage-directing school

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had been organized by Meyerhold in St Petersburg in 1918, and that this type of training continued at the Meyerhold Experimental Theatre Workshops. Like Meyerhold in the 1920s and 1930s, Kurbas believed that a stage director acquired his skills in the theatre. The minutes of the lectures on stage directing offered by Meyerhold in 1918–19 have been published.20 Publication of other archived documents concerning the following years is yet to take place. The minutes of Kurbas’s director’s labs have also, although much more recently, finally become available in print.21 Their pedagogy and stage direction still require closer examination and further study. Kurbas insisted on the importance of the intellectual, rather than the ‘emoting,’ actor.22 The resemblance to Meyerhold’s thought is startling. In 1924 Kurbas wrote, ‘The actor today does not identify with the role; he objectivizes it’: the emotion can be replaced by an expression that is precise or mechanized. Or, it is possible to organize a montage of reactions provoked by precise reflexes of the actor. This is the phase of Stanislavsky’s system as carried out by Vakhtangov … The grotesque is created by the unexpected, purely theatrical contrasts and not by psychological ones. Princess Turandot relies on the possibilities of a montage of emotions as such. In Meyerhold’s case, when reflex replaces psychology, it is also a montage of emotions.23 On stage, Kurbas’s actor was a flexible instrument able to move in and out of roles. The Ukrainian stage director used the term ochudnennia (making marvellous or strange);24 an equivalent exists in Meyerhold’s definition of the grotesque as the ‘soul of the stage,’ and is found in the concluding chapter of his ‘Balagan’ (On the Theatre)25 from 1913. Kurbas was also interested in the scientific theories behind the neuropsychological processes of humans and in the creation of emotions. His actors studied medicine, biology, psychology – ranging from the experimental psychology of Introduction to Psychology by José Ingenieros26 (a Marxist researcher from Argentina) to Lev Vygotsky’s ideas. Some sources point to Kurbas’s interest in works by Vladimir Bekhterev and Ivan Pavlov,27 and therefore reveal the attention he paid to the body–mind relationship in actors and the population in general. One of his actors, Oleksander (Alexander) Zaporozhets, attested that this approach inspired him to leave the theatre and study under Lev Vygotsky, Aleksei Leontiev, and Isaak Louria. Kurbas himself was interested in ideas developed by the Louria group.28 Kurbas’s idea of the actor is similar to Meyerhold’s concept of the model-actor: it is the image of an actor-poet whose incarnation was most often associated with Mikhail Chekhov.29 Both Meyerhold’s and Kurbas’s actors had to train extensively (e.g., in acrobatics, dance, rhythm) in order to develop their physical capacities since, according to Kurbas, the actor’s body is his most valuable instrument. The close relationship between Meyerhold’s research and that of physiologists of his time has long been known but is only beginning to be studied more closely. Meyerhold and Kurbas’s common interest in experimentation led the directors towards the contemporary human sciences. Both directors were deeply involved in their art, which they saw not as a reflection of life but rather as a construction of life. The spectator’s role was essential in this regard. Although the situation was not identical in Ukraine and Moscow, still, the newly created work had to appeal to a new audience: the proletariat. Both

526 Béatrice Picon-Vallin with Veronika Gopko-Pereverzeva

directors aspired to evoke in their audience thoughts and perceptions based on association by employing images and metaphors. Furthermore, they both conducted studies of their audiences’ reactions.30 Their work created new avenues of development for the critique of theatre. For example, in Russia, the school of Aleksei Gvozdev was able to grow and develop further by analysing Meyerhold’s performances and methods. As has already been suggested, Kurbas himself developed and published extensively on the theory of theatre, and thereby pushed these studies in Ukraine to a new level.31 It is interesting to note the similarities in the choices of plays and in the evolution of the repertoires of the two directors. In 1923 Kurbas staged a production of Georg Kaiser’s Gas and Ernst Toller’s The Machine Wreckers. For his part, Meyerhold supervised the production of two Expressionist plays, not in his own theatre but in Moscow’s Theatre of the Revolution: under the direction of P. Repnin, The Machine Wreckers was shown in 1922; and under the direction of A. Velizev, Toller’s Man and the Masses in 1923. On the Ukrainian side, Kurbas staged the production of Gogol’s The Inspector-General, Mérimée’s La Jacquerie, Ibsen’s Nora (the title under which Meyerhold also directed A Doll’s House), and Crommelynck’s Tripes d’or (Golden Guts). These are the plays that Meyerhold either staged or intended to stage in his own theatre or in his workshops. As well, based on Kurbas’s mise-enscène, Borys Tiahno directed Gas Masks by Sergei Tretiakov, Meyerhold’s close collaborator. While in the labour camp, Kurbas staged The Death of Tarelkin, a play which Meyerhold had staged twice. Gradually, they each began to focus on a contemporary, national repertoire as they tried to create a distinct form of Soviet comedy; Meyerhold collaborated with Vladimir Mayakovsky and Nikolai Erdman, while Kurbas worked with Mykola Kulish. It was thanks to Erdman that one of Kulish’s plays, Khuli Khurina (a comedy of the grotesque about Soviet Ukrainian life and the process of ‘Ukrainianization’), from 1926, was translated into Russian and produced in 1927 at the Moscow Satire Theatre. The Berezil Theatre, however, was forbidden to produce this same play.32 It is also important to note that Erdman was arrested in 1933 and confined to his residence, while Kulish was executed at the same time and in the same labour camp as Kurbas. The close ties between their objectives, research, and productions become even more evident when we analyse the history of contact between Kurbas and Meyerhold. They first met in 1923 during the GosTIM tour of Ukraine (Kyiv, Kharkiv) with the productions of The Magnificent Cuckold, The Death of Tarelkin, and The Earth in Turmoil. From the first years of the Young Theatre, Kurbas’s actors were captivated by Meyerhold’s work.33 An artistically vibrant city, Kyiv was the centre in which a number of artistic currents met – in addition to the theatre, these included visual art, literature, dance (as many essays in this volume have suggested) – and was home to many artists (Alexandra Exter, Isaak Rabinovich, Vladimir Tatlin, Bronislava Nijinska, Osip Mandelshtam, Aleksandr Tyshler, Ilia Erenberg, Nikolai Evreinov, and others). Among Kyiv’s theatre intelligentsia were many artists and researchers who had collaborated with Meyerhold before the Revolution. These included Aleksandr Smirnov from the Studio of Borodin Street in St Petersburg,34 Konstantin Miklachevsky, a specialist in commedia dell’arte, and the critic Mikhail (Mykhailo) Bonch-Tomachevsky, who had seen and reviewed the short plays that Meyerhold had written in the grotesque style in the 1910s.

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19.4 D.E. (1924). Mise-en-scène, Vsevolod Meyerhold (TIM). (L’Europe qui foxtrotte D.E.) (BPV)

In 1924 Kurbas and the Berezil Theatre invited and officially welcomed the GosTIM for their second tour of Ukraine (Kyiv, Kharkiv) with the productions of The Earth in Turmoil, The Forest, and D.E. (Daios Evropu).35 Meyerhold was much taken with Kurbas’s blank-verse dramatization of Jimmie Higgins, a novel by the American writer Upton Sinclair, presented at the Berezil in October 1923 in Kyiv. With the intention of staging it himself at the Theatre of Revolution, Meyerhold sent Kurbas a telegram asking for the text and his permission to stage it there;36 but, the project never materialized. In 1926 Kurbas invited Valery Inkizhinov to the Berezil Theatre – one of the closest of Meyerhold’s collaborators during the early 1920s, when exercises and studies on biomechanics were devised. Kurbas produced two shows that Inkizhinov directed, Sadie (1926) and The Mikado (1927), which were considered the season’s outstanding events. Kurbas’s interest in Asian theatre brought him to Moscow in 1928, where he attended the performances by Ichikawa Sadanji’s company. Wishing to share his enthusiasm for Kabuki Theatre, he invited a group of his actors to join him on this visit. At that time, Meyerhold was in Paris. By then, the Berezil’s reputation had reached Moscow and there was also talk of a possible tour. The Ukrainians were told of ‘Meyerhold’s high esteem for Kurbas.’37 However, Kurbas decided against touring.

528 Béatrice Picon-Vallin with Veronika Gopko-Pereverzeva

He also said that there was much to be learned from the Japanese.38 Like Meyerhold, Kurbas aspired to create a synthesis of Eastern and Western styles of theatre and was interested in acquiring a deeper knowledge of Eastern philosophies. The fascination with the form and conventions of Kabuki, the circus, and Charlie Chaplin as a model-actor represent further common interests of the two stage directors that bring them even closer. In 1925 their respective theatres were each awarded a medal at the Exhibition of Decorative Arts in Paris for the constructivist models that they presented at the time (a topic explored by Irena Makaryk in the previous chapter). When, in 1933, Kurbas was removed from his position as the director of the Berezil Theatre and came to Moscow, Meyerhold tried to contact him by telephone;39 we do not know whether he responded. An independent artist, Kurbas did not seek Meyerhold’s help nor did he claim to be his disciple. However, the Ukrainian press incessantly compared the two. Some argued that Kurbas was completely influenced by the Russian master; others praised Kurbas as the creator of new, authentically collective forms and derided Meyerhold’s work as nothing but bourgeois art. In 1923 a particularly lively debate, spurred by Meyerhold’s visit, was raised by the Ukrainian press, which attempted, artificially at times, to underscore similarities and differences. Krasovsky, D. Urazov, and Volodymyr Koriak (‘Avanti’; born Bliumshteyn) regarded Kurbas as Meyerhold’s follower and highlighted (as noted with a touch of irony by one of Kurbas’s supporters) the idea that ‘the new theatrical forms are first born in Moscow (suggesting that Moscow is the place where culture is more highly developed than in Ukraine) and then their influences are spread across the periphery and into Ukraine in particular.’40 Others, such as I. Turkeltaub, E. Boim, and Mykola Bazhan, defended Kurbas and suggested that critics needed to pay careful attention to dates to see who did what first. Still others attempted to show that Meyerhold and Kurbas were two totally opposite phenomena, both ideologically and artistically. They reduced Meyerhold’s work to a superficial construction of stage movement void of any emotional content. They further argued that Meyerhold could not have felt ‘the eurhythmics of the Revolution nor the pathos of the proletarian collective.’ Kurbas, however, was able to capture the dialectic of the proletarian times in his eurhythmic compositions and his interpretation of the masses. In this manner, Meyerhold was considered ‘proletarian only in his statements while in his creative process he was just a bourgeois.’41 Nevertheless, while Kurbas’s productions played simultaneously in Kyiv and Kharkiv that year, the productions of both artists were unanimously deemed phenomenal by the press. The two stage directors were considered major figures of the artistic left who had the opportunity to juxtapose their accomplishments and skills. The so-called contest between the two seemed to be unfair, since the Russian director already had a well-established reputation, while the Ukrainian had yet to create a name for himself outside of Ukraine. After Ukrainian audiences received the productions of Gas with amazement and enthusiasm, according to Kurbas’s supporters Meyerhold’s production of The Magnificent Cuckold caused a ‘disillusionment of the masses.’ With this production, Meyerhold appeared to be ‘a destroyer, a first-class futurist,’42 who only performed destructive experiments like those of

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the 1910s. ‘Kurbas is not a destroyer; he is a nationalist, an ex-structor.’43 Whereas the Ukrainian director created theatre for ‘the proletariat, the [Russian director created theatre] for the bourgeoisie and the “revolutionary” intelligentsia.’ In this manner the press created a rather unjustified and unnecessary competition between the two artists: ‘The champion of Kyiv knocked out the champion of Moscow’ read one newspaper byline.44 A little less passionately, one article showed how Kurbas came to represent the masses in their true colours by using organized movements like musical waves. ‘Kurbas’s theatre slaps the bourgeoisie in the face with the force of the masses and not with the force of tricks as does Meyerhold’s theatre,’45 which remained a theatre of the ‘hero.’ It is curious that no one commented on the fact that Kurbas transformed the ending of Kaiser’s play by treating it in a positive fashion. Instead of the apotheosis of the masses, he examined the problem of the relations of the masses with the individual, a topic which he also focused on in his next production, Jimmie Higgins. The violence in the discourse of the critics, who were sharply divided between those who were for and against him, did not please Kurbas. Moreover, he did not consider it flattering to being called the ‘Ukrainian Meyerhold.’ However, in discussions at the theatre and in his lectures, Kurbas insisted on his admiration for The Magnificent Cuckold, and on the powerful effect of the machine as an authentic principle of the production, particularly in The Earth in Turmoil. It was of fundamental importance for Kurbas to define a distinct identity for the Ukrainian theatre, to emphasize its individuality and unique character, to exclude Russian influence, and, even more important, any form of imitation. Nonetheless, the external influence was present, especially on the stages of the Russian theatres in Kyiv. Kurbas was aware of the need to learn from the Russian masters, but he also warned against any slavish imitation: to do so would mean that, ‘culturally, we risk becoming a Ukrainian version of the Russian theatre and nothing more.’46 Against his will, Kurbas remained ‘in competition’ with Meyerhold. So, in 1925, he positioned the Berezil Theatre at the forefront of the avant-garde movement and in direct competition with the Russians. Basing his arguments on articles by Nikolai Chuzhak, he wrote that Meyerhold had in fact been vanquished. The Russian director was scheduling Carmen47 and was staging The Inspector-General, which Kurbas had already produced in 1921. In Kurbas’s eyes, Meyerhold was primarily interested in formal problems. Several years later, the significance of such statements would become dangerously evident. Rather than just examining this competition, it is even more interesting to examine the internal dialogue, real and present, between the two artists. In many ways, the ‘destroyer/ex-structor’ opposition illustrated the positions of the two directors: one was working within the context of the Russian theatre tradition, re-evaluating and restructuring; and the other, venturing onto a new cultural territory, establishing, creating, and transforming. In 1930, the Commissar of the Enlightenment Anatoly Lunacharsky suggested that Meyerhold’s strength lay in the fact that he was a reformer and that he was in a more advantageous position than Kurbas. The Ukrainian director, much like the Georgian Sandro Akhmeteli, had to form as opposed to reform.48 Also, in many respects, Kurbas was setting precedents; for example, he was the first to produce Shakespeare’s plays in Ukraine.

530 Béatrice Picon-Vallin with Veronika Gopko-Pereverzeva

In 1927–8, the hostile critics finally stopped referring to him as the follower of the Russians in order to analyse and focus more completely on the distinct character of his works. A study of the documents (photographs, articles, memoirs) reveals a close relationship between Gas and Meyerhold’s shows. Even if Kurbas had not seen Meyerhold’s performances – as he insisted49 – the astonishment that these productions of the ‘Theatrical October’ generated was such that photographs and reports were quick to reach Ukraine. Similarly, Meyerhold did not see Jimmie Higgins, which had premiered after the tour of the GosTIM in Ukraine. However, he had surely heard of it and seen the images taken from the show, which thus incited him to request the rights from Kurbas. In Kurbas’s production of Gas, the actors/workers ‘created’ the setting – the factory – with their human movements. The work of designer Vadym Meller, the abstract construction, contained various levels and offered the actors a performance space in which they could reveal their acrobatic skills. It also offered the director the possibility of designing expressive stage compositions. The author’s name (Kaiser) painted on the back wall slightly evoked the graphic innovations of The Magnificent Cuckold. It seemed as if the production of Gas synthesized elements from The Dawn, The Magnificent Cuckold, and The Earth in Turmoil. (This production is studied in greater detail in this volume in Virlana Tkacz’s essay ‘Les Kurbas’s Early Work at the Berezil.’) Kurbas conceded that the tour of the GosTIM in 1923 ‘could not have not contributed something to a collective formed under the conditions of Ukrainian provincial reality [which was] deprived of specialists,’ and that it did create an influence. However, in 1925 he stated that ‘Jimmie Higgins was, genetically speaking, linked with Ruhr,50 the show that preceded Gas, rather than with Meyerhold’s theatre (some external similarities led the critics and the petty bourgeois in a completely wrong direction).’51 He continued: ‘For each collective that thinks independently, the encounter with a new theatrical culture can lead to important correctives; but the traces of the influence of this new theatrical culture quickly disappear. The original voice of the Berezil expressively resonates today in a large choir of greater and lesser creators of the new theatre [formed] after [the] “October” [Revolution].’52 With the production of Jimmie Higgins, there was marked improvement in the use of cinema techniques in the theatre53 (as also argued in Virlana Tkacz’s essay, ‘Les Kurbas’s Early Work at the Berezil’). Here, Kurbas undoubtedly went farther than Meyerhold did in The Earth in Turmoil – Sergei Tretiakov’s adaptation of Marcel Martinet’s The Night (Tretiakov was also responsible for the ‘montage of the text’). In the staging of the play, Meyerhold used three screens in order to project fixed images, numbers, and texts, thereby adding comments to the action on the stage. The initial project was supposed to include the use of film, but this never materialized for financial reasons. In his own adaptation of Jimmie Higgins, Kurbas created, as he said, a ‘theatre of montage’ that linked different sequences; each carried a unity of style, method, and image. Like Erwin Piscator, he completely integrated film with the stage action. It is important to underscore that Kurbas was a member of the VUFKU (AllUkrainian Film Directorate) since its inception in 1922. As Irena Makaryk notes in a previous chapter, in 1924–5 he produced three films: Vendetta, Macdonald, and

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19.5 Sergei Tretiakov, The Earth in Turmoil (adapted from M. Martinet’s La nuit), 1923. Miseen-scène, Vsevolod Meyerhold. The Constructivist set integrates projection screens with the stage action. (BPV)

Red Arsenal (also known as Arsenaltsi – The ‘Arsenal’ Workers).54 While Kurbas was compared to D.W. Griffith, Aleksander Dovzhenko acknowledged him as his mentor. In his search of new theatrical forms, Kurbas, much like Meyerhold in the Russian cinema, trained numerous filmmakers, actors, and designers. In the production of Jimmie Higgins, Meller’s construction, which was composed of high towers, offered multiple playing areas and an extreme verticalization of space through the use of a combination of ladders and galleries. During the sequence where Jimmie’s ship departs for Russia, the actors climbed onto a bridge as if to board the ship. A screen was slowly lowered onto the bridge and the projected film then showed the departure of the steamship, therefore acting as an ‘extension’ of the stage. The film had been shot by Kurbas using both close-ups and long shots. ‘The most impressive discovery was the effect generated by the departure of the steamship, which was made possible by the combination of a fixed structure and the screen which was being gradually rolled from the top down. The hurried movement of the actors and the loud atmosphere of this scene created a perfect illusion of reality.’55 A storm was also shot for the purpose of the production. The work on the sound, sound effects and music, completed the sequence of images. In 1922 Evgeny Vakhtangov commented that Meyerhold was setting the stage for the theatre of the future. In a similar fashion, in 1926 the poet Osip Mandelshtam

532 Béatrice Picon-Vallin with Veronika Gopko-Pereverzeva

highlighted the fact that Kurbas was working for the future Ukrainian theatre.56 The theatre of the future for which both directors worked placed great emphasis on the musical component, and therefore collaboration with the composer was essential. The music for the theatre was interwoven with the composition of the play. The whole play was produced as a kind of musical score: the elements of rhythm, melody, tempo, leitmotif, counterpoint, sound effects, and so forth formed a subtle, yet efficient, background for the actor as well as for the audience. (Yanna Leonenko’s essay in this volume focuses on Kurbas’s nuanced understanding and use of music in his productions.) During his first trip to Austria, the work of Rudolf Steiner made a significant impression on Kurbas, who was himself an accomplished pianist. This experience may have been one of the reasons for the importance which Kurbas placed on rhythm in his plays. Meyerhold, who was formally trained as a professional violinist and who very early on was actively interested in problems related to rhythm, knew of Steiner’s theories through Andrei Bely and Mikhail Chekhov. Meyerhold worked with numerous composers such as Mikhail Gnesin, Sergei Prokofiev, Dimitry Shostakovich, and Vissarion Shebalin, while Kurbas also worked with a variety of composers, including Anatoly Butsky and Yuly Meitus. In 1924 some critics once again accused Kurbas of emulating Meyerhold in his fourth stage version of Macbeth, which, in fact, he presented several months before D. E. (Daios Evropu). While Meyerhold had achieved impressive cinematographic effects57 using simple boards mounted on wheels, Kurbas used huge screens that moved in such a functional and poetic way that it is impossible to argue that his was an imitation. The following examples will serve as an illustration. In his production of Macbeth, Kurbas used mobile screens which could not only be repositioned to represent the walls of the palace, tunnels, and hallways, or the backdrop for the witches’ appearances, they could also rise and fall like the blades of an enormous guillotine. At the moment when the ghost of Banquo made an appearance, Macbeth attempted to get closer to it, and in doing so, kept bumping his head against the mobile ‘wall,’ which made the ghost disappear. In another instance, when all the screens were removed from the stage, suddenly making it seem deserted, a peasant diagonally crossed the empty space to the sound of organ music. Slowly but rhythmically, he advanced across the stage as if he was crossing a field.58 Kurbas used the role of the Porter (called the Fool in this production and one of five characters played by his great actor Amvrosy Buchma) to make direct allusions to current events – news taken from newspapers or rumours circulating through the city – which would change on a daily basis as events changed. Meyerhold’s and Kurbas’s genius would not let them submit to the constraints of ideology,59 so the two directors, so close on intellectual and artistic levels, shared the same fate. Their works, passed down orally for a long time, would be engraved in the ‘internal creative laboratories’ of artists who had the chance to see their images or to hear about them. In this way, Meyerhold’s The Inspector-General has haunted Russian and foreign directors (such as Georgy Tovstonogov and Matthias Langhoff). In much the same way, Kurbas’s Macbeth has haunted a Russian director, Mikhail Butkevich, who was spellbound by some memorable sequences from the production recounted by an actress who once worked for Kurbas, later to become a painter.62 Translated from the French by Anna Bogic

19.6 D.E. (1924). Mise-en- scène, Vsevolod Meyerhold (TIM). The mechanism, created out of rolling panels painted reddish brown, evokes Edward Gordon Craig’s ‘screens.’ (BPV)

19.7 Les Kurbas, prison photo (Lubianka prison)

534 Béatrice Picon-Vallin with Veronika Gopko-Pereverzeva NOTES 1 Russian Archives of Literature and Art, Moscow, where the ‘Treasure’ was placed after the death of Eisenstein. 2 See B. Picon-Vallin, ‘La Condition humaine au théâtre,’ Les Cahiers de la Comédie-Française 22 (1997) 5–15. 3 See Nelli Kornienko, Rezhissiorskoe iskusstvo Lesia Kurbasa. Rekonstruktsiia (1887–1937) (Kyiv: Gos. Tsentr im. Lesia Kurbasa, 1969–2005) 353. 4 In the case of Meierkhol’d, the date of 1940 was only provided in 1988. In the case of Kurbas, the date was discovered only in 1997. A large book about Kurbas appeared in 1987 (Iskusstvo publishers, Moscow) that still notes his year of death as 1942. 5 In Marthe Bradshaw, ed., Soviet Theatre 1917–1941, vol. 7 (New York: Research Program on the USSR, Studios on USSR, 1954). 6 Editors’ note: Myroslav Irchan was the pen name of Andrii Babiuk (1897–1937), a writer from Western Ukraine. He lived in Winnipeg from 1923 to 1929 and wrote plays there, then decided to return to Ukraine. The Berezil staged his Place d’Armes in January 1932, directed by Borys Balaban and designed by Vlasiuk and Tovbin. 7 See V. Meierkhol’d, ‘Réflexions notées par A. Gladkov,’ in V. Meyerhold, Écrits sur le théâtre, trans., with preface and notes, B. Picon-Vallin, vol. 4 (L’Age d’Homme, 1995) 367; and Aleksandr Deich, ‘Chelovek kotorii byl teatrom,’ in Les’ Kurbas. Stat’i i vospominaniia o L. Kurbase Literaturnoe nasledie (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1987) 173. 8 Deich 178. This original interpretation was performed five years before the one performed by Mikhail Chekhov in 1921 under Stanislavsky’s direction. It is known that this interpretation was a powerful source of inspiration for Meierkhol’d’s 1926 The Inspector-General. 9 L. Kurbas, ‘Teatral’noe pis’mo,’ in Les’ Kurbas 339. 10 Ibid. 341. 11 Ibid. 344. 12 Ibid. 343. 13 See, in particular, V. Meierkhol’d, ‘S tekhnikami improvizatsii,’ in Igra 2 (St Petersburg) (1918) 29–30; translated in Meyerhold, Écrits sur le théâtre 291–2. Other references also come from 1918–22. 14 Kurbas, ‘Teatral’noe pis’mo’ 348. 15 See Nelli Kornienko, ‘Teatral’naia estetika L. Kurbasa,’ in Les’ Kurbas, 326; and V. Meierkhol’d, ‘Intervention au GosTIM,’ adapted from the article by Platon Kerzhentsev, ‘Un théâtre étranger (“Chuzhoi teatr”),’ Meeting of 25 December 1937, in Écrits sur le théâtre, 4: 198. Meierkhol’d claims to be an ‘expérimenteur par excellence,’ employing this phrase in French. 16 From 1923, Meierkhol’d headed the Meierkhol’d State Theatre (GosTIM) and ran his experimental theatre workshops – GEKTEMAS (State Experimental Theatre Workshops) and GVYRM (State Advanced Workshops for Theatre Directors) – where he trained actors and directors in a special system of theatrical performance and production. 17 Meierkhol’d’s theatre journal – Afisha GosTIMa (Meierkhol’d State Theatre Playbill) – only published a few issues. 18 See Ivan Aksionov, ‘Piat’ let v Teatre Meierkhol’da,’ which remained unknown until 1994, when it was published for the first time in Teatr 1 [Moscow] (1994) 109–71. 19 L. Kurbas, ‘Sevodnia ukrainskogo teatra i Berezil’,’ in Les’ Kurbas 412.

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20 See V. Meierkhol’d, Leksii 1918–1919, comp. Oleg Feldman (Moscow: OGI, 2000). 21 See N. Kuziakina, ‘Les’ Kurbas,’ in Les’ Kurbas 23. Kurbas’s lecture notes are reprinted in Les’ Kurbas, Filosofiia teatru, ed. Labins’kyi. 22 Les’ Kurbas, ‘Puti i zadachi Berezilia,’ in Les’ Kurbas 385. 23 Kurbas in 1924, quoted by N. Kornienko, Rezhissiorskoe iskusstvo 206. La Princesse Turandot was on tour in Kyiv in 1922. Editors’ note: The Berezil actors were reading the Russian formalist theorist Viktor Shklovsky at that time. Kurbas deliberately chose to use the word ochudennia over vidchudnennia (Russian: ostranenie). The Ukrainian prefix ‘o’ emphasizes chudo – the miraculous, the marvellous; so the object is endowed with the marvellous; by contrast, vidchudnennia (with the prefix ‘vid’ or from, away) emphasizes the alien and the foreign. Kurbas was thus drawing attention to spiritual and joyous functions. 24 Ibid. 160. 25 See Meierkhol’d, Écrits sur le théâtre, vol. 1 (revised and augmented 2002) 193. 26 Founder of the Society for Psychology in Buenos Aires and of Italian origin, he was one of the promoters of socialism in Argentina. 27 See Kornienko, ‘Teatral’naia estetika L. Kurbasa’ 289. 28 See Aleksandr Zaporozhets, ‘Master,’ in Les’ Kurbas 171–2. 29 Kornienko, ‘Teatral’naia estetika’ 276, who quotes M. Krushel’nyts’kyi’s recollections of 18 May 1959. 30 Irena R. Makaryk, ‘The Perfect Production: Les Kurbas’s Analysis of the Early Soviet Audience,’ Gramma: Journal of Theory and Criticism 15 (2007) 89–109, examines Kurbas’s unusually wide and still unsurpassed spectrum of tools for audience analysis. 31 See Kornienko, Rezhissiorskoe iskusstvo 192. 32 Editors’ note: Kulish’s play is titled after the name of the hero of the eponymic work by Ilia Erenburg, Julio Jurenito (1922), apparently based on the true story of a man who died in Ukraine in 1921 under obscure circumstances. The work was published in 1926 as a booklet. However, it was presented in Kyiv (in Russian) at the Novyi Kyivskii Theatre under the direction of M. Diskovskii. 33 See the recollections of Zaporozhets, ‘Master’ 159. 34 See the reminiscences of Irina Avdiieva, ‘Kratkii mig prazdnika,’ in Les’ Kurbas 86–7. After the closure of Smirnov’s Studio, Kurbas welcomed the abandoned actors. 35 Contract preserved at the Ukrainian State Museum of Theatre, Music, and Film Arts in Kyiv, displayed during the permanent exhibition on Les Kurbas, and reproduced in Veronika Gopko-Pereverzeva’s mémoire [research paper] ‘L’Expressionisme dans les mises-en-scène de Les Kurbas au Théâtre Berezil,’ 2002–3, Université de Paris III– Sorbonne Nouvelle (supervisor: B. Picon-Vallin) 87–8. 36 Telegram dated 17 December 1924, State Museum of Theatre, Music, and Film Arts (Kyiv; RN 8570); reproduced in Gopko-Pereverzeva 89–90. 37 See Evgeniia Strelkova, ‘Zatkinskii v’ezd,’ in Les’ Kurbas 116. 38 Ibid. 39 Deich 189. 40 See anonymous, in Visti VUTsVK 10:7 (1923), n. 150, 4. 41 Ibid. 42 ‘Panfuturist-ekstruktor,’ ‘Les’ Kurbas i Vsevolod Meierkhol’d,’ in Bolshevik 138 (1923). The author is, without a doubt, the pseudonym of Mykola Bazhan. 43 The word was invented in order to highlight the novelty of his work.

536 Béatrice Picon-Vallin with Veronika Gopko-Pereverzeva 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53

54 55 56 57 58

59

60

‘Panfuturist-ekstruktor,’ ‘Les’ Kurbas i Vsevolod Meierkhol’d.’ F. Ia., ‘Kurbas i Meierkhol’d,’ in Visti VUTsVK 24:6 (1923), n. 137, 3. Quoted in N. Kuziakina, 21. See Kurbas, ‘Puti i zadachi Berezilia’ 382. See Deich’s analysis in ‘Chelovek kotorii byl teatrom,’ 185. L. Kurbas, ‘Berezil’ i voprosy faktury’ 378. Les’ Kurbas’s musical and stage composition, produced in February 1923. Kurbas, ‘Berezil’ i voprosy faktury’ 378. Ibid. See B. Picon-Vallin, ‘Le cinéma, rival, partenaire ou instrument du théâtre meyerholdien,’ in Théâtre et cinéma années vingt, general ed. Claudine Amiard-Chevrel, vol. 1 (Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme, 1990). Meyerhold produced two films before 1917 and had several projects in mind in the 1920s, although they never materialized. Khanan Shmain, ‘Rezhyser, pedahoh, uchenyi,’ in Les’ Kurbas, ed. Vasyl’ Vasyl’ko (Kyiv: Mystetsvo, 1969) 136. In Kievskii proletarii, 7 May 1926; quoted in Kornienko, Rezhissiorskoe iskusstvo 209. See B. Picon-Vallin, Meyerhold: Les voies de la création théâtrale, vol. 17 (Paris: CNRS Editions, 1990–2004) 154–9. For a detailed study of this remarkable production, see Irena R. Makaryk, Shakespeare in the Undiscovered Bourn: Les’ Kurbas, Ukrainian Modernism, and Early Soviet Cultural Politics (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2004), chapter 2. Meierkhol’d’s The Inspector-General and The Mandate, and Kurbas’s Macbeth, among other plays, may be cited as productions in which a group of characters performed an ‘endless’ scene of crowning and re-crowning. Malcolm was executed by another pretender who was in his turn executed and replaced, and so on … M. Butkevich, K igrovomu teatru: Liricheskii traktat (Moscow: GITIS, 2005) 222.

For the whole earth is the sepulchre of famous men; and their story is not graven only on stone over their native earth but lives on far away, without visible symbol woven into the stuff of other men’s lives. Pericles, Funeral Oration over the Athenian Dead1

1 Cited by Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, rpt. in Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter, trans. Thomas Cahill (New York: Doubleday, 2003) 245.

20 Les Kurbas and the Spiritual Foundations of the Ukrainian Avant-garde nelli kornienko

Les Kurbas’s youth coincided with the tumultuous modern age, when things were not right: Hamlets were to be found both on stage and in the audience, Treplevs shot themselves for not measuring up to the ideal. Fantasy and imagination did not fit into the narrow confines of reality. Kurbas was drawn both to the temptations of theatrical illusion and to a fairly sceptical sobriety which would not allow him to live on hope alone. All this led away from life to literature, from the material world to spiritual asceticism. Kurbas’s contemporaries resolved this conflict either by rejecting the imperfection of man in favour of the always reliable marionette, as did Gordon Craig; or by refuting the material world which had deceived humanity, as did the Cubists. Others turned with nostalgia to the art of the ancients, to the ideals of Hellas and ancient Egypt. Maurice Maeterlinck1 proposed sublimation in an exclusively symbolist existence. Nikolai Evreinov regarded the creation of a ‘theatre for oneself’ as the panacea, while Isadora Duncan sang a Dionysian ode to the body. Some preached simplicity, while others awaited miracles, as they turned towards mysticism and magic. The world was capricious and full of contradictions. On the remains of old Romantic standards, poets wrote despairing poems about the coming war and global catastrophe. Theatre, painting, and music cried out and floundered, begging and calling for redemption. The idea of a unified existence was disintegrating. To renew the broken ‘thread of time’ meant that new social, moral, and national orientations had to be found. Kurbas understood this, and like many of his contemporaries, believed that art could change the world. He wanted the ideal world of the future to be governed by culture. We find the same ideas in the German Romantics, in Schiller and Kant, in the utopian philosophers, in Plato’s Republic, and even in ancient legends and myths. Craig spoke about this at the beginning of the twentieth century, and sixty years later Peter Brook would again echo these ideas. As a twenty-year-old idealist and director-to-be, Kurbas consciously searched for his point of resistance, one on which he, like Archimedes, would overturn the world. Kurbas came from Western Ukraine, which was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His grandfather was a priest [allowed to marry in the Eastern Catholic Rite]. Both his parents were actors. His father was called ‘the leading force of Western Ukrainian theatre.’ He was sent to study in the capital, Vienna.

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20.1 Les Kurbas at the Young Theatre (VT)

In 1907–8 Kurbas, a student of Germanic and Slavic studies, concentrated on philosophy and theology. He embarked on a course of language study – since he knew German, Polish, and Yiddish, he focused on Old Church Slavonic and Sanskrit. Previously, he had taught himself English in order to read Shakespeare, and Norwegian to read Ibsen. He was completely open to the intellectual and spiritual teachings of both West and East. Kurbas’s library of the time contained German-language books on Persian, Arabic, Indian, and Chinese literatures; Old German poetry and prose; Georg Brandes’s essays on Russian literature from Avaakum to Dostoevsky; and a plethora of works on classic Greek theatre and drama, psychological portraits of Shakespeare, Goethe, Kierkegaard, and Voltaire. In addition to Plautus, Terence, and Lucian, there was the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. For a while he was fascinated by Lev Tolstoy’s moral teachings. He was also attracted to Tibetan medicine and the ancient Hindu Vedas. But theatre remained Kurbas’s secret obsession. Arising at five in the morning, Les would hurry to stand in line for an hour or two to obtain theatre tickets and then spend all day in the sweet anticipation of his encounter with the beautiful – as he watched Alexander Moissi perform Romeo, or the unparalleled Josef Kainz as Ferdinand or Richard III. Kurbas encountered Vienna in ‘the age of the tragic mind,’ as Bernhardt Reich called the first decade of the twentieth century in Europe. It was then that ‘unconstrained eternity’ became the subject of Kurbas’s intellectual quest. His ethical-philosophical search included the teachings of Francis Assisi and Jakob Böehm, together with an ardent interest in mysticism and the fantastic. Life was imbued with Romanticism and Catholicism, as new pages of secret knowledge were being revealed. At the time, Rudolf Steiner was particularly popular in Europe and lionized by students.2 Steiner’s articles on Goethe’s and Schiller’s Weltanschauung, his theatrical reviews, his comments on Wagner, Ibsen, and Dostoevsky – all enticed Kurbas with their celebration of the spirit and ‘philosophy of freedom.’ Steiner’s Anthroposophy was based on new scientific discoveries, and appealed to the young

540 Nelli Kornienko

20.2 Rudolf Steiner (photo: NKLKC)

20.3 Hryhory Skovoroda lithograph by Mykhailo Zhuk, 1925

Kurbas, who felt there was great potential in transferring this knowledge to the pretersensual (or extrasensory) sphere. Anthroposophy prophesied a ‘second awakening,’ unknown to everyday ‘simple,’ ‘linear’ consciousness. To counter the exterior dimensions of life and ‘external’ states of the soul, Steiner called for ‘inspiration’ – a state of a ‘pure emptiness’ of consciousness. Only the spiritual would be permitted into this state of ‘alertness.’ As a prerequisite, Steiner insisted on a ‘profound silence-reticence of the human soul,’ on ‘spiritual listening.’ This, he argued, is how what is of greatest significance arises. Later art ‘translates’ this into sensory and extrasensory languages. It is this ‘second awakening’ that establishes a new hierarchy and new relations with the physical world, which is derivative, of secondary importance. At times it can be equated with dreams, hallucinations, and mirages. In his lectures on the nature of dreams, Steiner showed how such a new hierarchy of values in the life of the soul can change the imagery of dreams, which then become revelations about the essence, the nature of the principal laws of existence. All this impressed Kurbas (as later it would impress another great artist, the Russian actor Mikhail Chekhov, who would make a special point of visiting Steiner’s European studio in 1924). Steiner, like the neo-Platonists and the eighteenth-century Ukrainian philosopher Hryhory Skovoroda,3 maintained that ‘a person is a microcosm that carries inside him all the secrets of the macrocosm.’4 He proposed human ‘co-operation’ and ‘co-creativity’ with the universe, an understanding which was not only intellectual, but also achieved through spiritual elation and ecstasy, through a mobilization of the subconscious that continuously forms the person. According to Steiner, artists should bring themselves to states of spiritual elation in which everything around them is seen anew, through new eyes. This will lead to a transformation of both the individual and the world. Thus, a unique form of ‘defamiliarization’ and ‘ochudnenia [or astonishment]’ arises in the perceptions of the world.5

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In 1907 at a Congress of the [Theosophical] Society in Munich, Steiner presented Edouard Schuré’s6 Eleusian Drama with Marie von Sievers in the role of Demeter. This was a unique mystery, the result of spiritual experiments in the awakening of self-discovery and research into the ‘extrasensory’ and the intuitive. Gesture and movement were central to this image-based performance. Kurbas was fascinated by Steiner’s idea of a return to the primary forms of theatre, to the moment when theatre was ‘a performance everyone could partake in and celebrate.’7 Steiner was held in high esteem as a theosophist and mystic by such thinkers and artists as Andrei Bely and Viacheslav Ivanov. Kurbas, however, was more interested in the theatrical aspect, in Steiner’s attempt to unite the consciousness of the audience with the consciousness and emotional experiences of the characters. Steiner’s productions convinced Kurbas that total unification of stage and audience was possible when both actors and audience professed the same ‘moral religion.’8 In such a unified world view the actor’s art could border on clairvoyance, where theatre would become a mystery for the future that could transform a person psychologically from within through the soul’s creativity. Kurbas’s youthful fascination with Steiner attests to the correlation of his thinking with contemporary European notions about the quest for moral absolutes. In 1920 Kurbas would write the following in his diary: Art, especially the theatre, must return to its original form – the form of a religious act. It is in its essence a religious act. Look at Steiner – his concept of art as having a Luciferian beginning. Look at Edouard Schuré. [Art] is a powerful device for transforming the coarse into the refined, ascending into the higher spheres, transforming the material. Theatre is truly a temple and must be pure and tranquil, even though all kinds of prayers will be said in it.9

‘For Kurbas as for Goethe, theatre was a laboratory in which he, like an ancient alchemist, sought the philosopher’s stone capable of transforming the quotidian in the human soul into gold.’10 Kyiv’s Young Theatre (1916–19) was Kurbas’s first attempt to create a utopia. Alchemy also stimulates a paradox. From the very beginning Kurbas existentially tended towards characteristics typical of hesychasm [a tradition of praying in the Eastern Orthodox Church that requires the hermit to retire inward and stop registering the senses in order to achieve an experiential knowledge of God]. It was no accident that near the close of his creative life, in anticipation of a tragic end, his thoughts centred on the idea of retreating to a monastery, a cell, a lighthouse, on the tranquillity of solitude, as they once had in his youth. But, for the time being, the ‘hermit’ was thrust into a whirlwind. The Young Theatre represented the beginning of a new Ukrainian theatre, a theatre of the avant-garde. The new European drama and philosophy were to become the sources for a new consciousness. The individual in European drama was read through mystical and metaphysical formulae. Drama was to become the poetry and philosophy of life. Sin, sacrifice, death, the essence of the ‘I,’ and love were to be prepared with refined perfection.

20.4 Actors of Les Kurbas’s Berezil Theatre (YHOD)

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Like Appia’s reforms, Craig’s theory of an ‘ideal theatre’ emerged out of the logic of symbolism and the aesthetic of the modern.11 Later, these would be developed by Kurbas, together with his theory of ‘imagistic transformation.’ In Russian culture, Meyerhold, Aleksandr Blok, Viacheslav Ivanov, Nikolai Berdiaev, and others belong in this context. Ukrainian theatre exhibited trends analogous to those dominant in European theatre, and built its spiritual bases on this foundation. For instance, Lesia Ukrainka’s work provides an example of the innovative use of the Symbolist aesthetic.12 Her dramas represented a unique modification of classic drama, and at the same time a Symbolist reflection of ancient pre-Christian biblical mythologemes. Kurbas’s Young Theatre began its existence as the cannons of the First World War roared, on the eve of the October Revolution in Russia. The idea of a nationalliberation movement was very relevant – in March 1917, before the Bolshevik coup in Russia, a national government, the Central Rada (Council), was formed in Kyiv, made up of the nation’s intellectual elite. The resulting upsurge in national awareness affected practically all social strata in Ukraine, leaving a substantial mark on new artistic thought, especially on theatre. Kurbas understood that the new age offered the opportunity to realize his dream of theatre as a social parliament, the creator of new life in a new, free, Ukraine. His first theatre, the Young Theatre, was an experiment in how to traverse the history of world theatre in a few years. Each production addressed a separate ‘age.’ Kurbas studied aesthetics from the ancient Greeks to naturalism and modernism. Each production at the Young Theatre became a separate lesson in a different style of design and method of performance. The Young Theatre presented a unique anthology of theatrical styles, an aesthetic of diversified forms. There were ‘spiritual mysteries,’ with elements of Impressionism (ĩuławski’s Ijola), with references to Goya’s Los Caprichos; the Symbolist Études by the Ukrainian poet Oleksander Oles; and the naturalistic tones of Volodymyr Vynnychenko’s The Black Panther and the White Bear, with its strong biblical allusions to the theme of sin. These were followed by Lesia Ukrainka’s U pushchi (In the Wilderness), on the freedom of the creative individual, ‘conformity,’ and the price spiritual tyranny demands for freedom; as well as Kurbas’s staging of Jan Hus,13 based on a poem by Taras Shevchenko, in which Kurbas first utilized elements of Expressionism. Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex (1918) became the quintessential Young Theatre production. Continuing Appia’s and Craig’s experiments with music and space in theatre, Kurbas and designer Anatol Petrytsky opened up the box set, placing white columns, cubes, and stairs against a grey backdrop. The stage space consisted of pure architectural forms. The director insisted on ‘feelings, as in Handel’s oratorios.’ Ancient cosmocentricity, a focus on where we come from, became the spiritual context for the play. This was done in a time that proclaimed man as the measure of all and the centre of the universe. In contrast to Reinhardt’s Oedipus Rex, with its army of extras playing Athenian plebeians, Kurbas’s production accentuated the abstract ‘ballet’ of the chorus. A new theatrical lexicon was created utilizing the white tunics of the chorus, the asceticism

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20.5 Volodymyr Leontovych as Creon and Les Kurbas as Oedipus

of the grey backdrop, the interplay between the architectural design and the aesthetic movement of the new stylized ballet. ‘The chorus with its beautiful gestures and movements creates a deep, aesthetically unforgettable impression, and, in fact, continuously holds the spectators in a state of tension,’ noted a critic.14 He explained it in the following way: ‘The chorus harmoniously joins every rhythm with an appropriate gesture. That is to say, every musical note has a musical gesture.’15 In Kurbas’s version, Oedipus moved towards death, non-existence, yet his physical blindness became an indicator of the most profound inner enlightenment – the universe opens up to the blind. Kurbas reconsidered the concepts of the ‘individual’ and of ‘fate.’ Entering into a duel with fate, his tragic hero lost. But something much greater than physical life was gained – the eternity of truth and faith, the strength of the human spirit, a higher moral order. It is important to stress that Kurbas’s version referred not only to the problem of the tragic hero and his relationship with the people, or the problem of Fate and individual responsibility. The beauty of motion, line, and sound was of no less importance to the director. The production demonstrated the significance and value of purely aesthetic stage methods. Stanislavsky, Reinhardt, Vakhtangov, and Meyerhold also embarked on such quests. Aesthetic perfection was of prime importance to Craig. Utilizing methods of theatrical language and space, Kurbas transformed the classic drama, with its monosemantics and paradigmic and syntagmatic arrangement, into an accented and strengthened polysemantic [work].16 He introduced ‘cultural citations,’ what we now call intertextual references, and additional ‘sources’ into his staging. The polysemantic role of the chorus, the ‘cultural citations’ from the present and from other forms of art (sculpturally organized movement, architecture, etc.) strengthened the decentred motion of content, made it especially sensitive to the infinite. Not surprisingly, a contemporary critic noted: ‘The methods of the interpretation of ideas impress. Here Kurbas has undoubtedly risen to a philosophical understanding of art and to great bravery, displayed brilliantly in the production of Oedipus Rex.’17 The production was a triumph of principle.

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All around there was instability; all life-support systems disintegrated during the prolonged war, revolution, and financial chaos. Yet Kurbas continued to build an avant-garde theatre for the future. In 1918, in his introduction to Victor Auburtin’s Art Is Dying,18 which Kurbas translated from German, he polemicized with ‘this book of fathomless, hopeless sorrow but a profound love for art.’ ‘I consider the appearance of Bergson in philosophy, with his defence of metaphysics and turn to intuition applies to … a turning point between two great eras in style … I think that pure reason is told once again: You are not strong enough to make it on your own.’19 The director believed that the future of theatre lay in a synthesis of the rational with the intuitive. As Kurbas continued to work through his theatrical anthology of styles, his production of Franz Grillparzer’s Woe to the Liar became a laboratory for commedia dell’arte, which I would also like to call ‘in anticipation of Huizinga.’20 The director allowed Anatol Petrytsky a free hand in design. After Oedipus Rex’s architectural forms and cosmic dimensions, ‘infinite’ forms of play were at the centre of this production: ‘Fantastically drawn colourful trees, giant keys, houses smaller than a human foot, fish in a river, an enigmatic forest – these were very appropriate and reflected the unreality of much in this play.’21 Eccentricity, buffoonery, farce, and unrestrained improvisation replace the pseudo-heroic in this historic comedy, transforming it into a folk parable. Most important was play – word situational, visual, and pantomimic. Physical action ‘on an assigned topic,’ eavesdropping, pursuits, chases, dashing bodies, hands, legs, the joyous rhythms of feasts, dances, games, contemporaneous insertions – all aimed at the most democratic of audiences – were components of the carnivalesque aesthetic proposed by Kurbas and Petrytsky. Kurbas felt this element of play was an existential vitality and an analogue of the fullness of life. He considered the theatre as a strong spiritual ‘influence’ on society and the state. His ‘theory of transformation’ is based on the formula of play. For me personally, Kurbas’s Young Theatre presents heuristic models by reaching out in their work to a marvellous, mysterious, unknown future. At the time, Kurbas equated theatre with a temple in its semantic richness. A temple, in such a sense, can be a city, an individual, or any other phenomenon. Even The Black Panther and the White Bear, despite its compromises, featured liturgical sounds; In the Wilderness was a rebellious revelation, and Ijola a covert prayer for sin. Commenting on the theatre that he was creating, Kurbas fiercely condemned surface imitation as the absence of life (which for him was an artistic phenomenon, as it was for Meyerhold, Craig, and Reinhardt). Kurbas hoped to synthesize all the elements that made up an actor’s microcosm, to overcome the Dionysian, transforming it into an ideal essence, the Apollonian ‘I.’ A Political Theatre At this point, Kurbas believed that it was possible to ‘utilize’ the revolution to change society’s priorities, to instil in it the primacy of theatre, art, and culture as structural elements. For a while, Kurbas was successful in realizing Gordon Craig’s dream of creating a unique theatrical academy. The Berezil Theatre (1922–33), first

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20.6 Directors’ lab at the Berezil, 1925. Sitting: Kh. Shmain, Ya. Bortnyk, V. Vasylko, B. Tiahno, Z. Pihulovych, Les Kurbas, F. Lopatynsky, and Yu. Lishchansky; standing: P. BerezaKudrytsky, I. Kryha, and A. Priy

called the Berezil Artistic Association, became its embodiment.22 It laid the foundations for all forms of Ukrainian theatre – drama, opera, experimental, operetta, cabaret, review, circus, cinematographic, and children’s theatre. It also established the first theatre museum in Ukraine, and created the basis for theatre sociology and criticism. Utilizing theatre, Kurbas embarked upon rebuilding a European Ukraine. However, following the failed anti-imperial movement, Ukraine became part of the Soviet Union, which, despite its democratic rhetoric, was beginning to take on the trappings of a new empire. There were attempts to synthesize the teachings of Christ, Buddha, and pagan deities in the writings of Madame Blavatsky,23 Rudolf Steiner, and other esoterics. Expressionists who shared this quest – Georg Kaiser, Ernst Toller, Walter Hasenclever, Fritz von Unruh24 – posited the questions, How to put an end to social inequality, to war? How to still believe in humanism? The plays of Expressionists underwent substantial rethinking in Ukraine, at times so radical that the productions seem to be the antitheses of plays. In particular, Kurbas’s version (1923) of Kaiser’s Gas essentially approached ‘Rousseau and Tolstoy,’ as attested to by critics.25 There are interesting reminiscences by Oleksander (Alexander) Zaporozhets, who as a young man acted with Kurbas and later became an internationally renowned scholar. His methodology was implemented in the American school of psychology. The scholar-psychologist had interesting observations about Kurbas’s composition of mass scenes, which include descriptions

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20.7 Jimmie Higgins and the King

of the transformation of the cog-like person, a part of the machine, into an individual. This was done when, all around in real life, the individual was nullified and turned into a human cog. For this, Kurbas was denounced for his ‘abstract humanism.’26 Kurbas went even further in his next production, Jimmie Higgins (1923), his own dramatization of the American novel by Upton Sinclair. This is the story of a ‘little man,’ the worker Jimmie Higgins, a socialist who suffered through the First World War to become an independently thinking individual struggling for his rights. The production was not a depiction of ‘class struggle,’ but rather a passion mystery. In an atheistic society, Kurbas unexpectedly laid a sacral theme over simple political content. The director altered the system of motivations and created ‘stream of consciousness’ on stage. This placed Kurbas’s experiment in the sphere of the world avantgarde.27 Kurbas maximally subjectivized his hero’s spiritual space. Subjectivization was gained by rendering the subconscious impulses of the hero’s psyche. Hallucinations and visions that emerged during torture and suffering materialized on the stage. (See Tkacz’s essay, ‘Les Kurbas’s Early Work at the Berezil,’ for a detailed description of this scene.) Kurbas’s second major contribution to the theory and practice of the European avant-garde was his innovative use of cinema in theatre. He constructed his plays according to the principles of film montage, utilizing the aesthetics of Expressionist

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silent film, including the use of special lighting and montage employing ‘dissolves,’ ‘close-ups,’ and a score of musical fragments over concrete sounds, creating a unique musical concretism. Film itself added the texture to the cinematographic text. Short film clips with the lead character became the sense-forming part of the play’s aesthetic. ‘Live’ and ‘film’ scenes were integrated. A giant ‘close-up’ portrait complemented Jimmie’s stage performance and gestures, attaining continuity and ‘relevancy.’ This was the first poly-functional utilization of cinema in theatre. As would become clear later, theatre was forming the filmmakers. At the time, Meyerhold and Eisenstein were also working with film on stage. The aesthetic principle of ‘defamiliarization’ or ‘alienation,’ on which Brecht would later build his epic theatre, was present in Kurbas’s production of Macbeth in 1924 (discussed in Irena Makaryk’s essay ‘Dissecting Time’). Kurbas’s formula of transforming the ‘unseen’ into the ‘seen,’ his ‘stream of consciousness’ that revealed the depths of an individual, and work with rhythm and energy as life principles complemented his idea of an actor as a ‘wise Harlequin.’ He saw theatre as the constructor of life, based on the spiritual principles of the Ukrainian avantgarde as rooted in the philosophy of Hryhory Skovoroda:28 the ‘inner person,’ in the new conditions, was to rely on new discoveries in psychology and philosophy. The human ‘I’ as a ‘microcosm’ concerned Kurbas, even in his political-theatre phase. The ‘I’ as an abyss contained the experience of millennia. Malevich’s Black Square became the consummate mark of this abyss. It provoked inner vision. The avant-garde became unified with the depths of the philosophy of the ‘I.’ But these aesthetic currents changed with time. The politics of the day demanded ‘ordinary’ conduct from Kurbas. The artist was reminded by the state that he, too, was supposed to build socialism. Kurbas conducted experiments on key concepts of his theory. In contrast to Stanislavsky, who emphasized ‘transformation’ as psychological approximation, or Meyerhold, who referred the actor to ‘biomechanics,’ Kurbas searched for a new type of acting in the stream of life, in the stream of energy, with rhythm as a foundation.29 ‘Everything in the world has rhythm. A table … my words, the wind, and not only rhythms perceived by the ear, the rhythm of sound, but also spatial rhythms (sound also includes space),’ Kurbas maintained.30 Kurbas described acting as the ability of the imagination to enter and be present in the assigned rhythm, to sustain the assigned rhythm. His attention to rhythm as a source of energy was influenced by Steiner’s eurythmics, as well as by van Gogh’s and Gauguin’s rhythmo-plasticity, which actors studied in his theatre. Tibetan meditation, based on the rhythms of the mined associations in the subconscious, was also obligatory. Kurbas’s experiments reached far beyond the limits of theatre, as we can see in his remarks grounded in fundamental ideas about creativity and reception: ‘When we see a building … on Bankova [Street], for example, embellished with animals, elephants, etc., in a way that makes it seem that this narrow building is about to fall, we feel that the building is nervous. The evaluation … [that] we do not like it is because of the discomfort that arises when we sense the building’s disarray … When we focus on it, we repeat this disarray in ourselves.’31

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20.8 Les Kurbas working with Olympia Dobrovolska (YHOD)

In a series of presentations on Japanese and Chinese art and philosophy (Kurbas studied Confucianism, Lao-tzu, and Japanese Shinto), he maintained that the inner ‘microcosm’ is a universe analogous to artistic harmony. Because of this, ‘all approaches in art are various stages of one and the same creative process.’32 Kurbas developed the concept of an energetic source: ‘Even in the concrete and realistic [work of] Rubens there are … elements of the subjectless … [the] influence of paint and colour on a viewer, on mood … on a certain rhythm, similar to … the Suprematists or Expressionists. The material of art is diverse – paint, canvas, drawing, space, time.’33 Implementing the ideas of Émile Jaques-Dalcroze and François Delsarte, Kurbas continued his own research into rhythm as a mechanism of the sublimation of time and space. Like many avant-gardists, Kurbas was a natural ‘semiotician’ and theatrical ‘anthropologist.’ He searched for the organizing principles of a theatrical text.34 The principle of ‘alienation’ or ‘defamiliarization,’ as defined by Viktor Shklovsky and the Russian Formalists,35 was used by Kurbas on the stage as a method of ‘revising’ the canon, changing norms on account of various elements.36 The ‘defamiliarization effect’ can contain philosophical, linguistic, and artistic levels, not only ‘technological’ ones. Audiences and critics were not able to keep up with the director’s experiments, thus constituting yet another component of his impending tragedy. But a battle raged for the hearts and minds of the masses. They had to be included in the ‘cultural revolution,’ as it was then demanded. The director did not march along in step with the times, but far ahead, radically shattering stereotypes.

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20.9 Mykola Kulish reading his play to the artists of the Berezil, 1927

A Philosophical Theatre Kurbas’s most important achievements are connected with the works of dramatist Mykola Kulish (1892–1937) and designer Vadym Meller (1884–1962).37 At that time, the theme of heroism in the service of the Party predominated in Soviet theatre. Family ties and the individual carried no weight, which is why a play such as Konstantin Treniov’s Liubov Yarova (Russian: Liubov Yarovaia) with a heroine who informs on her own husband, seemed ‘proper’ to Party members and became a Soviet classic. Kurbas created a very different theatre, one that attempted to talk to people during times that were becoming increasing more totalitarian; in contrast, Kurbas’s language was one of philosophical evaluation. Kurbas’s productions of Mykola Kulish’s works marked the beginning of his philosophical theatre.38 Kulish’s drama The People’s Malakhy was a theatrical shock. Today it is regarded as one of the century’s best [Ukrainian] plays. It played to packed houses, although there was growing political pressure on Kurbas’s theatre, as was even visually apparent: the first rows in the theatre had to be reserved for members of the Secret Police.39 The main character of the play is a postal clerk – Malakhy Stakanchyk. Frightened by the Revolution, he walls himself into a closet, reads the Bible and Karl Marx, and begins to confuse the two. He emerges after several years with a project – the ‘sky-blue reform of humanity.’ Malakhy’s reforms consist of a sermon on moral self-improvement. He calls ‘“hitting” a woman with a disrespectful word’ a sin, because ‘the ancient Indian Rig Vedas say never to hit a woman, even with a

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20.10 Yosyp Hirniak, Marian Krushelnytsky, and Valentyna Chystiakova in The People’s Malakhy (VT)

flower.’ But he confuses devotion with debauchery and does not see the enticement of an innocent girl into prostitution, yet suffers when no one can show an elderly pilgrim the road to Jerusalem. Malakhy sets out to save ‘sinners’ and winds up in an insane asylum. Malakhy’s own daughter Liubov, who goes to search for him, commits suicide in ‘Madame Apolinara’s Salon,’ a brothel. The ‘sky-blue dreamer’ is given his due only in the insane asylum. He is rejected by the proletariat when he comes to deliver his sermon. He can find no place for himself under socialism. The dramatist identified the play’s genre as ‘tragicomedic.’ Kurbas and Meller constructed a half-real and half-fantastic world on stage – the world of Malakhy’s feverish mind. The director continued to experiment with the idea of conscious ‘behaviour.’ The author’s cynical tone, irony, sorrow, and laughter, as well as Malakhy’s ephemeral dream, were conscientiously ‘materialized’ on stage by designer Vadym Meller. Together with the director, he created a grandiose ‘reforming machine’ made from a plow, cogwheels, levers, tractor parts, and windmill vanes for Malakhy’s dream sequence. When Malakhy’s ‘sinful’ contemporaries were placed into it, the contraption creaked, as wheels and vanes whirled. ‘Spiritual hymns’ blended with the Communist ‘Internationale’ and church bells rang as the machine transformed Malakhy’s contemporaries into ‘the select.’ Angelic figures with pink wings

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20.11 Scene from act 1 of The People’s Malakhy (VT)

descended from Malakhy’s ‘sky-blue yonder.’ Kurbas introduced an interplay of colours and music based on Scriabin’s research.40 A rich spectrum of blue circles with brilliant yellow centres (the colours of the Ukrainian flag) danced on the backdrop. Butterflies, lines, triangles, and fantastic pictures of Malakhy’s ‘tomorrow’ emerged. While remaining petit bourgeois, Malakhy (as performed by Marian Krushelnytsky) was transformed during the performance into a ‘Hamlet from Mishchanska, or ‘Petit Bourgeois Street.’ Contemporary critics referred to him as a Don Quixote. This was achieved with shifts in the zone of motivation. With a sack thrown over his shoulder and ‘sky-blue dreams’ in his eyes, our hero seemed to be the reverse shadow of the great Skovoroda. This was a new image of a ‘prophet’ tragically (or tragicomically) thrust upon us. It is one of a free person on the infinite road of life, the embodiment of the Ukrainian who wants ‘to go and never to return,’ because the object of the quest, what is best, most precious, is always beyond the horizon. Malakhy could be seen as a folk hero (he was appropriately shown with folk accoutrements: bast shoes, a straw hat, his clothes in a bundle on a stick, and a sunflower in hand). The music had a traditional base; as in any village, the road was the ‘gathering place’ and the in-law its main authority. The combination of realities (reading the Bible and Karl Marx in a closet), the folk laments and liturgical music of the score, the romanticism and the pathos, the psychologically grotesque and ironic melodrama, resulted in an alternation of regularity with irregularity. Krushelnytsky’s Malakhy was imbued with both beautiful notions about the soaring spirit and fanaticism. Kurbas and Kulish showed their hero as a pilgrim, prophet, messiah, at the same time rendering him as a pseudo-hero, anti-prophet, and false shaman who is unmasked in three contexts: a brothel, an insane asylum, and in the scene with the proletariat.

20.12 Scene in psychiatric ward in The People’s Malakhy (NKLKC)

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20.13 Photo of Berezil artists who were rehearsing Maklena Grasa in Mezhyhiria, summer 1933. Les Kurbas and his mother Wanda Yanovych at centre (VT)

The play’s language overtly raised self-awareness to symbolic levels, and, on the other hand, delicately instilled self-awareness through the parody of mythological and quasi-religious reflection. Kurbas played with concepts that were cutting-edge risqué: circles of Hell, life’s Asylum, the Looking Glass, the ‘sky-blue dreams’ watchword as a tragic grimace. Lost Love (the translation of ‘Liubov,’ the name of the heroine and Malakhy’s daughter, who hangs herself) complemented the concept of ‘sky-blue reform’ – Revolution; while the Closet (hermetic confinement) was opposed by wandering as anti-hermeticization and a counterpoint to the canon of the ‘new socialist person.’ The play was built as a stage metaphor for the internment of the Mind. A metatext came into being which brought together a portrait of the world that had been transformed in a looking glass, while the internal world was in the process of losing its self-worth, ‘soaking up’ external stories and themes. Kurbas created a people’s tragedy under the cover of the tragicomic discourse. The semantics in Kurbas’s play were complexly coded and totally confused critics attempting to ‘catch up’ with the phenomenon.41 I personally interpret this remarkable production as both mystical and metaphysical; its re-coded genre was perhaps a brilliant mystification. It allowed for interpretations as a parable, tragicomedy, ‘lament’ – ‘a pitiful lament’ for dreams and illusions, but also provided a warning.

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Kurbas’s Final Production at the Berezil In 1932–3, Ukraine seemed to fall into a coma. That year brought the artificial famine and genocide, which by some accounts took seven million, by others, over ten million lives. All national cultural ‘niches’ were destroyed. Kurbas’s productions of The People’s Malakhy and Myna Mazailo (1930) were closed. Criticism of the Berezil was now more political than artistic. One of the leaders of Ukraine’s Renaissance, Mykola Khvylovy,42 had already put a bullet through his head. His fate was soon to be repeated by Commissar of Education Mykola Skrypnyk,43 who had defended these circles. Lance Corporal Hitler had become the Führer. Representatives of fascist Germany openly demanded at an international economic conference in London the annexation of lands of the western parts of the Soviet Union, namely Ukraine. It was in this atmosphere that Kulish was writing Maklena Grasa, the play that was to be Berezil’s final production. The tragicomedy’s action takes place in Poland under Pilsudski’s dictatorship.44 In the midst of an economic crisis we find the characters at a point where all norms, all firm ground have fallen by the wayside, and society finds itself in catastrophic chaos. The play’s hero, the broker ZbroĪek, kept his money in a bank that folded. He wants to make his money back in one last scheme – his own death. He takes out life insurance. If he is killed, his family will receive enough money to open a factory. ZbroĪek will be immortalized as someone who has ‘made it,’ even at the price of his own life. The daughter of a worker, Maklena Grasa, who has just turned thirteen, decides to kill ZbroĪek, since he has been threatening to evict her, together with her sick father, and her little sister Khrystyna, swollen from hunger, from the basement where they live. The industrialist Zarembski, a representative of ‘Polish’ fascism who dreams of capturing Kyiv and Crimea, also lives in the building and also becomes bankrupt. Another character, the musician Ihnaty Padur, is based on the remarkable Ignacy Paderewski,45 a composer, pianist, as well as Poland’s prime minister and minister of external affairs. In the play, the musician who had once captured the imagination of all of Europe lives in a doghouse and heads a procession of beggars in a wild dance. This was an allegorical statement about the government’s attitude to art; artists are forced to live out of trash cans and feed on scraps of food. Kurbas and Kulish, in collaboration with Meller and the most talented Berezil actors, delivered Maklena Grasa as a play about the deformation of logic in a world in which lesser values – money and ‘Party’ interests – were destroying human individuality and alienating the soul. The production was a philosophical tragicomedy and connected to the ‘ironic tragedy’ of The People’s Malakhy. Meller rendered the play by combining heavy red ‘Shakespearean’ tones, and dressing the stage with glittering ‘washed-out’ decorative textures. The construct on which various scenes took place was covered with mica, creating a raw mist in a certain light – the essences of Time and Space emerging from the murky, foggy autumn atmosphere with light-piercing rain, puddles, mud, umbrellas, galoshes, raincoats, and wet playbills. A street hurdy-gurdy could be heard next to an organgrinder mournfully screeching, while a young dancer (later renowned actress Tamara Karpova) created an acrobatic lacework of movement as though she had just stepped out of a Picasso canvas.

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20.14 Dmytro Miliutenko as Zarembsky and Yosyp Hirniak as ZbroĪek in Maklena Grasa (NKLKC)

A dirty, damp city building reflected the social stratification. A three-tiered model of the world represented heaven, purgatory, and hell. Zarembski, the strongest, held the rights to heaven. He imagined a victory over the world, associated with dictatorship and self-assertion.46 Kurbas and Kulish introduced the intelligentsia’s hidden reflections on the appearance of the ‘two’ fascisms in Europe: the ‘distant,’ ‘Polish,’ one spoke for the more local one. Totalitarian Poland, ‘from sea to sea,’ was a metonymic mirage whose undisputed context was an actual empire that had once been carved from the Baltic and Black Seas to the Pacific Ocean. It was not by accident that the creators of the 1933 staging of Maklena Grasa placed Zarembski at the top of the world. The unemployed worker Grasa lived in the basement with his two children. Above him lived the broker ZbroĪek, who tries to gain access to the world of the Zarembskis.

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Kurbas achieved a rare lightness and lack of inhibition in his direction. The reality of the characters was combined with a hyperbolic deformation of life; the grotesque was combined with irony, lyricism was measured with naturalistic probability, reality with a symbolic definition of the historic perspective of individual fate. This was a fantastic realism that echoed the premises of Gogol’s poetics and elements of the Ukrainian Baroque phantasmagorical novel, whose traditions, interrupted in the early twentieth century, make themselves evident in contemporary Ukrainian prose (Valery Shevchuk)47 and 1960s cinema (Sergey Paradzhanov, Yury Ilienko).48 In Maklena Grasa, Kurbas brought the logic of artistic transformations to a head. The entire play became a transformation, developing a series of associative tropes, subdued to concrete artistic logic, according to a concrete script. A world of ‘devilry’ was presented as a procession of beggars and cripples in the style of the ‘phantasmagorical’ aesthetic of the Ukrainian Baroque and the chilling visions of Goya. Padur, as performed by Krushelnytsky, transformed the begging scene into great art and the gallows humour of its play-within-a-play, in which ZbroĪek was the director, rehearsed his own real, not imagined, murder. The three main characters – ZbroĪek, Padur, and Maklena – defined the central idea. The play featured a scene in which Maklena, driven to despair by the family’s financial situation, decides to walk the street. [Only thirteen], she does not entirely fathom what she is doing. She stands alone in the street, as she does in life, in the pouring rain – in the Deluge. Kurbas created an amazing play with umbrellas in this mass scene. Chopin’s prelude fades as the rain stops. Passers-by stop, shake off their umbrellas, and close them. Maklena comes alive at this instant, energetically attempting to gain the attention of men. But suddenly the rain resumes and is transformed into a downpour. The sound of the prelude fades back up; the umbrellas reopen. People quicken their steps and disappear into the mist. The sloping flats of the set clearly showed the silhouettes of the indifferent people. Their umbrellas, like living separate entities, spoke about the characteristics of their owners. This scene, one of the most important in the play, was masterfully rendered on the psychological, plastic, and musical levels.49

The heroine is counteracted by an exterior, singular in its continuity, totality, reality. Maklena suddenly ‘scores’ – a ‘client’ – but the frightened, horrified, and disgusted Maklena names an incredibly high price. ‘For that kind of money, my dear, one can now buy a mare,’ the ‘client’ says. ‘Well, then … buy yourself a mare’ – the girl answers, unable to carry the burden of pretending to be an ‘adult.’ Maklena presses her palm to her temple – and the city suddenly lunges, disintegrates, and changes. This effect was achieved by a sharp change in the angle of the lights, creating the illusion of movement in the landscape. This deformation of ‘stage texture’ reflects Maklena’s change in consciousness, her changing ‘point of view.’ Kurbas and Meller once again used a ‘transformation’ – and rendered the world through the consciousness of a character in the play. The audience then viewed the world through Maklena’a eyes, identifying with her. The audience saw how the city awoke, fell apart into bits. The artists recreated a surrealistic ‘map of the world’

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20.15 Yosyp Hirniak as the dapper ZbroĪek in Maklena Grasa, 1933 (YHOD)

with unbelievable accuracy, ‘choosing’ from the subconscious its subterranean horrors and rendering them before the audience’s eyes. The young person’s subterranean horror and underground life came to reflect each other, shoving Maklena into a sad adulthood. The mind refused to understand and would not allow logic to explain. The world was falling apart in front of Maklena. ‘The chain of continuity was being broken,’ proposing associations in the philosophical sense. In another scene at the beginning of the play the elegant ZbroĪek runs out onto a plank over the orchestra pit. The soul of the broker soars as he constantly glances at his watch, hoping to hasten the passage of time. An auction will soon bring him happiness: Zarembski’s factory will be his for a song. The actor Yosyp Hirniak, who played ZbroĪek, was extravagant in his plasticity and playfulness. Assuming

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20.16 Yosyp Hirniak as ZbroĪek, who lost all, in Maklena Grasa (VT)

court manners, he bowed and recommended himself to the audience; he was triumphant, victorious. This comedic character tended towards the grand gesture, giving no hint of the tragedy ahead. He returned several minutes later, ruined, lost, and aged. A bowler lifelessly hung from his hand, instead of his dapper cane; his new jacket was wrinkled, worn, and dirty. ZbroĪek had just learned that he was bankrupt. He looked at his building and wife with a blank stare. He slowly recognized them, as if he was slowly returning to life. A nervous attack of asthma gripped him, and he madly cried out (perhaps to God): ‘The money has disappeared beyond the horizon! … Asthma is choking the world! … Its heart is a bank, a global bank – about to burst.’ Then, suddenly a promising idea dawns on ZbroĪek – he can kill himself. In a later scene the broker ZbroĪek prepares for his own death. As its ‘director’ he plans the mise-en-scène of the murder, he readies the props for the bloody event, and counts up the debits and credits. Life is rendered here in two dimensions. On the one hand, the real ZbroĪek readies himself for real death and gathers the elements for its realization in a business-like manner. Pain, fear, horror, cynicism, and faith in the celebration of a quick mind – all of these have become confused in the broker’s inflamed mind. On the other hand, this real person is staging

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20.17 Yosyp Hirniak as ZbroĪek, with watch, in Maklena Grasa (VT)

a play, not about himself, and finding satisfaction in the very risk of rehearsal; ‘homo ludens,’ or the ‘wise harlequin,’ celebrates himself in a premonition about the end – he will fool everyone – he will be murdered. He speaks about himself in the third person, with the tranquillity of a commentator: It’s as if I came out … And I stand like this … (demonstrates) and she shoots from behind, in the neck. Only in the neck! (Sips his wine, continues planning). I hold the watch, clasped in one hand. A mysterious detail, a question for detectives … So (out of habit he adds on an imaginary abacus) the premiums have been paid, the pistol has been bought, the place and time – has been thought through. Only the last will … still remains. (Dresses, takes a candle …).

The pleasure derived from the very fact of ‘playing’ death make this scene a masterpiece of an aesthetic premonition of the totality of play. It marks the infinity of play as a basis for life. Even fear is engulfed by play; its illusoriness becomes obvious. A shift from reality to illusion creates an individual small myth on the level of a micro-subject. ZbroĪek emerges in his own imagination (in an illusion), but there is also the ZbroĪek who has fallen out of the illusion, whose only real option is suicide. His rehearsal of his suicide – a form of his unique mythologization – is at once a way of putting off the actual suicide. ZbroĪek creates a myth about what he has seemingly ‘achieved,’ and transmits it as a ritual accompanied by romantic candlelight, a glass of wine, his philosophizing (a rhetorical substitute for the last word /will?) This is theatre for one actor and for one viewer – an ironic reflection on Evreinov’s idea. Life was being drawn out to form a ritual, death is substituted by ritual. There is another ‘play-within-a-play’ to which the audience is invited – the scene with Marian Krushelnytsky as Padur. The actor rendered Padur as a philosopherbeggar who lives in a dog-house out of protest. The road between Diogenes’ barrel and the dog-house has been long and is getting the best of the unfortunate beggar. His frock has come apart, his sleeves are ragged, and his bowler hat has been squashed into a pancake. In rags, with strands of hair sticking out in the back like quills, only his genteel manners betray the former aristocrat. ‘I was the first to think

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20.18 Natalia Uzhvy as Maklena and Marian Krushelnytsky as Padur in the doghouse scene, Maklena Grasa (NKLKC)

of make begging an art!’ – Padur’s affront required an audience – otherwise how would he have uttered his protest in defence of the perishable luxury of selfawareness? When answering Maklena’s call, the gallant Padur emerges from the dog-house with an enormous bow tie. Here, next to the dog-house, is the appropriate place for free expression. Padur introduces himself: ‘It is I! – like the singularity of self-awareness in philosophy, a world substance, the eternal I! Transcendental according to Kant, congruous with Hegel. I! From which the universe in Fichte emerges and even according to materialism – the highest stage in the development of matter – I!’ An impressed Maklena asks naive questions, which the extravagant philosopher cannot answer. She wants to know whether he has a mother and why he lives in a dog-house. Padur’s transcendental ‘I’ is lost amid these simple questions, which tempt the philosopher to look at his past from a new point of view, making his efforts at self-irony seem foolish. After his unsuccessful ‘revelations about the universe,’ nothing is left for him to do other than to become himself, a tired and disillusioned intellectual. This Padur answers Maklena, when she advises him to become a revolutionary: ‘Ma fille, these were my youthful fantasies and dreams … I have now outgrown them and know that socialism will be nothing but the second grandest illusion after Christianity.’ An instinct for sympathy unfailingly dictates he must do something for Maklena, and she asks her new friend to play for her. Padur answers Maklena with the

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music of his youthful dreams, playing about his beloved, about the mighty trees (‘There aren’t any now’) that he had once seen (‘as in Poussin’s heroic landscapes’), about his love for a girl … He has protected himself from the world with dreams. Krushelnytsky prepared his role as Padur in great detail, staging the scene, directing its lofty music next to the dog-house, at the very edge of fate, in the infinite expanses of the universe. The play’s atmosphere consisted of an uncomfortable, tragic universe. Padur had not managed to enjoy his dream of the past when his ocarina began to emit a strange melody, full of dissonance. ‘I don’t like it much. What are you playing now?’ Maklena fearfully asks. Padur, yells hoarsely to avenge his sentimental weakness: ‘Now? What we have now is revolution, socialism, and communism. The earth is old and cold. And bald! Not a blade of grass left. The sun is like the moon and the moon is half a frying pan … The last musician sits playing a flute! This is my newest composition.’ The dissonance of the ocarina, like the sorrowful despair of Malakhy’s flute, signals discord with the world, harmony transgressed, the alienation of the existential ‘I.’ Life has turned out to be a fraud. Padur must soberly forget his dreams about his beloved, about great trees, forget everything he believed from a long time ago. His only compensation is Maklena’s kiss. But then the youthful creature disappears into the distance, and the shrivelled Padur is left to listen to the quiet music. He wipes away a tear, and exclaims: ‘What sentiment! What irony!’ Then he explodes and frightfully bellows: ‘Vodka!’ Marian Krushelnytsky played Padur as an artist who had been crushed by the world, who ‘was sensitive’ to the spiritual. His unusual persona expressed the solitude of talent, which was dying because: ‘new musicians had come onto the [world – N.K.] stage! … not musicians, but untalented hacks! They play flattering symphonies on official strings for the dictator and receive leading roles in art for this!’ By begging, Padur established the loss of absolute-spiritual values, philosophy, music, memory. The Byronic jest is appropriate here – the goal of self-assertion is now served by a fierce game for … his own life. It is Padur’s involuntary experiment in testing yet another utopia in a series that he unmasks in his monologues. However, Kant and Fichte are no longer responsible for them. Padur’s monologues are a mark of the Apocalypse, and Padur is its prophet. It is easier to sense the coming apocalypse if one feels one’s own subjective apocalypse is at hand. The motivation here is singular, fragile. The artist’s (creator’s) banishment from society is often a sign, a harbinger, of the Apocalypse. Carnivalization and theatralicization constitute important lexical elements in Padur’s scene. Padur mirrors the sorrowful carnival of life, which asks unresolved questions. Everything, including the faded frock coat on the once celebrated musician, life on the edge in the dog-house, and his sincere replies to young Maklena’s questions, has meaning that resonates beyond the theatre. Maklena (who is thirteen years old, not yet a woman; just as old as Juliet) is a character who can still be called a child, an angel close to God. This is why Maklena has unique rights. The fact that she is put into the position of taking a life is a strong condemnation of the world around her.50

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20.19 Les Kurbas in prison (NKLKC)

Following the premiere, on 24 September 1933, Maklena Grasa was performed a few times, and was then removed from the repertoire. Kurbas’s philosophical theatre was doomed. Soon the director would enter onto a new stage, where the artist was pitted against the state. He would direct shows in labour camps and then find himself on the tragically magnificent Solovetsky Islands [in Russia’s far north]. In October 1937 Captain Matvieev of the Secret Police would put a bullet through Kurbas’s temple. It would be one of one of 1, 111 shots that ended the lives of some of the most brilliant and talented intellectuals in the Soviet Union. Each was shot ‘to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the Great October Revolution.’ Translated from the Ukrainian by Virlana Tkacz

NOTES 1 Maurice Maeterlinck (1862–1949), Belgian poet and playwright, writing in French. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1911. 2 Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925), Austrian philosopher, playwright, and esotericist. Originally a Theosophist, he founded Anthroposophy in 1913. He is also the founder of Waldorf education, biodynamic agriculture, and Eurhythmy, a form of expressive movement in which each gesture was coordinated with a sound. 3 At this point Kurbas was not yet aware of Skovoroda’s teachings. 4 See Rudolf Steiner, Christianity as Mystical Fact and Ancient Mystery (1902); Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe’s World Conception (1886); and Theosophy: An Introduction to the Spiritual Processes in Human Life and the Cosmos (1904). See also Robert A. McDermott, The Essential Steiner (Great Barrington, MA: Lindisfarne Books, 2007). 5 See ‘Editors’ note’ to note 23 in chapter 19 above. 6 Édouard Schuré (1941–29), French philosopher, writer, and publisher of esoteric literature. 7 Viacheslav Ivanov, Borozdy i mezhi. Opyty esteticheskogo i kriticheskogo (Moscow: 1916) 270.

564 Nelli Kornienko 8 Hnat Ihnatovych, an actor close to Kurbas, did not rule out the possibility that Kurbas saw Steiner’s play The Guardian of the Threshold in 1913 at the Congress of the Association in Munich. Until the Second World War Ihnatovych had in his possession Kurbas’s notes describing rhythmic exercises that Kurbas had conducted, based on the subject of this mystery play. Iryna Steshenko, Iryna Avdiieva, and H. Behicheva attest to this (from the author’s private archive). 9 A note from Kurbas’s diary, dated 10 July 1920. IMFE, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Document 2876. 10 I. Steshenko about Les’ Kurbas. Interview conducted by Les’ Taniuk, in Nauka i kul’tura 21 (1987) 395. 11 For more detail on this see N. Kornienko, ‘Edvard Gordon Kreg ta ioho teoriia “ideal’ noho teatru,”’ in Gordon Kreg, Pro mystetstvo teatru, trans. N. Kornienko, L. Taniuk (Kyiv: 1974). 12 Lesia Ukrainka (pen name of Larysa Kosach-Kvitka, 1871–1913), one of the best known Ukrainian poets and playwrights. 13 Long poem by Taras Shevchenko, Ukraine’s best-known nineteenth-century poet, about Jan Hus (ca. 1372–1415), a Czech religious thinker and key contributor to the Protestant movement, who proposed to reform the church in his native Bohemia. His followers were known as the Hussites. Jan Hus was excommunicated from the Catholic Church in 1411, and four years later burned at the stake. 14 Iakiv Savchenko, ‘Tsar Edip v Molodomu teatri’ [Oedipus Rex at the Young Theatre], quoted in Iurii Blokhyn, ‘Molodyi teatr [Young Theatre],’ Zhyttia i revolutsia 6 (1930) 166. 15 Kurbas continued the quests of Dalcroze and Delsarte. Not accidentally, these systems, dealing with the creation of special scores for acoustic-plasticity, were later taught in Kurbas’s Berezil’ theatre. 16 In Roland Barthes’s understanding, according to his analyses of the following oppositions: novel-romantic, work-text. 17 Savchenko, ‘Tsar Edip’ 165. 18 Victor Auburtin (1870–1928), Berlin theatre critic. 19 V. Obiurten [Victor Auburtin], Mystetstvo vmyraie (Kyiv: 1918) 3. 20 Johan Huizinga (1872–1945), Dutch historian and one of the founders of modern cultural history. Huizinga first proposed the theory of play as an ontologically valuable source at the beginning of the twentieth century, but his book Homo Ludens was published only in 1938. 21 Oleh Metlyns’kyi, ‘Molodyi teatr: Hore brekhunovi,’ Vidrodzhennia 12 (1918) 202. 22 Berezil’ – derived from March: the beginning of spring, the exuberance of life, ideas, plans. 23 Helena Blavats’ka (1831–91), or Madame Blavatsky as she usually known, was born Helena von Hahn in Ukraine, of German heritage. A writer and psychic, she was the founder of the Theosophical Society in New York, later headquartered in India and London. Her writings connecting the esoteric with new science are considered the first instances of what is now called New Age. 24 Walter Hasenclever (1890–1940), German Expressionist writer; Fritz von Unruh (1885–1970), German Expressionist writer.

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25 Proletars’ka Pravda, 29 April 1923. 26 This term would become part of a totalitarian evaluative concept of life and cultural phenomena, and a dangerous label according to which an artist could expect banishment or even death. 27 The term ‘stream of consciousness’ was introduced by American philosopher-idealist William James. James Joyce’s 1922 novel Ulysses became its classic example. 28 Eighteenth-century Ukrainian philosopher, before whom lay the promises of honours, power, and career. At age 44 Skovoroda set out to wander Ukraine with only a sack over his shoulder. He authored original teachings, which in some ways anticipated his contemporary Rousseau and many of Tolstoy’s ethical concepts. In a certain sense Skovorodianism can be connected to the philosophies of the Middle and Far East that were grounded on the idea of the fulfilment of life through its observation. Ancient systems of thought can also be mentioned in this context. Skovoroda came to integrate ancient, medieval, and modern culture. The philosopher developed the concept of learning about the ‘unseen,’ hidden, ‘inner’ self. Skovoroda saw the road to the Ideal world – to a world of Tranquillity – through an ascent ‘upward’ exclusively according to spiritual laws. Here he acted in continuation of Plotinus’s aesthetics, while at the same time developing the Ukrainian philosophical-theological tradition, connected with the names of Petro Mohyla and Heorhii Konys’kyi. Interestingly, it was the ‘foreigner’ Steiner who first directed Kurbas to this Ukrainian philosopher. 29 Here I mean the experiments by Vlail P. Kaznacheyev and others. 30 Les Kurbas, ‘Aktor u nashii systemi i pratsi nad rolliu’ [The Actor in Our System and Work on the Role], in Les Kurbas, Berezil’ (Kyiv: Dnipro, 1988) 56. 31 Ibid. 55. 32 Ibid. 56. 33 Les’ Kurbas, ‘Pro rol’ svitohliadu ta idei v mystetstvi,’ in Kurbas, Berezil’ 74. 34 This concept is utilized throughout the article in a semiological sense, as are the concepts of ‘sense,’ ‘content,’ ‘levels of sense,’ etc. 35 Viktor Shklovskii (1893–1984), Russian critic writer and linguist, who developed the theories of Russian Formalism. 36 I have in mind the works of Iurii Tynianov, Roman Jakobson, Olga Freudenberg, the Prague School of Linguistics – Jan MukaĜovský, Nikolai Trubetskoi, and others – and also the works of G. WĘlflin, V. Dibelius, L. Schpitzer, and others. The evolution of the core doctrine of the formal method entered the theories [doctrines] of ‘New Criticism’ in Europe (England, USA, Germany, Switzerland, and others). 37 Born in St Petersburg, Vadym Meller studied in Tbilisi, Yerevan, and Kyiv, as well as at the Geneva Art School. After graduating from Kyiv University he continued his studies under H. Knirr in Munich and, later, at the Academy of Arts. Having graduated from it with honours, in 1912 Meller enrolled in Bourdelle’s sculpture class in Paris. Within a year he had exhibited his works in the ‘Independent Salon,’ along with Picasso, Braque, Derain, Delon, Metzinger, and Gleizes. Returning to Kyiv after the revolution of 1917, he worked as a set designer in Bronislav Nijinska’s studio, and became enraptured by monumental art and architecture, experimenting with book design, posters, and machine painting. He ultimately headed the stage design process at the Berezil’ and made the first Ukrainian films (1924) with Kurbas.

566 Nelli Kornienko 38 I consider the following productions to constitute Kurbas’s philosophical theatre: The People’s Malakhii (1927), Myna Mazailo (1929), Maklena Grasa (1933) (all by Mykola Kulish), and Ivan Mykytenko’s Dictatorship (1930). 39 The name of the hero fortunately remained undeciphered by those in power and contemporary criticism. Malakhii – Malachy (Hebrew for ‘my herald’) – was the last of the Old Testament prophets, who foresaw the advent of the Messiah and the impending Judgment Day. 40 Aleksandr Scriabin (1870–1915), Russian composer, pianist, and mystic, who developed a colour system based on Isaac Newton’s optics that he then associated with musical keys. 41 See Z. Hurevych, ‘Pro narodnoho Malakhiia,’ Krytyka 5 (1928); P. Rulin, ‘Berezil’ u Kyievi,’ Zhyttia i revolutsiia 7–8 (1929); L.M., ‘Khot’ ty i v novoi kozhe,’ Proletarii, 10 December 1929; K. Kravchenko, ‘Narodnyi Malakhii,’ Proletars’ka pravda, 30 May 1929; B.R., ‘Narodnyi Malakhii,’ Proletars’ka pravda, 30 May 1929; Iu. Smolych, ‘Ukrains’ki dramatychni teatry v sezoni 1927–28,’ Zhyttia i revolutsiia, September 1928; and others. 42 Mykola Khvyl’ovyi (born Mykola Fitilev, 1893–1933), writer and publicist of the Ukrainian cultural renaissance of the 1920s. 43 Mykola Skrypnyk (1872–1933), Bolshevik leader and Soviet Ukrainian statesman. He persuaded the Communist Party to introduce a ‘Ukrainianization’ policy. In January 1933 his policies were condemned and he was removed from office, leaving the Ukrainian cultural elite open to attack. 44 Polish history evaluates Pilsudski’s era entirely differently. Of significance here is a model in which Poland appears as a provisional sign for totality, the ‘dictated.’ This can be any country under totalitarianism. Notwithstanding, this naive reference to a ‘non-Soviet’ environment proved to be of no service to the play. 45 Ignacy Paderewski (1860–1941), Polish pianist, composer, diplomat, and a prime minister of Poland. He was born in what is now Ukraine. 46 From Zarembs’kyi’s monologue: ‘We need new paths from sea to sea. We need to enter the expanse of the ocean of the steppe beyond the steely Dnipro as soon as possible … Even further! Further south, to the perches of the Crimean mountains … Kyiv is our key to the east. Danzig – to the West.’ 47 Valerii Shevchuk (1939–), contemporary Ukrainian writer of phantasmagorical novels. 48 Sergei Paradzhanov (born Sarkis Paradzhanian, 1924–1990), Armenian director of powerful lyrical films whose career was curtailed by official harassment. His prizewinning film Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors was based on a Ukrainian short story. Iurii Illienko (1936–), Ukrainian film director and cinematographer. His camera work on Paradzanov’s Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors earned him international awards. He made several award-winning films in the 1960s and 1970s. 49 M. Stanislavs’kii, ‘Ostannia robota Kurbasa,’ in Les’ Kurbas 290–1. 50 We have deliberately allowed ourselves to relate key fragments of the play to allow the reader to ‘feel’ the words and atmosphere of the play, as the reader cannot know twentieth-century Ukrainian classics, and without such an albeit ‘brief’ familiarity it is difficult to understand both the play’s artistic foundations and the reasons for the conflict with the state.

Premonition (excerpts) The sun disappears behind the mountains And its last dream glistens Over the land ... Like my own last dream ... A rose cloud in a tired sky ... A last dream ... Disappears in a maze of tunnels ... I ... I want to live ... I want ... And preconscious fear jolts the eyes wide-open Eyes sightless for a moment. I want to live How hoarse ... I want to live How wild. Les Kurbas, 18 January 1918

Translated from the Ukrainian by Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipps

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APPENDIX 1 Production List

Date

Play*

Author

Director

Designer

EXPERIMENTAL STUDIO, Kyiv (May 1916–September 1917) 9 May (1917)

Bazaar (1910)

Volodymyr Vynnychenko Ukrainian (1880–1951)

Les Kurbas

13 May

Zilia Korolevych (1913)

Stepan Vasylchenko (born Stepan Panasenko) Ukrainian (1878–1932)

Les Kurbas

20 May

Prometheus Unchained Eternal Revolutionary

Celebration at the Kyiv Opera

Les Kurbas

Vasyl Krychevsky D. Ilchenko

YOUNG THEATRE, Kyiv (September 1917–April 1919) 1917–1918 24 September

The Black Panther and the White Bear (1911)

Volodymyr Vynnychenko Ukrainian (1880–1951)

Les Kurbas

According to sketches by Mykhailo Boichuk

15 October

Youth (1893)

Max Halbe German (1865–1944)

Les Kurbas

Mykhailo Boichuk

17 November

An Evening of Études (1913), including Autumn, Dance of Life, In the Light of the Bonfire, and A Quiet Evening

Oleksander Oles (born Oleksander Kandyba) Ukrainian (1878–1944)

Les Kurbas Anatol Petrytsky (3 études) & Hnat Yura (A Quiet Evening)

8 December

Doctor Kerzhentsev, or Thought (1913)

Leonid Andreev Russian (1871–1919)

Hnat Yura

12 April

Ijola (1906)

Jerzy uławski Polish (1874–1915)

Les Kurbas

19–25 August

Young Theatre tours Odesa with The Black Panther and the White Bear, Youth, Evening of Études, Ijola, and previews of In the Wilderness, Woe to the Liar, and Enemy of the People.

*Note: Ukrainian titles have been provided only where there is any doubt as to what the original titles might be.

Mykhailo Boichuk

Date

Play

Author

Director

Designer

16 November

Oedipus Rex

Sophocles

Les Kurbas

Anatol Petrytsky

19 November

Candida (1897)

George Bernard Shaw English (1856–1950)

Hnat Yura

Anatol Petrytsky

3 December

In the Wilderness (1910)

Lesia Ukrainka (born Liarysa Kosach) Ukrainian (1871–1913)

Les Kurbas

Stepan Hrechany

12 December

Woe to the Liar (1838)

Franz Grillparzer Austrian (1791–1872)

Les Kurbas

Anatol Petrytsky

31 December

The Sunken Bell (1896)

Gerhart Hauptmann German (1862–1946)

Hnat Yura

Anatol Petrytsky

January

An Enemy of the People (1882)

Henrik Ibsen Norwegian (1828–1906)

Semen Semdor

January

Tartuffe (1664)

Molière French (1622–73)

Valery Vasyliev

Anatol Petrytsky

8 January

Nativity Play

Traditional text

Les Kurbas

Anatol Petrytsky

30 January

Sin (1918)

Volodymyr Vynnychenko Ukrainian (1880–1951)

Hnat Yura

Stepan Hrechany

11 March

‘Heretic, or John Hus,’ ‘The Great Vault,’ and lyrical poems

Taras Shevchenko Ukrainian (1814–61)

Les Kurbas

Anatol Petrytsky

15 March

Nationalization of theatres by the Bolsheviks. The Young Theatre is renamed The First Young Theatre of Kyiv Soviet of Workers’ Deputies.

April

The Young Theatre is merged with the National Theatre into the Shevchenko Dramatic Theatre.

22 April

Les Kurbas directs the children’s opera Billy Goat (Koza-Dereza) by Mykola Lysenko, designed by Anatol Petrytsky.

1918–1919

Date

Play

Author

Director

Designer

May

Lyrical poems by Pavlo Tychyna staged by Les Kurbas with Young Theatre at the Art Cave.

Early summer

Kurbas announces plans to stage Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He was also considering staging Antony and Cleopatra.

19 August

Kurbas appears in the ballet Aziade, as the sheik.

August

Kurbas prepares two operas – Halka, designed by Oleksander Khvostenko-Khvostov, and Taras Bulba, designed by Anatol Petrytsky. Both sets are destroyed when Denikin’s troops invade Kyiv.

SHEVCHENKO DRAMATIC THEATRE, Kyiv (April 1919–June 1920) 1919–1920 10 March

Haidamaky (1841)

Taras Shevchenko Ukrainian (1814–61)

Les Kurbas

Kostiantyn Yeleva

KYIDRAMTE (KYIV DRAMATIC THEATRE), Touring company (June 1920–January 1922) 1919–1920 Summer 1920 in Bila Tserkva (June–September): 47 performances of 11 productions, including revivals of Young Theatre productions of The Black Panther and the White Bear, Woe to the Liar, and Youth. New productions include: 9 June

2 July

They Made Fools of Themselves (Poshylysia v durni) (1875)

Marko Kropyvnytsky Ukrainian (1840–1910)

Les Kurbas

Satan perhaps God, Man and Devil (1900)

Jacob Gordin Born in Ukraine (1853–1909)

Pavlo Dolyna

Dance of Bureaucrats perhaps Dance of Fools (1912)

Leo Birinsky Born in Ukraine (1884–1951)

Les Kurbas

Miss Mara (1917)

Volodymyr Vynnychenko Ukrainian (1880–1951)

Les Kurbas

Date

Play

Author

Director

Designer

20 August

Macbeth

William Shakespeare

Les Kurbas

Anatol Petrytsky

26 September

The Captive (1872)

Marko Kropyvnytsky Ukrainian (1840–1910)

Les Kurbas

1920–1921 Kyidramte in Uman (September–April): 159 performances, including revivals of productions from the Experimental Studio (Zilia Korolevych), Young Theatre (Nativity Play, Evening of Études by Oles, Oedipus Rex, Lyrical Poems by Shevchenko), Shevchenko Dramatic Theatre (Haidamaky), and most Kyidramte productions from Bila Tserkva. New productions include: Mirandolina, or The Mistress of the Inn (1753)

Carlo Goldoni Italian (1707–93)

Les Kurbas

Liberty (1898)

Maurice Pottecher French (1867–1960)

Les Kurbas

At the First Dance (1911)

Stepan Vasylchenko (born Stepan Panasenko) Ukrainian (1878–1932)

Les Kurbas

16 January Spring 1921

The Marriage (1873)

Nikolai Gogol (born Mykola Hohol) Ukrainian/Russian (1809–1852)

Vasyl Vasylko

5 March

The Inspector General (1836)

Nikolai Gogol

Les Kurbas

18 March

Marat

Anton Amnuel (born Nikolai Nikolaev) Russian (1890–?)

Les Kurbas

Last Days of the Paris Commune

Nikolai Ivanovich Lvov

Les Kurbas

White Carnations

Alphonse Daudet French (1840–1897)

Winter 1920

8 April–5 July 1922: Kyidramte in Kharkiv July to end of 1922: Kyidramte in Bila Tserkva

Date

Play

Author

Angelo, the Tyrant of Padua (1835)

Victor Hugo French (1802–85)

Cricket on the Hearth (1845)

Charles Dickens English (1812–70)

The Lawyer Patelin (1706)

David-Augustin Brueys French (1640–1723) and Jean Palaprat French (1650–1721)

A Doll’s House (1879)

Henrik Ibsen Norwegian (1828–1906)

Romeo and Juliet (fragments)

William Shakespeare

Director

Designer

Favst Lopatynsky

Les Kurbas

BEREZIL ARTISTIC ASSOCIATION, Kyiv (30 March 1922–4 May 1926) 1922–1923 7 November

October (Three Scenes of Struggle and Victory)

Scenario written collectively by the First Studio

Les Kurbas

Vadym Meller

Les Kurbas directs Uncle Kindart’s October Puppet Show, a political satire, as a special presentation for the 45th Division of the Red Army. 24 February

Ruhr

Script written by collective of the First Studio

Les Kurbas

Vadym Meller

27 April

Gas I (1918)

Georg Kaiser German (1878–1945)

Les Kurbas

Vadym Meller

June–July

First Studio tours Kharkiv with Ruhr and Gas.

Favst Lopatynsky

Vadym Meller

1923–1924 7 November

The New Ones Advance

Based on story by Yukhim Zozulia Russian (1891–1941) dramatized by Favst Lopatynsky

Date

Play

Author

Director

Designer

20 November

Jimmie Higgins

Based on 1919 novel by Upton Sinclair American (1879–1968) Dramatized by Les Kurbas

Les Kurbas

Vadym Meller

6 January

The Machine Wreckers (1922)

Ernst Toller German (1893–1939)

Favst Lopatynsky

Vadym Meller

14 February

Man and the Masses (1921)

Ernst Toller

Hnat Ihantovych

Vadym Meller

2 April

Macbeth (new version)

William Shakespeare

Les Kurbas

Vadym Meller

3 April

Gas Masks (1923)

Sergei Tretiakov Russian (1892–1939)

Mise-en-scène: Les Kurbas director: Borys Tiahno

17–30 May

Fourth Studio tours Kharkiv with The Machine Wreckers, Macbeth, Haidamaky, and Jimmie Higgins.

June

Fourth Studio tours Poltava with Jimmie Higgins, Haidamaky, and Macbeth.

Summer

Kurbas directs two films at VUFKU Studios in Odessa: Vendetta and Macdonald.

1924–1925 8 November

They Made Fools of Themselves

Marko Kropyvnytsky Ukrainian (1840–1910) Modernized by Volodymyr Yaroshenko Ukrainian (1893–1941)

Favst Lopatynsky

Valentyn Shkliaiev & Maiia Symashkevych

23 December

The Secretary of the Labor Union

based on 1905 novel The Walking Delegate by Leroy Scott American (1875–1929) Dramatized by Borys Tiahno

Borys Tiahno

Vadym Meller

Date

Play

Author

Director

Designer

25 February

Chasing Two Rabbits (1883)

Mykhailo Starytsky Ukrainian (1840–1904) Modernized by Volodymyr Yaroshenko (1893–1941)

Vasyl Vasylko

Valentyn Shkliaiev and Maia Symashkevych

8 August

Les Kurbas is named ‘People’s Artist of the Republic.’

1925–1926 Planned

97 by Mykola Kulish, but Kurbas terminates the rehearsals directed by Yanvary Bortnyk

17 October

The Commune in the Steppes (1925)

Mykola Kulish Ukrainian (1892–1937)

Pavlo BerezaKudrytsky

Valentyn Shkliaiev and Maia Symashkevych

12 November

La Jacquerie (1828)

Prosper Mérimée French (1803–70)

Borys Tiahno

Valentyn Shkliaiev

24 December

On the Eve (Naperedodni)

Based on étude ‘The Year 1905’ by O. Popovsky and Adrian Piotrovsky (1898–1938) dramatized by Stepan Bondarchuk (1886–1970)

Les Kurbas

Valentyn Shkliaiev

Kurbas directs film Arsenaltsi for VUFKU Studios, completed in December 1925. 11 March

The All-Ukrainian Theatre Commission announces that the Berezil Artistic Association will be reorganized as the Berezil National Theatre and be moved to Kharkiv, then capital of Ukraine.

19 March

Riff-raff (Shpana) (1926)

4 May

Berezil Artistic Association’s farewell performance in Kyiv includes scenes from Haidamaky, La Jacquerie, On the Eve, Chasing Two Rabbits, The Commune in the Steppes, Jimmie Higgins, and Riff-raff.

Volodymyr Yaroshenko Ukrainian (1893–1941)

Yanvary Bortnyk

Maia Symashkevych and Valentyn Shkliaiev

Date

Play

Author

Director

Designer

BEREZIL NATIONAL THEATRE, KHARKIV (1926–1933) 1926–1927 16 October

Golden Guts (1926)

Fernand Crommelynck Belgian (1888–1970)

Les Kurbas

Vadym Meller

23 November

Sadie

Based on short story ‘Miss Thompson’ by Somerset Maugham English (1874–1965) dramatized by John Colton and Clemens Randolph as Rain (1922) Translated by Mike Yohansen

Valery Inkizhinov

Vadym Meller

20 January

Prologue

Re-working of On the Eve Text by Les Kurbas & Stepan Bondarchuk

Les Kurbas

Maiia Symashkevych & Valentyn Shkliaiev

3 February

Sava Chaly (1898)

Ivan Karpenko-Kary (born Ivan Tobilevych) Ukrainian (1845–1907)

Favst Lopatynsky

Maiia Symashkevych

19 March

The King Amuses Himself (1832)

Victor Hugo French (1802–85) translated by Maksym Rylsky

Borys Tiahno

Valentyn Shkliaiev

13 April

The Mikado (1885)

Gilbert and Sullivan, text modernized by Mike Yohansen and Ostap Vyshnia (born Pavlo Hubenko)

Valery Inkizhinov

Vadym Meller

Date

Play

Author

Director

Designer

1927–1928 Planned

Woyzeck by Georg Büchner (1813–1837). Kurbas starts rehearsals, but the Repcommittee denies the theatre permission to stage the show.

4 October

The Spell of the Apple Blossoms (Yablunevyi polon) (1926)

Ivan Dniprovsky (born Ivan Shevchenko) Ukrainian (1895–1934)

Yanvary Bortnyk

Valentyn Shkliaiev

11 November

October Revue

Composed by Les Kurbas from works of Mykola Kulish, Pavlo Tychyna, Yury Smolych, Oleksander Kolylenko, Stepan Bondarchuk, Mike Yohansen, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Johannes Becher, Ernst Toller, Albert Ehrenstein, Ludwig Rubiner, and August Stramm

Les Kurbas

Vadym Meller, Dmytro Vlasiuk, & Yevhen Tovbin

12 January

Armoured Train 14–69 (1927)

Vsevolod Ivanov Russian (1895–1963)

Borys Tiahno

Maia Symashkevych and Valentyn Shkliaiev

31 March

The People’s Malakhy (Narodnyi Malakhyi) (1927)

Mykola Kulish Ukrainian (1892–1937)

Les Kurbas

Vadym Meller

11 November

The Conspiracy of Fiesko in Genoa (1783)

Friedrich von Schiller German (1759–1805)

Yanvary Bortnyk

Nisson Shifrin

9 January

Hello on Radio 477 (Allo na Khvyli 477)

Revue text by Mike Yohansen, Borys Balaban, Leonty Dubovyk, Volodymyr Skliarenko, and Kuzma Dikhtiarenko

Volodymyr Skliarenko, Borys Balaban, and Leonty Dubovyk led by Les Kurbas

Vadym Meller

18 April

Myna Mazailo (1928)

Mykola Kulish Ukrainian (1892–1937)

Les Kurbas

Vadym Meller

1 May–4 June

Berezil tours Kyiv with Hello on Radio 477, Myna Mazailo, The People’s Malakhy, The Mikado, The Conspiracy of Fiesko in Genoa, Prologue, and Sava Chaly.

1928–1929

Date

Play

Author

Director

Designer

1929–1930 Planned

Sonata Pathétique by Mykola Kulish. The Repcommittee denies the theatre permission to stage the show, but the play is staged in a Russian translation at the Kamerny Theatre in Moscow, directed by Aleksandr Tairov, on 20 December 1931. Romeo and Juliet is planned as part of a larger cultural project to stage the classic for workers and students, but is ultimately not staged (reasons unknown).

11 March

The Testament of Mr Ralka (Zapovit pana Ralky) (1929)

Vasyl Tsymbala, with additions by Volodymyr Skliarenko

Kuzma Dikhtiarenko and Volodymyr Skliarenko Composition and corrections by Les Kurbas

Dmytro Vlasiuk and Yevhen Tovbin

31 May

Dictatorship (1930)

Ivan Mykytenko Ukrainian (1897–1937)

Les Kurbas

Vadym Meller

24 November

97 (1924)

Mykola Kulish Ukrainian (1892–1937)

Leonty Dubovyk

Vadym Meller

10 January

Unknown Soldiers (1930)

Leonid Pervomaisky (born Ilia Hurevych) Ukrainian (1908–73)

Volodymyr Skliarenko

Dmytro Vlasiuk and Yevhen Tovbin

14 February

The Year 1905 in a Holding Cell (1905 Rik na KhPZ)

Documentary collage, text edited by Les Kurbas

Les Kurbas

Vadym Meller

15 February

M.R.T.O.

Montage dedicated to the International Workers’ Theatre Organization

Volodymyr Skliarenko and Kuzma Dikhtiarenko

Dmytro Vlasiuk and Yevhen Tovbin

8 March

Comrade Woman

Text by the creative brigade of Berezil: Valentyna Chystiakova, Mykhailo Verkhatsky, Voltovska, and O. Ishchenko; compiled by Yury Smolych

Valentyna Chysiakova, Dmytro Vlasiuk Mykhailo Verkhatsky, and Yevhen Tovbin and O. Ishchenko

1930–1931

Date

Play

Author

Director

Designer

14 April

Four Chamberlains

Text by the creative brigade of Berezil

Volodymyr Skliarenko and Borys Balaban

Vadym Meller

28 May

Cadres (1930)

Ivan Mykytenko Ukrainian (1897–1937)

Leonty Dubovyk

Dmytro Vlasiuk and Yevhen Tovbin

June

Berezil tours Donbas

2–13 July

Berezil tours the republic of Georgia with Myna Mazailo, Haidamaky, Dictatorship, Cadres, and Prologue.

1931–1932 1 October

Birth of a Giant

Text by the creative brigade of Berezil, Myroslav Irchan (born Andry Babiuk) Ukrainian (1897–1937) and Yury Yanovsky Ukrainian (1902–54)

Les Kurbas

Vadym Meller, Dmytro Vlasiuk and Yevhen Tovbin

18 January

Place d’Armes (1931)

Myroslav Irchan Ukrainian (1897–1937)

Borys Balaban

Dmytro Vlasiuk and Yevhen Tovbin

7 April

Little Town of Ladeniu (1932)

Leonid Pervomaisky (born Ilia Hurevych) Ukrainian (1908–73)

Kuzma Dikhtiarenko

Dmytro Vlasiuk and Yevhen Tovbin

15 June

Tetnuld (1931)

Shalva Dadiani Georgian (1874–1959)

Mise-en-scène: Les Kurbas Director: Volodymyr Skliarenko

Vadym Meller

The Owner (Khazain) (1900)

Ivan Karpenko-Kary (born Ivan Tobilevych) Ukrainian (1845–1907)

Volodymyr Skliarenko

Vadym Meller

1932–1933 24 December

Date

Play

Author

Director

Designer

29 May

Monsieur de Pouceaugnac (1669)

Molière French (1622–73)

Leonty Dubovyk

Dmytro Vlasiuk

1932

Kurbas announces that Hamlet (Shakespeare) and Bartholomew Fair (Ben Jonson) are in preparation. Also planned for the following year are King Lear (Shakespeare) and Optimistic Tragedy (Vsevolod Vishynsky).

1933–1934 24 September

Maklena Grasa (1933)

Mykola Kulish Ukrainian (1892–1937)

Les Kurbas

Vadym Meller

5 October

The Commissar of Education of Ukraine announces that Les Kurbas is to be replaced as the artistic director of the Berezil National Theatre.

Fall

Kurbas leaves for Moscow, where he begins rehearsals with Solomon Mikhoels on Shakespeare’s King Lear at the Moscow State Yiddish Theatre. At the same time Kurbas rehearses Othello at the Maly Theatre. He is arrested in December 1933, leaving both productions unfinished.

Mid-1930s

Kurbas directs several productions while in prison camps, including Glory by Victor Gusev, Aristocrats by Nikolai Pogodin, Krechinsky’s Wedding by Alexandr Sukhovo-Kobylin, Intervention by Lev Slavin, The Devil’s Disciple by George Bernard Shaw, the opera Demon by Anton Rubinstein, and The Dream in Vian Guba by Miroslav Irchan.

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APPENDIX 2 Kyiv, Historical Timeline

584 Appendix 2

Major changes of government in Kyiv, 1917–22, and significant events1 13 March 1917

News of the tsarist regime’s collapse arrives in Kyiv.

17 March 1917 3–5 March (Old Style)

Central Rada (Council; Russian term: ‘Soviet’) established (lasts to April 1918).

17–21 April 1917

All-Ukrainian National Congress in Kyiv elects historian Mykhailo Hrushevsky as president. Vice-presidents: writer Volodymyr Vynnychenko and publicist and military affairs specialist Symon Petliura.

18–21 May 1917

Numerous congresses take place in Kyiv, including First Ukrainian Military Congress.

23–9 June 1917

Peasants Congress.

26–7 July 1917

First Ukrainian Workers’ Congress.

23 June 1917

First Universal (Edict) declares universal suffrage, law and order by Ukrainian parliament.

16 July 1917

Second Universal issued. Includes non-Ukrainian representatives in the General Secretariat.

25 October 1917

In Petrograd, October Revolution. Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, overthrow the Provisional Government headed by Aleksandr Kerensky and seize power (7 November, Gregorian calendar).

1918–21

Russian Civil War.

October (18 November, New Style)

In Petrograd: Council of People’s Commissars (Sovnarkom – Lenin’s government).

20 November 1917

Ukrainian National or People’s Republic (Ukrains’ka Narodnia Respublika) is proclaimed in the Third Universal.

1 Paul Robert Magocsi, A History of Ukraine (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1996); Orest Subtelny, Ukraine: A History (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1988); Entsyklopedia Ukrainoznavstva, vol. 3 (Paris, New York: Shevchenko Scientific Society, 1959); online Encyclopedia of Ukraine, at http://www .encyclopediaofukraine.com. The editors would also like to thank Michael Hamm for his comments and suggestions about the notorious problem of establishing dates for some of these events. Exact times and dates are often difficult to establish and were not always recorded during some of the most chaotic periods. Readers should also take note of another area of possible discrepancy caused by the difference in recording dates in Old Style (Julian) or New Style (Gregorian calendar). The Gregorian calendar was only introduced in the Russian SFSR on 14 February 1918. Hence, the October Revolution of 1917 started on 7 November under the Gregorian calendar, but on 25 October according to the Julian calendar. By tradition, it continues to be referred to as the October Revolution.

Kyiv, Historical Timeline

585

15 December 1917

In Brest-Litovsk, Russian Bolsheviks begin negotiations to conclude the armistice with the Central Powers on behalf of all Russia, including Ukraine. Central Powers, however, approve the delegation from the Rada, which begins process of concluding a separate peace.

22 January 1918

Rada calls a Constituent Assembly; freedom of speech, press, religion, assembly, strikes, and the individual guaranteed.

22 January 1918

Fourth Universal declared; independence declared and the Ukrainian National Republic (UNR) with the Rada as its representative body.2

29 January 1918

Non-Ukrainian workers seize the Kyiv Arsenal, tying down Ukrainian troops for several days before capitulating.

9 February 1918

Treaty signed between Central Powers and UNR. The Germans and Austrians divide up Ukraine into spheres of influence; they send in 450,000 troops.

8 February 1918

Bolsheviks invade Kyiv; they occupy the city for three weeks until the Rada calls for German military assistance; thousands of Ukrainian speakers are executed.

2 March 1918

Army of the Central Rada occupies Kyiv along with allied Germans; Central Rada returns.

28 April 1918

German troops invade Kyiv and the Rada chambers on the day the new constitution is to be read. Next day, the League of Landowners proclaims General Pavlo Skoropads’kyi ‘Hetman’ (Leader) of Ukraine. Backed by Germans, who are really in control, the ‘new’ government overturns some of the Rada’s initiatives such as the nationalization of large estates; all authority is vested in the Hetman until elections of a Ukrainian parliament; UNR is superseded by the Ukraine State.

29 April 1918

Kyiv is created the capital of the Ukrainian state. A period of Ukrainian and Ukrainian-language renaissance follows: Ukrainian university, Academy of Sciences, National Theatre, National Library, and other institutions are created.

12 June 1918

Military setbacks necessitate that Soviet Russia comply with the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. A preliminary peace is signed with the Ukrainian government.

11 November 1918

German armistice with the Entente.

13 November 1918 (Old Style)

Brest-Litovsk treaty is annulled.

2 Although dated 22 January, this document was actually produced on the night of 24–5 January.

586 Appendix 2 14 November 1918

Skoropadsky, desperate for support, appoints a new cabinet consisting almost entirely of Russian monarchists; announces the Act of Federation, committing Ukraine to union with the future non-Bolshevik Russian state. On the same day, Ukrainian opposition forms an insurrectionary government, the Directory, led by two rivals, Vynnychenko and Petliura, who openly declare a rebellion against the Hetman. The Directory, formed on 14–15 November, consisted of Vynnychenko, Petliura, Fedir Shvets, Opanas Andrievsky, and Andrii Makarenko.

14 December 1918

The Germans and Skoropadsky evacuate Kyiv. The Directory troops, led by Petliura, enter Kyiv.

December 1918

Bolsheviks invade Ukraine. Diplomacy fails, and the Directory is forced to declare war on Soviet Russia on 16 January 1919.

22 January 1919

Act of Union. Union of all Ukrainian lands: Western Ukrainian Republic (formerly under Austria-Hungary) joins the UNR.

4 February 1919

Red Army re-enters Kyiv; Directory flees to Vinnytsia. Bolsheviks are able to establish authority that lasts until August 1919.

1919

Anarchy. Decline of the Directory; disintegration of all stable government; anti-Jewish pogroms censured by Directory, but led by those nominally under Petliura; Kyiv changes hands five times in 1919.

30 August 1919

Led by Petliura (head of the Directory and Supreme Ataman – military commander), Ukrainian forces enter Kyiv; Council is organized under Izaak Mazepa.

31 August 1919

Volunteer Army invades Kyiv.

16 December 1919

Red Army takes Kyiv.

7 May 1920

Petliura concludes negotiations with the Poles and with them captures Kyiv. Massive exodus from Kyiv in 1919–20 because of privations; problems in food distribution; population of Kyiv drops to 376,000.

11 June 1920

Bolsheviks retake Kyiv. UNR government retreats into exile; in November 1921 UNR government makes the last and failed attempt to spark a general insurrection to defeat the Bolsheviks. Partisan activity continued throughout 1922.

Kyiv, Historical Timeline

587

29 December 1922

Treaty of the Creation of the USSR. Kyiv becomes part of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, a founding republic of the USSR. The capital is moved to Kharkiv, where it remains until 1934; thereafter Kyiv’s position as capital of the Ukrainian SSR is restored.

21 January 1924

Death of Lenin. Organized delegations from Kyiv, including members of the Berezil, attend Lenin’s funeral.

1 February 1924

The British Empire recognizes the USSR. Power struggles of the 1920s end with Joseph Stalin assuming leadership of the USSR by the end of the decade.

28 October 1924

France recognizes the USSR.

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Contributors

Gennady Estraikh is the Rauch Clinical Professor of Yiddish Studies at New York University, a staff writer at Vayter, a weekly newspaper of the American Jewish community, and the editor of the Concise Russian-Yiddish Dictionary (1989, 1990). His most recent book is In Harness: Yiddish Writers’ Romance with Communism (2005). Mayhill C. Fowler is a graduate student in the Department of History at Princeton University writing a dissertation on theatre in interwar Soviet Ukraine. A former professional actress, she holds a BA in Russian from Yale University and an MFA in acting from the National Theatre Conservatory. Veronika Gopko-Pereverzeva is an actress, singer, and teacher at the children’s First Experimental Theatre of Ukraine. She has worked at the Théâtre du Soleil under the direction of Ariane Mnouchkine and is currently studying theatre at the Sorbonne. Michael F. Hamm is the Ewing T. Boles Professor of History at Centre College. He has written articles on Kyiv, Kharkiv, Riga, and Kishinev and is the author of Kiev: A Portrait, 1800–1917 (1993), and editor and part-author of The City in Russian History (1976) and The City in Late Imperial Russia (1986). Dmytro Horbachov is a professor of fine art, specializing in the history and theory of art at the Karpenko-Karyi National University of Theatre, Cinema, and Television in Kyiv. He is the author of numerous books (most recently, Malevich and Ukraine [Kyiv 2006]), articles, and catalogue essays, as well as the organizer of many seminal exhibitions, including ‘Crossroads: Ukrainian Modernism, 1910–1930’ (Chicago/New York, 2006–7), ‘The Phenomenon of the Ukrainian Avant-garde 1910–1935’ (Winnipeg/Hamilton, 2001–2; Kyiv, 2002), ‘Welcome Back to Ukraine, Mr. Burliuk’ (Kyiv, 1997), and others in Denmark, Germany, France, and Croatia. A specialist in attributions, he has served as a consultant for, among others, the Sotheby’s, Christie’s, and Phillips auction houses. Oleh S. Ilnytzkyj is a professor of Ukrainian literature, language, and culture, and an adjunct professor of comparative literature at the University of Alberta. He is

590

Contributors

the author of numerous publications on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Ukrainian literature, Ukrainian–Russian literary and cultural relations, and Modernism and Futurism, most notably, Ukrainian Futurism, 1914–1930: An Historical and Critical Study (1997), winner of the 1997 ‘Best Book Award’ of the American Association for Ukrainian Studies. He is also the editor of Canadian Slavonic Papers (since 2001). Nelli Kornienko is a theatre historian, the director of the Les Kurbas Centre in Kyiv, and a member of the Academy of Arts of Ukraine, as well as the recipient of the Les Kurbas Prize and the Order of Princess Olha. She defended her dissertation, entitled ‘Les Kurbas the Director’ in 1970, and has written many of the milestone articles and books on the topic. She has published over 200 scholarly works, which have been translated into 32 languages. A long-time resident of Moscow, where she worked at the Institute of Theatre and History of the Arts and UNESCO, she has lived since 1992 in Kyiv, where she founded the Les Kurbas Centre, which researches his theories of art and produces experimental theatre. Her doctoral dissertation was entitled ‘Theatre as a Diagnostic Model of Society’ (1993). Her books include Repetytsiia maibutnioho (Rehearsing the Future, 1998) and Les Kurbas i dukhovni zasady ukrainskoho avanhardu (Les Kurbas and the Spiritual Foundations of the Ukrainian Avant-garde, 2007). She was Ukraine’s nominee for the prestigious Kyoto Prize in 2007. Taras Koznarsky is a professor of Slavic languages and literatures at the University of Toronto. In addition to publishing a number of articles and translations of Ukrainian poetry, he has recently completed a book-length study entitled ‘Empire, Identity, and Cultural Exchange: The Shaping of Ukrainian Literary Discourse, 1800s–1840s.’ Yana Leonenko is a graduate of the Petro Tchaikovsky National Music Academy (Kyiv) and the author of a number of articles on Ukrainian music. Her publications focus on music in the theatrical productions of Les Kurbas, the topic of her doctoral dissertation. In addition to pursuing her PhD, she is currently teaching at the Children’s Academy of Arts in Kyiv. Irena R. Makaryk is a professor of English at the University of Ottawa. Her research interests focus on Shakespeare’s afterlife, Les Kurbas, and theatre during periods of great social duress. Recent publications include Shakespeare in the Undiscovered Bourn: Les Kurbas, Ukrainian Modernism, and Early Soviet Cultural Politics (2004), short-listed for the Raymond Klibansky Prize for the best scholarly book published in English in the humanities in Canada. She was a contributing editor to Shakespeare in the Worlds of Communism and Socialism, co-edited with Joseph G. Price (2006), and Shakespeare in Canada: ‘a world elsewhere’? co-edited with Diana Brydon (2002). Myroslava M. Mudrak is a professor of the history of art at Ohio State University. She has devoted her scholarly interests to the study of art in East Central Europe,

Contributors 591

Ukraine, and Russia, concentrating on the modernist period of the early twentieth century. Her seminal work, New Generation and Artistic Modernism in Ukraine (1986), was awarded the Kovaliw Prize for Ukrainian Studies. Her publications include articles on Ukrainian Dada and dissidence, propaganda pavilions, the Ukrainian Studio of Plastic Arts in Prague, Panfuturism, Constructivism, and collections of Russian art. In addition to the exhibition catalogue (with Myroslav Shkandrij and Ihor Holubizky) David Burliuk 1882–1967: Futurism and After (2008), her most recent publications includes Beyond Borders: Ukrainian Book Design 1914– 1945 (2008). Béatrice Picon-Vallin is the director of the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) Performing Arts Research Lab and teaches the history of theatre at the Conservatoire National Supérieur d’Art Dramatique in Paris. She has translated and published extensively on the performing arts, particularly on the oeuvre of Vsevolod Meyerhold, including Vsevolod Meyerhold par Vsevolod Meyerhold (2005), Écrits sur le théâtre / Vsevolod Meyerhold (2001), Meyerhold (1990), and Le théâtre juif soviétique pendant les années vingt (1973). Maria Ratanova is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University, formerly a correspondent for Kommersant, a Russian daily newspaper, and a dance history instructor at the famed Vaganova Academy (once known as the Imperial Ballet School) in St Petersburg. Myroslav Shkandrij is a professor in the Department of German and Slavic Studies at the University of Manitoba. He has published extensively on the topic of Ukraine’s cultural scene in the 1920s, including the book Modernists, Marxists, and the Nation: The Ukrainian Literary Discussion of the 1920s (1992). His Russia and Ukraine: Literature and the Discourse of Empire (2002) applies postcolonial theory to modern Russian and Ukrainian writers. A strong art-history interest is reflected in his work as co-curator of the exhibitions ‘The Phenomenon of the Ukrainian AvantGarde, 1910–1935’ (2002) and ‘Futurism and After – David Burliuk, 1882–1967’ (2008). His latest book, Jews in Ukrainian Literature (2009), is the first extensive treatment of the subject. Oleh Sydor-Hybelynda is an art critic, art historian, and independent researcher living in Kyiv. He has authored over 700 articles in Ukrainian journals, newspapers, art catalogues, and encyclopedias. He has also curated a number of art exhibitions (including ‘Totalitarian Art,’ Kyiv, 1998), organized conferences, lectured at the Ukrainian Academy of Art as well as other institutions, and presented numerous papers in cities across Ukraine, in Israel, and Italy. Virlana Tkacz is a theatre director and heads the Yara Arts Group, a resident company at La MaMa Experimental Theatre in New York. She has created twenty original theatre pieces with Yara that have been performed in New York, Ukraine, Central Asia, Siberia, and China. The recipient of the American National Theater Translation Award, the NEA Poetry Translation Fellowship, and the Agni Review

592

Contributors

Poetry Translation Prize for her work with Wanda Phipps, she was named Honoured Artist of Ukraine in 2007. Her recent books include Shanar: Dedication Ritual of a Buryat Shaman in Siberia (with Sayan Zhambalov and Wanda Phipps, 2002), In a Different Light, a bilingual anthology of Ukrainian literature translated by Tkacz and Phipps (2008), and Kyrgyz Epic Theatre in New York (2008). Dagmara Turchyn (née Duvirak) received her master’s degree in musicology at the Mykola Lysenko State Music Academy of Lviv, Ukraine, and her PhD in music at the Petro Tchaikovsky National Music Academy (Kyiv). She worked as a research fellow at the Institute of Arts, Folklore, and Ethnography of the Academy of Sciences in Kyiv, and as an assistant professor of music history at Mykola Lysenko State Music Academy of Lviv, Ukraine. She has published about 40 studies in the fields of history of Ukrainian music, music aesthetics, and the psychology of music perception. She currently lives in Canada, where she occasionally gives guest lectures. Hanna Veselovska is a professor in the Department of Theatre Theory and Criticism of the Karpenko-Karyi National University of Theatre, Cinema and Television in Kyiv. Her research and publication interests include modern theatre theory, Ukrainian Baroque theatre, and Ukrainian theatrical Expressionism. Her most recent books are Dvanadtsiat’ vystav Lesia Kurbasa (Twelve Productions by Les Kurbas, 2005) and Teatralni perekhrestia Kyeva 1900–1910-kh rr. (Theatrical Intersections in Kyiv 1900–1910s, 2006).

Index of Names and Titles

Notes: A page reference in italics indicates the presence of an illustration. ‘LK’ refers to Les Kurbas Abstraction, 17; and Baroque Ukrainian art, 184; and Eastern Orthodoxy, 181; in Exter’s work and teaching, 170–6, 181; and Futurism, 9–10, 387–404; in graphic arts, 411; and Impressionism, 174; in LK’s work, 169, 288, 298, 449; in Nijinska’s choreography, 8, 298, 311, 312, 314, 315–16; in Picasso’s work, 171; and realism, 104; and Ukrainian Futurism, 387–404; in work of Yiddish artists, 193 Académie de la Grande Chaumière (Paris), 3, 172 Academy of Art (Ukrainian State Academy of Art, later Kyiv Institute of Art), 80, 224, 225, 230–1, 237, 410, 415, 435n4, 436n11 Academy of Sciences (All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences; Ukrainian Academy of Science, Vseukrains’k Akademiia Nauk, VUAN), 68, 224, 326–7 Adasovska (Adasovs’ka), Maria. See Zankovetska (Zankovets’ka), Maria Agnivtsev, Nikolai, 252, 258 Akhmatova (Gorenko), Anna, 21 Akhmeteli (Akhmetelashvili), Sandro (Aleksandr, Alexander), 253, 272n57, 529 Aleichem, Sholem (Shalom Rabinovitz or Rabinovich), 55, 101, 102, 198, 204; Menachem Mendel, 473n40; Tevye the Dairyman, 212 Alexander II, tsar, 54, 408

Alexander III, tsar, 39, 57 All-Russian Congress of Actors (St Petersburg, 1897), 39 All-Russian Constituent Assembly, 203 All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. See Academy of Sciences All-Ukrainian Central Studio Drama Group (Tsentrostudio, later, Hnat Mykhailychenko Theatre), 260–4, 269, 364 All-Ukrainian Congress of Artists, 177 All-Ukrainian Congress of Cultural Activists, 175 All-Ukrainian Congress of Plastic Artists, 176 All-Ukrainian Day of Music (1926), 329 All-Ukrainian Federation of Revolutionary Soviet Writers, 221 All-Ukrainian Film Directorate. See Vseukrains’ke fotokinoupravlinnia All-Ukrainian Musical Committee, 258 All-Ukrainian Society of Revolutionary Musicians (Vseukrains’ke Tovarystvo Revoliutsiinykh Muzyk), 336 All-Ukrainian Theatre Committee, 252, 268 Alshvang, Arnold, 329 Altieri, Charles: Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry, 389 Altman, Natan (Nathan), 21, 219, 494, 509n32, 511n55

594 Index Ambrosio, Arturo, 152 American Joint Distribution Company, 202 Andreenko, Michel, 511n55 Andreev, Leonid: Doctor Kurzhentsev, or Thought, 283; King Hunger, 248 Andreeva, Maria, 29, 45 Andriienko-Nechytailo, M., 176 Andriivsky (Andriivskii) Sobor (St Andrew’s, Kyiv), 77, 99 Annenkov, Yury, 43 Annensky (Annenskii), Innokenty (Innokentii): Famira Kifared (Thamira Khytharedes), pl. 9, 171, 175, 314 Ansermet, Ernest, 339n12 An-sky, Semen Akimovich (né ShloymeZanvl Rapoport), 55–6, 204 Antenna (Kyiv literary group), 209 Antheil, George, 340n27, 341n31; Ballet mécanique, 353 Antonov-Ovseenko, Vladimir, 66 Antonovych, Dmytro, 42, 244, 280–1, 283, 284, 288, 290 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 3, 21, 219, 389, 440n38 Appia, Adolphe, 175, 305n47, 318, 343, 502, 543 Archipenko, Alexander (Oleksander Arkhypenko): Cendrars’s poem to, 182–4; and Kyiv Art Institute, 237; Kyiv as inspiration for, 79; modern or avantgarde style, 3, 21, 81, 219, 230, 236, 389; in Paris, 81, 219; and theory of cosmic or universal energy, 181, 182, 234 – art works: The Boxers, pl. 7; PierrotCarousel, 183 Architectural League of New York, 484 Aronson, Boris: career in USA, 512n75; and Kultur-Lige, 5, 193, 201, 203; on national art, 204; as a stage designer, 193, 207, 503, 506 Arp, Hans, 389 Arsenal (Kyiv), 60, 84; Arsenal’tsi (film by LK), 11, 443, 452, 465–8, 531 Artaud, Antonin: The Theatre and Its Double, 272n50 Art Cave (L’iokh mystetstva), 258–9

Art Deco, 479 Artists Studio (Kyiv), 209 Art Nouveau: in ballet, 311; in graphic design, 398 Asch (Asche), Sholem, 213n18, 268; Boh pomsty (God of Vengeance), 36 Asotsiiatsiia Revoliutsiinoho Mystetstva Ukrainy (Association of Revolutionary Artists of Ukraine, ARMU), 431, 440n39 Asotsiiatsiia Suchasnoi Muzyky (Association of Contemporary Music), 330–1, 351 Association of Literary Writers in Ukraine, 209 Association of Proletarian Composers of Ukraine, 336 Association of Revolutionary Composers of Ukraine, 336 Atkinson, J. Brooks, 500, 504 Auburtin, Victor: Art Is Dying, 15, 545; ‘Drama and Stage,’ 159 Auric, Georges, 328 Austrian Secession, 323 Avangard – Almanakh proletars’kykh myttsiv Novoi generatsii (Avant-Garde – Almanac of the Proletarian Artists of the New Generation), 388, 404 Avdieva (Avdiieva), Iryna, 147, 346, 354, 365, 564n8 Babiivna, Hanna, 463, 473n38 Babyshkin, Oleh, 457, 475n68, 476n77 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 334 Baer, Nancy Van Norman, 314 Bagrov, Mikhail, 33–4 Bahrynovsky (Bahrynovs’kyi), Mykhailo, 251, 347 Bakst, Léon, 175, 511n55 Balaban, Borys, 344–5, 534n6 Balla, Giacomo, 389, 396 Ballets Russes, 298, 301, 306n56, 308n89, 312, 320n4 Bal-Makhshoves (critic), 7, 203, 204, 207 Balmont, Konstantin, 331, 336 Baltrušaitis, Jurgis, 208 Banduryst Kapelle, 325 Baranoff-Rossiné, Volodymyr, 219

Index Bartók, Béla, 330, 331, 335, 341nn30, 35, 351 Barvinsky (Barvinsk’yi), Vasyl (Vasyl’), 323, 324 Bassermann, Albert, 150 Basshe, Em Jo, 504 Baudoin de Courtenay, Sophia, 440n38 Bauer, Yevgeni (Evgenii), 157, 161, 472n37; Tale of the Blue Sea, 162; The 300th Anniversary of the House of the Romanovs, 156–7 Bauhaus, 340n26, 389, 396 Baumeister, Willi (Villi Baumaister), 387, 405n3 Bazhan, Mykola, 154, 352, 423, 528, 535n42; ‘Fokstrot’ (Foxtrot), 392; Zustrich na perekhresti (Meeting at the Station Crossroads), 423 Beaumarchais, Pierre Augustin Caron de: Marriage of Figaro, 308n94 Beck, Lily (Lili, Lilli), 152 Behicheva, H., 564n8 Beilis, Mendel, 59, 65, 90n15 Bekhterev, Vladimir, 525 Beklemishev, Hryhory, 324; MuzychnoIstorychni Demonstratsii (MusicalHistorical Demonstrations), 327–8 Bell, John, 511n53 Belorussian State Yiddish Theatre, 207–8 Bely, Andrei, 117, 532, 541; Petersburg, 134n62 Belza, Ihor, 330 Ben-Adir (Abraham Rosin): Our Language Problem, 198 Berdiaev, Nikolai, 543 Berest, Borys, 469n10, 475nn57, 66, 476nn70, 77 Bereza-Kudrytsky (Bereza-Kudryts’kyi), Pavlo, 546 Berezhny (Berezhnyi), Kostiantyn, 247, 251, 267 Berezil (Berezil’) Theatre (Berezil Artistic Association, Kyiv 1922–6; Berezil National Theatre, Kharkiv, 1926–33), 364–81, 545–63; as avant-garde, 529; collaborative or collective approach, 5, 231, 365, 524; company photographs,

595

364, 461, 542, 546, 550, 554; Director’s Lab, 461, 546; film work for actors of, 456–7, 463–4; First Studio, 346, 365–8, 381n1, 382n16, 509n32; LK’s removal from, 520, 528; Meller’s designs for, 316; musicians at, 348–9; Second Studio, 366; at the Solovtsov Theatre, 267; sponsored by Red Army, 366, 383n20; and State Jewish Theatre (Moscow), 211 – formation and aims: foundation, 364–5, 443, 524, 546; identified as Russian, 494, 497; importance and influence of, 228, 509n32; Mandelshtam’s description of, 234; name, 364–5; transition from Young Theatre, 415 – publications and writing by and about: audience questionnaires, 451; Barykady teatru (Theatre Barricades), 162, 417, 418, 422, 435, 524; LK’s article on Jimmie Higgins, 385n53; representation at New York International Theatre Exhibition, 494, 496, 497, 501, 503; representation at Paris Exposition, 11, 479, 482, 490; in Siluety, 409, 461, 462 – training and technique: dance and movement, 313; étude work, 457; use of music, 9, 345–7 Berezil (Berezil’) Theatre productions, 569–81 – Allo na khvyliakh 477 (Hello, on Radio 477), 341n33, 492 – Commune in the Steppes (Kulish), 234 – Dyktatura (Dictatorship, Mykytenko), 222, 223 – Gas (Kaiser), 368–73; archetypal characters, 295, 368; Butsky’s score and role of music, 253, 261, 354, 368, 372; chorus portrayal of machine and explosion, 368–9, 371–2, 373, 377; compared to Meyerhold productions, 526, 530; compared to Les Noces (Nijinska), 373; as Expressionist, 368, 512n74, 526, 546; Hirniak in, 368, 512n74; importance and impact of, 353; Meller’s design for, 301, 369–72, 440n37, 501, 530; Neshchadymenko in, 295; and New York International

596 Index

–

–

– – – – – –

Theatre Exhibition, 494, 501, 504; production sketches and photographs, 369–72, 501; reviews and reception, 384n37, 512n74, 528, 546–7; Shuvars’ka’s choreography for, 298, 368, 373, 384n38 Jimmie Higgins (Dzhimmi Higginz, Sinclair), 374–81, 506, 527; Buchma in, 385n49, 468; Butsky’s score and role of music in, 9, 261; explosion portrayed in, 377, 379; film and film techniques in, 9, 140, 329, 355, 376–7, 379, 381, 444, 448, 465; graphic design in, 11; Griffith’s influence on, 162–3; LK’s article on, 385n53; LK’s dramatization, 384n41, 527, 547–8; Meller’s design for, 531; and Meyerhold, 527, 530–1; military scene, 161; and New York Exhibition, 494, 501, 506; possible influence on Vybukh (Explosion, Yanovsky), 341n32; production photographs, 374–5, 378–80, 501, 547; role of chorus, 289; Tasin’s film of, 467–8, 476n79 Macbeth (Shakespeare, 1924): Brechtian techniques in, 548; Buchma in, 446, 447, 464, 532; choreographed movement, 313; comparison with Meyerhold’s D.E., 532, 536n59; film techniques in, 444, 465, 470–1n15, 506; groundbreaking impact of, 445; influence of Griffith’s Intolerance, 162–3; LK’s plans for and previous versions of, 81, 151, 308n94; Marianenko in, 454; Meller’s design for, 446–7; parallels with Vendetta, 458; poster location signs, 422, 447; production photographs, 446–7, 510n32; use of montage in, 444–50; use of screens in, 532 Machine Wreckers (Toller), 494, 499, 500 Maklena Grasa (Kulish), 555–63, 566n38; production photographs, 555–6, 558–61 Man and the Masses (Toller), 504 The Mikado (Gilbert and Sullivan), 440n37, 527 Myna Mazailo (Kulish), 228, 229, 555, 566n34 Naperedodni (On the Eve, Popovsky and Piotrovsky), 355

– Narodny Malakhy (Narodnyi Malakhyi, The People’s Malakhy, Kulish), 438n24, 550–4, 555; production photographs, 551–3 – Place d’Armes (Irchan), 521 – Proklamatsia sezonu (Proclamation of the Season), 355 – Prologue, 231 – Riff-Raff (Yaroshenko), 234 – Ruhr, 366–8, 371, 382n16, 384n37, 530; production photograph, 367 – Sadie (Maugham), 527 – Sekretar profspilky (The Secretary of the Labour Union, Scott), 11, 476–7n82, 479, 489, 490, 494, 507n3 – Sonata Pathétique (Kulish), 228 – They Made Fools of Themselves (Kropyvnytsky), 265, 266, 267, 438n24 – Zhakeria (Jacquerie, Merimée), 234, 236, 355, 526 – Zhovtnevyi ohliad (October Revue), 365–6, 371, 382n16, 383nn17, 20, 467 Berg, Alban: Wozzeck, 440n37 Bergelson, David: and Kultur-Lige, 7, 200, 201, 203, 207, 208, 212; ‘Literature and Society,’ 206; and Meisel, 199; in photographs, 200, 203; and Rafalsky, 198 Berger, Henning: The Deluge, 248 Bergonier, August, 30 Bergonier Theatre (later Red Theatre), 139, 140, 251; Russian Drama Theatre at, 267; Young Theatre at, 139, 303n14 Bergson, Henri, 179, 450, 545 Bernhardt, Sarah, 146 Bernstein, Aline, 492, 499, 506 Ber Ryback (Ber-Rybak), Issachar (Zakhar, Suker, Isaachar), 193, 201, 203, 208, 497; The City, pl. 5 Bersenev, Ivan, 34, 48n21 Bertini, Francesca, 152 Bialik, Khaim Nakhman, 199 Bi-Ba-Bo Cabaret, 252 Bichuia, Nina, 162 Bilinsky (Bilins’kyi), Boris, 511n55 Bilotserkivets (Bilotserkivets’), Natalka: ‘We’ll not die in Paris,’ 478 Bilotserkivsky (Bilotserkivs’kyi), Lev, 44

Index Bjørnson, Bjørnstjerne, 364–5 Blakytny (Blakytynyi), Vasyl, 258 Blaue Reiter Almanach, Der (The Blue Rider Almanac), 429 Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider) group (Munich), 219, 430 Blavatsky, Madame (Helena Blavats’ka, Helena von Hahn), 546, 564n23 Blibin, Ivan, 157 Blok, Aleksander (Aleksandr), 199, 205, 543; Balaganchik (The Fairground Booth), 42, 43, 523 Boboshko, Iurii, 476n76 Bobryts’kyi, Volodymyr, 440n35 Boccioni (Futurist), 396 Boëhm, Jakob, 539 Bohatyriov, Semen, 324 Bohomazov, Oleksander, 176–81; and Burliuk, 179; and Exter, 179, 437–8n20; and folk art, 178; and Futurism, 176, 411, 441n43; and Hesychasm, 181; and ‘Kiltse’ (Circle), 80, 437–8n20; and Kultur-Lige, 193; at Kyiv Institute of Art, 237; as a musician, 178; street banners and posters, 257; universal energy, 234 – art works: Electrician, pl. 2; Fire in Kyiv, 176–7; Lviv Street, pl. 3, 80; Souvenirs of the Caucasus, 176–7; Steam Train, 176 – writing: ‘Major Tasks for the Development of Painting in Ukraine,’ 177–8; ‘Painting and Elements,’ 172, 174, 178, 194n4, 411, 435n4 Boichuk, Mykhailo, and the Boichukists: career, 431–3; influence of, 440n38; and Monumentalism, 219, 231; photographs, 225, 431; stage designs, 219, 304n30; and Ukraine nationalism, 224 – art works: cover for Velykyi shum-povis (Franko), 432; frescoes, 80; Literacy, 433 Boichuk, Tymko, 440n38 Boim, E., 528 Bojnar, Endre, 20 Bolshoi Drama Theatre (Leningrad), 349 Bolshoi Theatre (Moscow), 311, 345, 349

597

Bonch-Tomashevsky (BonchTomashevs’kyi), Mykhailo (Mikhail), 251, 261, 272n52, 347, 526 Bondarchuk, Stepan: and Art Cave, 259; ‘Charlie Chaplin,’ 162; on LK as a musician, 347; on Mordkin, 319n3; on Sadovsky production of Autumn, 303n16; at State Ukrainian Music Drama Theatre, 251; and Young Theatre, 284, 287, 288 Bordwell, David, 448, 471nn18, 21 Borotbists (Left Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionary Party), 209 Bortnyk, Ivanvarii, 546 Borysov, M., 455, 456, 473n38 Boshyk, Yury, 91n39 Bourbon, Ernest, 149 Bowlt, John E., 21 Boychuk, Mykhailo, 21 Brahms, Johannes, 334 Brandes, Georg, 539 Braque, Georges, 3, 21, 171, 219, 389, 494 Brecht, Bertolt, 356, 434, 513n82; LK’s Brechtian techniques, 4, 11, 445, 505, 548 Bredov, General, 72 Breuer, Marcel, 389 Brodsky (Brodskii), Grigory (Grigorii), 56 Brodsky (Brodskii), Izrail, 55 Brodsky (Brodskii), Lazar, 55 Brodsky (Brodskii), Lev, 29 Brodsky (Brodskii), Mark (Meir Schor), 55 Brodsky (Brodskii) family, 56, 59 Bronshtein, Yakov, 210 Brook, Peter, 538 Brotherhood of New Drama, 523 Brotherly Union of City and Village, The (film), 83 Bublikov, A.A. (communications minister), 61 Buchma, Amvrosy (Amvrosii): in Arsenal, 465, 476n77; in Jimmie Higgins (Sinclair), 385n49, 468; on LK and Eisenstein, 140; in Macbeth, 446, 447, 464, 532; in Macdonald, 463, 464, 475n66; in Ukraziia, 476n77; in Vendetta, 457 Büchner, Georg: Woyzeck, 440n37 Bugova (Feldsher), Liia, 268

598 Index Bukharin, Nikolai, 83–4; Azbuka kommunizma (An ABC of Communism), 83 Bulgakov, Mikhail, 112, 135n77; Belaia gvardiia (The White Guard), 6, 98, 102, 111–21, 122, 129, 226, 252; Dni Turbinykh (Days of the Turbins), 226; Kiev-gorod (Kiev, the City), 112–14 Bund, 197, 210 Bunny, John (Packson), 148–9, 153 Burachek, Mykola, 225, 328, 413 Burchak, F.S., 62 Bureau of Musical Ethnography, 326–7 Burliuk, David: and Blaue Reiter, 219; and Bohomazov, 179; constructed poems, 436n7; and Exter, 174; and Futurism, 193, 412, 421–2, 448; graphic concept, 412; and Hesychasm, 181; on textural canvas, 174; Ukrainian identity, 230; universal energy, 234 – works: The Bung, pl. 18; My Kozak Ancestor, 437n14; Tango with Cows, pl. 17 Burliuk, Vladimir (Volodymyr), 436n7; The Bung, pl. 18; Tango with Cows, pl. 17 Busoni, Ferruccio, 327, 328, 340n28 Butkevich, Mikhail, 532 Butovsky (Butovs’kyi), Semen, 251 Butsky (Butskoi, Buts’kyi), Anatoly (Anatolii): atonal works, 5; career, 348–9 – scores for LK productions, 346, 348, 532; The First Building of the New World, 261; Gas, 261, 354, 368; Jimmie Higgins (Sinclair), 261 – writing: in Muzyka, 329; ‘Scientific Foundations of Technical Performance,’ 348; ‘Vital Sources of Music,’ 348 Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The (film), 504 Capellani, Albert, 147, 149 Carnival, Le (ballet), 312 Carpenter, John A., 341n31 Carrà, Carlo, 396 Casella, Alfredo, 330, 340n28, 351 Catherine II, 411 Cave Monastery (Pechers’ka Lavra) (Kyiv), 27, 52, 99, 105, 106 Cavendish, Phil, 468

Cendrars, Blaise: ‘La tête’ (Head), 182–3 Central Rada (Council, 1917–18), 7, 197, 224, 243; demonstration in support of, 65; First Universal, 63; founding of, 17, 63, 543; Fourth Universal, 67; and Ukrainian National Theatre, 244 Central Red Army Club: Yermilov’s murals for, 428, 429 Central State Studio of Ballet, 307n88 Cézanne, Paul, 10, 172, 176, 388, 389, 449 Chagall, Marc, 3, 439n26 Chaplin, Charles, 153, 161–2, 528 Chardynin, Piotr, 454, 465; Lisovyi zvir (Forest Beast), 455; Ukraziia (or 7 + 2, film), 455, 456, 473n44, 476n77 Charusskaia, Elizaveta, 33 Chatsky (Chats’kyi), B., 490 Chavez, Carlos, 341n31 Chekhov, Anton: The Swedish Match, 469n10; Tri sestry (Three Sisters), 33; Uncle Vania, 31–2; Vishniovyi sad (Cherry Orchard), 32 Chekhov, Michael (Mikhail), 453, 519–20, 525, 532, 534n8, 540s Chelichev (Tchelitschev, Tchelitschew), Pavel, 21, 175, 257 Cheney, Sheldon, 497, 499 Cherevko (policeman), 52 Cherkasenko, Spyrydon, 243 Chervony shliakh (Kharkiv publishing house), 210 Chirikov, Evgeny (Evgenii): Evrei (The Jews), 36, 50n32 Chokolov, N., 77 Chomón, Segundo de, 146 Chopin, Frédéric, 22, 343, 346, 557; ‘Marche funèbre,’ 144; mazurkas, 347; Prelude no. 20, 346 Chorans (choir), 326 Chumak, Vasyl, 258, 261 Chuzhak, Nikolai, 529 Chuzhy (Chuzhyi), Andry (Andrii), 185–9, 391; Vedmid poliuie za sontsem (The Bear Hunts the Sun), 397 Chystiakova (Chistiakova), Valentyna (Valentina): in Arsenal, 465; at Berezil

Index Theatre, 313, 551; marriage to LK, 298, 299, 318; and Nijinska, 313, 318, 381–2n2; in The People’s Malakhy (Kulish), 551; at Young Theatre, 298 cinemas (in Kyiv), 141–2; Apollo, 142; Corso, 141, 142, 144, 152, 156; Derzhkino (National Movie Theatres), 142; Express (later Moderne), 141, 142, 156, 159; Intimate Theatre (or Arts), 141; Lotos, 141; Maxime, 141; Miianovsky’s (Miianovs’ky’s) Theatre, 143, 145, 151; Monte Carlo, 141, 142; Movie Theatre of A. Schantzer, 141, 142, 144; Movie Theatre of R. Schtremer, 141, 142, 143, 159; New Theatre, 141, 152, 159; New World, 141, 142; Odeon, 141; Record, 141; Renaissance (now Coliseum), 141, 142; Suchasny (Suchasnyi) teatr (Contemporary Theatre), 142 Cˇiurlionis, Mikalojus, 15 Clark, Barrett H., 499 Cleopatra (ballet), 312 Committee to Create a Ukrainian National Theatre, 243 Communism Is Conquering the World (outdoor mystery play), 257 Communist Party: Central Committee of, 88, 482–3; (Bolshevik) of Ukraine (CP(b) U), 20, 224, 225–6; Russian (Bolshevik) Twelfth Congress, 225, 322; of the Soviet Union (CPSU), 226, 336 – policies and control: on the arts, 81–2; and avant-garde communism, 20; and Kultur-Lige, 207–10; and socialist realism, 79, 366; on theatres, 482–3; two-culture theory (Ukrainian, Russian), 88, 224; on Ukrainianization, 78, 224–6, 322, 566n43; Union of Soviet Composers, 366; vs. Ukrainian nationalism, 226–7 Constructivism: in art and graphic arts, 219, 425–6, 429, 432–4; in dance, 315, 316; in film, 448; in literature, 396, 399; in music, 331, 333, 340n26; in stage design, 175, 315, 429, 494, 500, 522, 524, 531; street banners and posters, 257 Continental Hotel (Kyiv), 258

599

Copland, Aaron, 340n28 Council of United Community Organizations, 62, 63 Craig, Edward Gordon: and Classical Greek culture, 287; and Eastern theatre, 475n62; Exter influenced by, 175; and Koonen, 45; LK influenced by, 284–5, 293–4, 318, 343, 366, 444, 522, 524; at Moscow Art Theatre, 34, 44; and New York International Theatre Exhibition, 502; on puppets vs. actors, 293–4, 538, 545; theatre aesthetics and ideals, 34, 543, 544, 545; use of screens, 533 – writing: ‘The Actor and the ÜberMarionette,’ 293–4; On the Art of Theatre, 304n38 Crommelynck, Fernand: The Magnificent Cuckold, 526, 528, 529, 530; Tripes d’or (Golden Guts), 440n37, 526 Crone, Rainer, 236 Crooked Jimmie (Kyiv), 252, 256 Crooked Mirror, The (Petrograd), 246, 250 Cubism and Cubo-Futurism, 193; Cubist Expressionism, 80, 445; CubistSuprematists, 270; in Exter’s work, 80, 181, 257, 314; in film, 471n18, 475n62; and Futurism, 389, 394; and Jewish folk art, 201; Parisian, 3; in stage design, 175, 314–15, 445, 494; street banners and posters, 181, 257. See also Futurism cummings, e.e., 497, 504, 511n63; Him, 506 Czajkowski, Michał, 100 Dada and Dadaists: and Futurism, 190, 393, 396; in graphic design, 471n18; noise music, 391, 405n14; in poetry, 191–2, 389, 391, 393 d’Annunzio, Gabriele, 152 de Chirico, Giorgio, 389 Deed, André (Glupyshkin, André Chapuis), 147, 148, 161 de Falla, Manuel, 331, 341n30 Deich, Aleksandr (Alexander): artistic circle of, 45; on Kuznetsov, 34; on LK, 26, 522; on Meyerhold, 42, 45; on Oedipus Rex, 288; role in Kyiv theatre, 46; as a

600

Index

scenographer, 155; on Solovtsov Theatre, 30, 35; student years, 29; on Vertep, 293 Delaunay, Robert, 15 Delaunay, Sonia, 3, 21, 81, 175 Delsarte, François, 249, 284, 287, 304n36, 475n62, 549, 564n15 Deluque, Louis, 160 Demutsky (Demuts’kyi), Danylo, 467, 474n47 Denikin, Anton, 71, 73, 74, 465 Department for the Liquidation of Ukrainian Illiteracy (Likuknep), 88 Depero, Fortunato, 494 Derzhavne Vydavnytstvo Ukrainy (DVU, Ukrainian State Publishing House), 329, 409 de Vega, Lope: Fuente Ovejuna, pl. 15, 34, 253, 256, 311 Diaghilev, Sergei, 298, 306n56, 307n88, 312, 313, 314, 320n4 Diakiv, Volodymyr, 440n35 Diakov, Ivan, 58 Directory, 65, 68, 69, 92n67, 224, 245, 256 Diskovskii, M., 535n32 Dix, Otto, 389 Dniprovsky (Dniprovs’kyi), I., 227 Dobrovolska (Dobrovol’s’ka), Olympia (Olympiia), 282, 287, 549 Dobrushin, Yekhezkel, 199, 200, 201, 204, 208, 212 Dolyna, Pavlo, 375, 463, 501 Dom Bergonier, 30, 40, 48n11 Dombrovsky (Dombrovs’kyi), Marian, 324 Domontovych, Viktor: Doktor Serafikus, 230 Dontsov, Dmytro, 252 Dormition Cathedral (Pechers’ka Lavra), 106 Dorotov, Aleksei, 62 Dos Passos, John, 504 Dostoevsky (Dostoevskii), Fyodor Mikhailovich, 117, 135n77 Dosvitny (Dosvitnyi), O., 227 Doublier, Francis, 455 Douglas, Charlotte, 232 Dovhal (Dovhal’), Oleksander, 431 Dovhalevsky (Dovhalevs’kyi), Mytrophan, 418–19

Dovzhenko, Alexander (Oleksander): and Berezil Theatre, 467, 474n47; and folk culture, 232; LK’s influence on, 465, 467, 476n80, 531; photograph, 466; portrait of Tychyna, 260; role in Ukrainian film and avant-garde, 21, 224, 443 – films: early work, 468, 477n85; Arsenal, 467; Zemlia (Earth), 222, 467, 474n47; Zvenyhora, 150, 234, 416, 467, 474n47 Drabik, Wincenty, 249 Drahomanov, Mykhailo, 40 Drama School of Ukraine, 307n88 Dramatic Conservatory, 249 Dramatic Theatre, 248 Drawicz, Andrzej, 114, 133n40 Dreling, V.A., 64 Drozdov, Vladimir, 324 Drunin, Vladimir, 211 Dubnow, Simon, 55 Dukhan, Igor, 206 Dumka (choir), 326, 339n12 Duncan, Isadora, 5, 21, 143, 287, 288, 305–6n54, 538 Dunets, Khatzkl, 210 Dunin-Markewicz, Kazymir, 249 Duvan-Tortsov, Isaak, 29, 33, 36–7 École de Mouvement (Kyiv). See Nijinska, Bronislava Einstein, Albert, 453 Eisenstein, Sergei: and LK, 140; and Meyerhold, 519; photograph, 449; theatrical work, 5, 355, 461, 470n12, 475n62, 548; use of montage, 5, 448, 461, 471n17 – film: Battleship Potemkin, 140, 141 Ellan-Blakytny (Ellan-Blakytnyi), Vasyl (Vasyl’), 259, 261, 333; ‘Toward the Problem of “Proletarian Art,”’ 260 Ellul, Jacques, 222 Epik, Hryhory (Hryhorii), 227; Persha vesna (First Spring), 222 Epstein, Mark, 193, 203, 209 Erckmann-Chatrian (Emile Erckmann and Louis-Gratien-Charles-Alexandre Chatrian): Le Juif Polonais (The Polish Jew), 37

Index Erdenko, Mykhailo, 324 Erdman, Nikolai, 526; The Mandate, 536n59 Erenberg (Erenburg), Ilia, 258, 264, 526; Julio Jurenito, 535n32 Ernst, Fedir, 329 Esenin, Sergei, 205 Everdell, William, 471n16 Evreinov, Nikolai, 249, 250–1, 253, 272n50, 526, 538; ‘Theatre and the Scaffold,’ 250–1; Vesiolaia smert (Happy Death), 272n48 Exhibition of Prints and Techniques (1924, Kharkiv), 410 exoticism, 153, 231, 234 Expressionism: in Berezil production of Gas, 352, 368; in Broken Brow (Toller), 267–8; German, 318, 389, 503; and LK’s theatre ideals, 546; in music, 245, 331, 336, 340n29; in theatre, 257–68, 522, 526, 549 Exter (Ekster), Alexandra (Oleksandra): Abstractionist and Cubo-Futurist work, 80, 170–6, 181, 257, 314; career, 320n6; Cubo-Futurist street banners, 181, 257; exhibitions, 80; and folk art, 170–2, 201, 232; and Izdebsky’s Salon, 80; and ‘Kiltse’ (Circle), 437–8n20; and Kozintsev, 5, 17; and Kultur-Lige, 193, 201; Kyiv studio, 172–6, 201, 219, 255, 313, 526; and Meller, 3, 5, 8, 175, 219, 309n99; and New York International Theatre Exposition, 492, 494, 511n55; and Nijinska, 8, 298, 313, 314–16; ‘On Creating a Laboratory for Stage Performances,’ 175; in Paris, 3, 21, 81, 183, 219; pedagogy and influence of, 3, 7, 8, 16, 172, 174, 192–3, 315; and Petrytsky, 3, 5, 175, 219, 304n21, 309n99, 315; photograph, 171; stage design characteristics, 175–6, 314–15, 316, 441n43; stage design course (1918), 175–6; and Suprematism, 170, 232; and Tairov, 171, 175, 304n31, 313–15; Ukrainian identity, 230, 236 – art work: Bridge, 173; ‘Colour Rhythms,’ 171; Fundukleivska Street at Night, pl. 4 – graphic design: cover for Hermes, pl. 21

601

– theatre designs: for Famira Kifared (Annensky), pl. 9, 171, 175, 314; for Salome (Wilde), 253, 255, 314 Eygns (Our Own, almanac), 204, 206, 215n57 Factory of the Eccentric Actor, 474n46 Faragoh, Francis Edwards, 504 Federation of Soviet Writers, 209 Fedorov, Ivan: Apostol (Epistle), 411 Fedotov, Georgii: Tri stolitsy (The Three Capitals), 137n93 Fefer, Itsik, 210, 211 Feldman, David, 211 Feldman (Fel’dman), D. (Dimitrii), 475n66, 476n77 Feldman, F. (cameraman), 463 Fenin, Lev, 248 Fertner, Antoni, 161 Feuillade, Louis: Fantômas, 143, 159; Les Vampires, 162 Filians’kyi, Mykola, 135n75 Film d’art, 139, 146, 147 Findling, John, 486, 508n22 First Exhibition of Drawing and Graphics (1926, Kyiv), 10, 410 First Jewish Exhibition of Sculpture, Graphics, and Design, 80 First National Choir, 325 First Proletarian Art Exhibition of Kharkiv, 425 First Yiddish Workers’ Theatre, 268 5 x 5 = 25, 80 Flach (Falenski), Josef, 249, 271n41 Fokine, Mikhail (Michel Fokin), 307n88, 312, 320n4 Forbes-Robertson, John, 151 Foregger, Nikolai (Nicholas), 21, 45, 461, 475n62 formalism: avant-garde artists accused of, 10, 220, 224, 259, 337, 387, 469; Russian formalist theory, 220, 535, 549, 565n35 Francis of Assisi, 539 François Hotel (Kyiv), 256 Franko, Ivan, 201, 211; Velykyi shum-povist’, 432 Franko Theatre, 384n38, 422

602

Index

Free Association of Artists, 258–9 Fridman (pogrom victim), 72 Froman, Margarita, 347 From the Basements to the Upper Floors (film), 83 Frumkin, Malka (Ester), 204 Fuchs, Georg, 305n47, 318, 522 Fun tsayt tsu tsayt (From Time to Time), 199 Futoriansky (Futorians’kyi), Savely (Savelii), 346 Futurism: and abstraction, 9–10, 387–404; in Bohomazov’s work, 176, 411, 441n43; in Burliuk’s work, 192, 412, 421–2, 448; and Dadaists, 190, 393, 396; in Exter’s work, 80, 170–6, 181, 257, 314; film and film techniques, 448, 464, 471n18; in graphic art, 411–12, 419–21; Italian, 3, 389, 391, 393, 396, 471n18; and Jewish folk art, 201; in Malevich’s work, 388, 389, 448; Panfuturism, 190, 230, 231, 388, 389, 396, 397; Russian, 393; in Semenko’s work, 10, 219, 220, 229, 387–8, 389–91, 393–6, 419–22; street banners and posters, 181, 257; and theatre, 245, 246, 494; Ukrainian, 10, 220, 228, 387–404. See also Cubism and Cubo-Futurism Gad (Hood), Urban, 151 Gaideburov, Pavel, 44, 50n39 Galician Ukrainian Army, 71 Garafola, Lynn, 314 Gardin, Vladimir, 162 Gauguin, Paul, 231, 232, 548 Generator (wall newspaper), 426, 427 George V, king of England, 463 Gerassimov, Sergei, 474n46 Geshelina, Leah, 200 Gillespie, David, 459 Ginzburg, Simion, 161 Ginzburg-Naumov, A.M., 64 Gladkov, Alexander, 440n35 Glazunov, Alexander (Aleksandr), 248, 339n12 Glière (Glier), Reinhold (Reingol’d), 348–9; collaboration with LK on Haidamaky, 351, 352, 474n47; at Kyiv Conservatory, 350; as a teacher, 324, 325

– works: Chervonyi mak (Red Poppy), 349; Midny vershnyk (The Bronze Horseman), 349 Gluck, Christoph Willibald, 334 Gnedov (Gnidov, Hnidov), Vasilisk (Vasilii), 185, 193, 195n27 Gnesin, Mikhail, 532 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 539, 541; Faust, 308n94; Werther, 160 Gogol, Nikolai (Mykola Hohol): and the avant-garde, 234; descriptions of Kyiv, 98, 101, 108, 114, 132n25; imperial identity, 45 – works: ‘The Portrait,’ 166n63; Revizor (The Inspector General): LK as actor in, 278, 522; LK production, 526, 528; Mardzhanov production, 33; Meyerhold production, 534n8, 536n59; Sadovsky production, 34, 35–6, 244, 278; Stanislavsky production, 534n8; Vii, 422 Gold, Michael, 503, 504; Strike! 506 Goldenveizer, A.A., 61, 63, 64, 68, 72, 73–4 Goldenweizer, Aleksei, 208 Goldfaden Kunst Vinkl Theatre, 268–9 Goleizovsky, Kasian, 315 Golomb, Abraham, 200, 208 Goncharova, Natalia, 301, 314, 315, 511n55 Gordin, Yakov (Iakov), 268 Gorky (Gorkii), Maxim (Maksim), 84; Dachniki (Summer Folk), 29; Deti solntsa (Children of the Sun), 36; Na dne (The Lower Depths), 43 Gorsky (Gorskii), Aleksandr, 311 GOSET. See State Jewish Theatre Gosiason (Hosiasson), Filipp (Philippe), 175, 194n7 GosTIM. See State Institute of Theatre Arts Goya, Francisco José de, 283, 557; Los Caprichos, 543 Gozenpud, Matvy (Matvii), 330 Gozzi, Carlo: La Princesse Turandot, 525, 535n23 Granovsky (Granovskii), Aleksei (Abraham Azarkh), 455, 494; Jidische Glickn (Jewish Luck, film), 473n40 Great Theatre of Miniatures, 246

Index Green, Paul: The Man on the House, 506; Supper for the Dead, 506; Tread the Green Grass, 506 Greenwich Village Theatre (New York), 492 Gregory, Isabella Augusta, Lady, 20 Greter & Krivanek Mechanical, 61, 70, 77 Griboedov, Aleksandr: Gore ot uma (Woe from Wit), 36 Griffith, D.W.: film techniques, 376, 377, 379, 384n46, 448; influence on LK, 470n15, 476n80, 531; Intolerance, 152, 154, 162, 384n46, 470n15, 472n27, 475n67, 476n80 Grigoriev, S.R., 65 Grigorovich-Barsky (Grigorovich-Barskii), D.N., 60, 62 Grillparzer, Franz: Woe to the Liar, 291, 292, 306n58, 545 Gris, Juan, 389 Gritchenko, Alexis (Oleksa Hryshchenko), 438n21; On the Relations of Russian Painting with Byzantium and the West, 420 Groys, Boris, 220 Guazzoni, Enrico, 152 Guenzburg, Baron Vladimir, 55 Guggenheim, Peggy: Art of This Century Gallery, 494 Gvozdev, Aleksei, 526 Gzhytsky (Gzhyts’kyi), Volodymyr: Chorne ozero (Black Lake), 222 Haber, Edythe, 116 Habima (Moscow Yiddish theatre), 211 Hakkebush, Liubov, 246, 251, 445, 446 Halahan, Hryhorii, 306–7n72 Halbe, Max: Youth, 281, 282 Hamsun, Knut: In the Grip of Life, 43 Hart (Tempering), 209 Hasenclever, Walter, 546, 564n24 Hauptmann, Gerhardt, 43, 228; Atlantis, 159; Drayman Henschel, 245; The Sunken Bell, 306n58; The Weavers, 245 Heap, Jane, 490, 497, 501, 510n46; The Little Review, 490 Hebbel, Friedrich, 336 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 179, 561 Heijermans, Herman: The Good Hope, 36

603

Henderson, Linda Dalrymple, 472n34 Herman, Emanuil (Emil Krotkii), 258 Hermes (journal), pl. 21 Hermes Group, 258 Hetmanate (German theatre), 250 Hetmanate (polity), 67–8, 70, 73 Hindemith, Paul, 328, 330, 331, 340nn27–8 Hirniak, Yosyp (Iosyp): arrest and imprisonment, 521; film work, 463; in Germany, 513n82; on LK’s film work, 452, 454–5, 456; photographs, 267, 452, 458–9, 551, 556, 558–60; on the Young Theatre, 278–80 – as an actor: in Dictatorship, 223; in Gas, 368, 512n74; in Jimmie Higgins (Sinclair), 385n49; in Maklena Grasa, 556, 558–60; in October Revue, 365–6; in The People’s Malakhy (Kulish), 551; in Ruhr, 367, 368; in They Made Fools of Themselves (Kropyvnytsky), 265, 266, 267, 438n24; in Vendetta, 454–5, 458–9 – writing: ‘Birth and Death of the Modern Ukrainian Theatre,’ 521 Hiutel, I., 319n3, 339n8 Hnat Mykhailychenko Theatre (formerly All-Ukrainian Central Studio Drama Group, Tsentrostudio), 260–4, 269, 364 Hnidov, Vasilii. See Gnedov, Vasilisk Hoberman J., 468, 473n40, 477n86 Hodziatsky (Hodziats’kyi), Vitaly (Vitalii), 338 Hoffmansthal Hugo von: Die Hochzeit der Sobeide (Svadba Zobaidy, Zobaida’s Wedding), 33–4; The Strange Girl, 159 Hofshtein, David: and Kultur-Lige, 201; landscape lyric, 205–6; poetry in Yiddish and Ukrainian, 7, 197, 199; translations by, 210, 211, 212; and Yiddish publishing, 208, 209 Holgate, Edwin, 3, 12nn2–3 Holovko, Andry (Andrii), 211; Burian (Weeds), 222; Maty (Mother), 222 Honegger, Arthur, 328, 330, 341n31, 351; Pacific 231, 353 Honh komunkulta (komunkul’ta) (The Gong of Comm[unist] Cult[ure]), 399, 402 Honzl, Jindrich, 371

604 Index Hood, Raymond, 484 Hoover, Herbert, 484 Horily (Horilyi), Oleksander, 325 Horodovenko, Nestor, 326 Horovits, Oleksander, 324 Hosejko, Liubomir, 469n2, 470n10 Hosiasson (Gosiason), Philippe (Filipp), 175, 194n7 Hrabovsky (Hrabovs’ky), Leonid, 338 Hridasov (critic), 465, 476n80 Hrinchenko, Mykola, 327, 329 Hrushevsky (Hrushevs’kyi), Mykhailo, 63, 66–7, 88, 91n39, 225, 415; Literaturnyinaukovyi vistnyk, 436n5 Hrynko, Hryhory (Hryhorii), 322 Hryshchenko, Oleksa (Alexis Gritchenko), 438n21; On the Relations of Russian Painting with Byzantium and the West, 420 Huizinga, Johan, 545, 564n20 Hundorova, Tamara, 18, 121, 122, 123, 126, 128, 136n88 Hurvits, Khaim-Dov, 197 Hus, Jan, 543, 564n13 Huyssen, Andreas, 18 Ianovs’kyi, Borys. See Yanovsky, Borys Ianovych, Stepan. See Yanovych, Stepan Iaroshenko, Volodymyr. See Yaroshenko, Volodymyr Ibsen, Henrik, 228, 539; A Doll’s House (Nora), 526; An Enemy of the People, 248, 306n58; Ghosts, 245; The Vikings of Helgeland (Giants of the North), 251 Iefremov, Serhii. See Yefremov, Serhy Iermilov, Vasyl. See Yermilov, Vasyl’ Ihnatovych, Hnat, 264, 357nn13, 20, 382n2, 471n26, 564n8; Babylonian Captivity (film), 153 Illienko (Ilienko), Yury (Yurii), 557, 566n48 Ilyin, Vasili (Vasilii), 475n62 Imperial Aleksandrinsky Theatre (St Petersburg), 38, 271n22 Impressionism, 323, 331, 389, 394, 543 Ingenieros, José: Introduction to Psychology, 525 Inkizhinov, Valery, 527

International Graphics Exhibition (Leipzig), 425 International Press Exhibition (PressaKöln), 425, 439n28 International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM), 330, 331 International Theatre Exposition (New York). See New York International Theatre Exposition Intimate Theatre, 256 Iohansen, M. See Yohansen, Maik Irchan, Myroslav (Andry or Andrii Babiuk), 261; The Dream in Vian Guba, 521–2; Place d’Armes, 534n6 Istoriia Kieva (ed. Suprunenko), 61 Iura, Hnat. See Yura, Hnat Ivanov, P., 227 Ivanov, Viacheslav, 541, 543 Iwaskiewicz, Jarosław, 102 Izdebsky (Izdebskii), Vladimir, 80 Izmailov, Vladimir, 99, 132n23; Puteshestvie v Poludennuiu Rossiiu, 131n6 Jancˇ ek, Gerald, 23n17 Jaques-Dalcroze, Émile, and concept of rhythmic movement (eurythmics), 271n44, 304n37; influenced by Classical Greek art, 287; influence on Ukrainian theatre and dance, 311, 439n33; and training for actors, 249, 284, 288, 329, 549, 564n15; and training for dancers, 313, 314, 316 Jasset, Victorin-Hippolyte: Zigomar, 144, 149 Jeanneret, Charles-Édouard, 389 Jewish Arts and Trades School (Kyiv), 209 Jewish Committee to Assist the Revival of Russia, 73 Jewish National Assembly, 203 Johnson, Robert, 314 Jones, Robert Edmond, 492, 506 Joyce, James: Ulysses, 490, 565n27 Kadet (Constitutional Democratic Party), 62, 68 Kaganovich, Lazar, 88, 225, 226

Index Kainz, Jozef, 318, 522, 539 Kaiser, Georg, 368, 384n42, 512n74, 526, 530, 546; From Morn to Midnight, 269; Gas: LK production (see under Berezil Theatre productions); other productions, 512n74 Kalmanovitch, Zelig, 203 Kalmanovych, Lazar, 268, 269 Kal’mykov, Mykola, 440n35 Kamensky (Kamenskii), Vasily (Vasilii): The Book on Evreinov, 250; Stenka Razin, 256; Tango with Cows, pl. 17 Kamerny Ballet (Moscow), 315 Kamerny Theatre (Moscow): Exter’s designs for, 171, 253, 255, 304n21, 313–14; at German theatre exhibition (1927), 508n14; and Paris Exposition, 479, 497; Tairov at, 45, 171, 248, 479, 502, 504 – productions: Famira Kifared (Annensky), pl. 9, 171, 175, 314; Salome (Wilde), 253, 255, 314 Kaminski, Esther, 268 Kanatka (Cable, wall newspaper), 426, 427 Kandinsky (Kandinskii), Vasily (Vasilii, Wassily), 170, 181, 318, 430, 453 Kanin, Alexander (Aleksandr), 267–8 Kant, Immanuel, 220, 538 Kapchynsky (Kapchyns’kyi), M., 456 Kapler, Aleksei, 253 Karabyts (Karabyts’), Ivan, 338 Karhalsky (Karhals’kyi), Serhy (Serhii), 251 Karpenko-Kary (Karpenko-Karyi), Ivan, 38, 38–9, 245; Suieta (Vanity), 244 Karpova, Tamara, 555 Kavaleridze, Ivan, 448–9, 449, 454; Koliivshchyna (By Water and Smoke, Mass Struggle), 472n35 Keaton, Buster, 464 Kepley, Vance, 455 Kerensky (Kerenskii), Aleksandr, 61 Khanzhonkov, Aleksandr, 154, 155, 156 Kharkiv Art Guild, 313 Kharlamov, Aleksei, 267 Khashtshevatsky, Moshe, 210 KhLam Club, 258

605

Khlebnikov, Velimir (Victor), 174, 185, 232, 412 Khodorovsky, Hryhory, 324 Kholodnaia, Vera, 163 Khotkevych, Hnat, 328; Hard Times, 270n10 Khronika mystetstv i khudozhnoi promyslovosti (The Chronicle of Arts and Artistic Production), 254 Khrushchev, Nikita, 225 Khvostenko-Khvostov, Oleksander (Alexander), 175, 219, 257, 429; design for Sinclair’s MOB, pl. 16 Khvylovy (Khvyl’ovyi, Fitilev), Mykola, 88, 227, 234, 555, 566n42; Syni etiudy (Blove etyudn, Blue sketches), 211; Valdshnepy (Woodsnipes), 227 Kierkegaard, Sören Aabye, 539 Kiesler, Friedrich, 492, 493, 494, 497, 499, 501, 504 Kiltse (Kil’tse, The Ring, 1914), 80, 437n20 Kister, Yury (Iurii), 247 Klee, Paul, 389 Kletzkin, Boris, 199–200 Klutsis, G., 439n26 Kochetovsky (Kochetovskii), Aleksandr, 312 Kogan, Piotr Semionovich, 509n30 Kohan, Hryhory (Hryhorii), 329 Kokhansky (Kokhans’kii), Pavlo, 324 Kolakovsky (Kolakovs’kyi), Oleksy, 324 Kolessa, Filaret, 341n35 Kolessa, Mykola, 324 Koliada, Mykola, 331, 332, 335, 336; ‘Shturm Traktornoho partyzanamy’ (Assault on Traktorny by the Partisans), 354 Kollontai, Aleksandra, 258 Koltsov, Mikhail, 258 Komar, Hryhory (Hryhorii), 248 Komisarzhevskaia, Vera, 42–5, 43, 271n43, 523 Kommissarzhevsky (Komissarzhevskii), Theodore (Fiodor), 249, 271n43 Kondradi (writer), 147 Konys’kyi, Heorhii, 565n28 Koonen, Alisa, 45, 253

606 Index Kopylenko, O., 227 Koriak, Volodymyr (Vol’ko Davydovych Bliumshteyn, ‘Avanti’), 210, 259, 260, 528; ‘To the Isles Electric! (An Intermedia),’ 196 Kornienko, I., 459, 471n17, 473–4n44 Korniichuk, Oleksander, 211 Korolchuk, Oleksander, 245 Korsh-Borisov (actor), 157 Kosach, Larysa. See Ukrainka, Lesia Kosariev, Boris, 176, 440n35 Kosenko, Viktor, 322, 335, 336; Odynadtsiat’ etudiv u formi starovynnyh tantsiv (Eleven Études in the Forms of Old Dances), 333–4 Kosherov, Alexandr, 37 Koshyts (Koshyts’), Oleksander, 322, 324, 325, 338n7 Kotliarevska (Kotliarevs’ka), Maria, 432 Kotliarevsky (Kotliarevs’kyi), Ivan, 38, 184–5, 437n13; Natalka-Poltavka (Natalka of Poltava), 30, 38, 39, 245 Kotsiuba, H., 227 Kotsiubynsky (Kotsiubyns’kyi), Mykhailo, 140 Kott, Jan, 489 Kovalenko, Prokhor, 47n3, 246 Kovzhun, Pavlo: The City, 85; cover for Nova generatsiia, 410 Kozachenko, H.A., 155 Kozintsev, Grigory (Grigorii): on artistic Kyiv, 16, 17, 21; on cine-gesture, 474n46; and Exter, 5, 17; and Harlequin MiniTheatre, 253; on LK’s film technique, 460–1; photograph, 460; pre-film work, 448–9 Kozintseva-Erenberg, Liubov, 257 Kozytsky (Kozyts’kyi), Pylyp: and Berezil Theatre, 348, 349, 355; and Expressionism, 336; at Kyiv Conservatory, 350; and new Ukrainian music, 325, 377; Petrytsky’s portrait of, 328; role and contribution, 322; writing for Muzyka, 329; and Yavorsky, 327, 350 – works: choral music, 329; Dyvnyi flot (The Miraculous Fleet), 330; Holod (The Famine), 336; Industrialnyi moment

(Industrial Moment), 331, 354; Ryiemo, ryiemo (Digging, Digging), 329; Seven Piano Preludes, 339n17; Voloshky (The Cornflowers), 333 Kramarenko, Lev, 237, 410 Krasovsky (Krasovs’ky) (critic), 528 Krat, Pavlo: Koly ziishlo sontse (When the Sun Rose), 234 Krenek, Ernst: Johnny spielt auf, 341n33 Krieger (actor), 157 Kropyvnytsky (Kropyvnyts’kyi), Marko, 39, 47n3; Po revizii (After the Inspection), 40; Poshylys’ u durni (They Made Fools of Themselves), 265, 266, 267, 438n24 Kruchenykh, Aleksei, 193, 412 Kruchinin Theatre, 250 Krüger, Elsa, 176 Krushelnytsky (Krushel’nyts’kyi), Marian, 551, 552, 557, 560–2, 561 Krychevsky (Krychevs’kyi), Fedir, 225 Krychevsky (Krychevs’kyi), Mykola: textile designs, 235 Krychevsky (Krychevs’kyi), Vasyl (Vasyl’): and Academy of Art, 225; as an architect, 437n15; and Leontovych Music Society, 328 – art and design: cover for Literaturnyinaukovyi vistnyk (Hrushevs’kyi), 436n5; cover for Maister Korablia (Master of the Ship, novel), 417; cover for Ukrainian Dumas and Historical Songs (Revutsky), 326; paintings, 225; scenic decor for Zvenyhora (film by Dovzhenko), 416; VUFKU logo, 444 Krychevsky collective, 257 Kryha, I., 546 Kryzhytsky (Kryzhyts’kyi), Heorhy (Heorhii), 248, 255 Kryzhyvetsky (Krzhyvets’kyi), Borys, 245 Kugel, Aleksandr, 35 Kuiper, John B., 475n62 Kuleshov, Lev, 385n46, 461, 475n62 Kulish, Mykola: collaboration with LK, 12, 228, 550–68; death, 526; and Literary Discussions, 227; photograph, 550; and VAPLITE, 227

Index – plays: Commune in the Steppes, 234; Khuli Khurina, 526, 535n32; Maklena Grasa, 555–63, 566n38; Myna Mazailo, 228, 229, 555, 566n34; Narodny Malakhy (Narodnyi Malakhyi, The People’s Malakhy), 228, 438n24, 550–4, 555, 566n38; Sonata Pathétique, 228 Kulish, Panteleimon, 97, 122, 132n23; Black Council, 129; Chorna rada, 131n6 Kultur-Lige (Yiddish Culture League), 193, 199–212; activists in, 203, 207–8, 209; Communist control of, 207–10; exhibitions at, 5, 80; founding and aims of, 80, 200, 201; The Main Aims of the KulturLige, 201; as neutral or non-partisan, 7; Nijinska at, 307n88; publishing activities, 204–5, 209 Kultur-Lige Studio, 268 Kulyk, Ivan (Israel): Vasil Rolenko in Amerike (Vasil Rolenko in America), 211 Kulzhenko (Kul’zhenko), Vasyl (Vasyl’) S., 409 Kunin, Yosyf (Iosyf), 345–6, 383n21 Kunst-farlag (Arts Publication House, Kyiv), 199, 205 Kuprin, Aleksandr, 103; Yama (Iama, The Pit), 6, 98, 102–11, 118, 120, 128–9 Kurbas, Les (Les’, Oleksander, LK) – career: mother (Wanda Yanovych [Ianovych]), 554; father (Stepan Yanovich), 47n3, 302n1, 474n50, 538; youth and education, 302n1, 318, 522, 538–41; in Austria and Germany, 81, 513n82, 522, 538–40, 564n8; arrival in Kyiv, 26, 141, 161, 278; professional life, 4, 11, 522–32; musical abilities, 343, 347, 522; as a dancer (sheik in Aziade), 319; marriage to Chystiakova, 298, 299, 318; criticism at Literary Discussions, 226–7; removal from Berezil Theatre, 520, 528; arrest (Moscow, 1933), 212, 520, 563; in labour camps, 521–2, 526, 533, 563; death, 4, 12, 520, 521, 534n4, 563; ‘rehabilitation,’ 521 – as an actor: in Autumn, 303n16; in Black Panther, White Bear (Vynnychenko), 281;

–

–

–

–

607

in The Dream in Vian Guba, 521–2; in Inspector General (Gogol), 278, 522; in Oedipus Rex (Sophocles), 288, 290, 544; with Sadovsky’s troupe, 26, 47n3, 278–80, 303n16; in Woe to the Liar (Grillparzer), 292; in Youth (Halbe), 282 as a director: Bergson’s influence on, 450; Brechtian techniques, 4, 11, 445, 505, 548; circus elements, 265; compared to Meyerhold, 528–9; creation of machines and explosions, 368, 369, 371, 372, 373, 376–7; influenced by Jaques-Dalcroze, 313; influence of, 505–6, 509n32; mass rhythm-plastiques, 373; movement, dance, and music, 9, 318, 329, 343, 345–9, 351–6, 362–8, 522, 524, 532; opera productions, 339n8, 348, 445; puppets and puppet techniques, 367, 368, 375; rejection of emotional approach, 474n46; theatre-laboratory structure, 524–5; theatre of the future, 531–2; training for actors, 284–5, 329, 363, 366, 474n46, 525; use of chorus, 289–91, 295–6, 363–4, 373, 543–4; Yiddish theatre, 211–12, 268, 473n41 films by: possible extant copies, 469n9; Arsenal’tsi (Workers in the Arsenal; Chervonyi Arsenal, Red Arsenal), 11, 443, 452, 465–8, 476n77, 531; ‘Hryts’ko Plakyda’ (scenario), 475n65; Macdonald (Pryhody Makdonalda, Macdonald’s Adventures; Istoriia odniiei uhody, The History of One Agreement), 11, 443, 452, 461–4, 463, 473n44, 475n66, 530; Shveds’kyi sirnyk (Swedish Match) or Dvorians’ke boloto (Courtly Mud), 469– 70n10; Vendetta (Oko za oko, An Eye for an Eye), 11, 443, 452, 454–61, 458, 459, 530 film work and techniques, 443–68; early film work, 450–1; editing process, 460; film and film techniques in theatre, 355, 381, 444, 530–1, 547–8; influences on, 139–40, 147, 152–3, 158–9, 162, 384–5n46; views on film, 139–58 passim photographs and portraits: as an actor, 281, 282, 288, 290, 292, 292, 544; with

608 Index Berezil company, 549, 554; musical portrait by Kozytsky (Prelude), 339n17; photographs, 28, 81, 279, 299, 344, 466, 505, 520, 533, 539, 563; portraits by Zhuk, 413, 436n9 – theatre productions: production list, 570–81; choice of repertoire, 526; in labour camps, 521–2, 526, 563; of Yiddish works, 211–12; The Dream in Vian Guba (Irchan, music by Urbanek, in labour camp), 521–2; King Lear (at State Jewish Theatre, Moscow), 211, 455, 473n41, 520. See also Berezil Theatre productions; Kyidramte; Young Theatre – views and influences: and American arts, 11, 500; anti-clerical views, 474n50; artistic identity, 21; as avant-garde or modernist, 18, 318, 538–63; on burlesque, 149; and Eastern theatre, 475n62, 527–8, 549; on film, 139–58 passim; and graphic design, 10–11, 414–15, 434–5; and Hesychasm, 541; on Kyiv as a ‘theatrical mecca,’ 26, 46; and Leontovych Music Society, 327, 328–9; on naturalism and realism, 524; on Paris Exposition, 490; on Shakespeare, 489; on tango, 159; on theatrical design, 305n47; unified conception of production (Gesamtkunstwerk), 9; on war, 160 – writing and editing, 296, 345; avantgarde manifesto, 312; Barykady teatru (Theatre Barricades), 162, 417, 418, 422, 435, 524; Director’s Diary, 242; in Mystetstvo, 260; ‘The New German Drama,’ 296; ‘Premonition,’ 567; ‘Questions about the Analysis of the Play as a Theatrical Problem,’ 159–60; ‘Shliakhy i zavdannia Berezolia,’ 490; and Teatralni visti, 243, 280; ‘Teatralnyi lyst’ (Theatrical Letter), 285–7, 524; translation and foreword to Art Is Dying (Auburtin), 15, 545; on Young Theatre, 280 Kurbas, Stepan. See Yanovych, Stepan Kushnirov, Aron, 199, 208 Kuzmin, E., 172

Kuzmin, Yevhen (Ievhen), 246, 255 Kuznetsov, Stepan, 33–4, 35, 48n20 Kvitka, Klyment, 324, 325, 326–7 Kvitka-Osnovianenko, Hyrhorii, 38 Kvitko, Leyb (Lev), 203, 204, 206, 212; ‘Khazerkeh’ (Small Sucking Pigs), 211; translation of Ukrainishe folk mayses (Ukrainian Folk Tales), pl. 20, 211 Kyidramte (Kyiv Dramatic Theatre, 1920–2), 81–2, 309n100, 313, 522 Kyiv Art School, 172, 201, 436n9 Kyiv Circus: Trud i kapital (Work and Capital), 262–3 Kyiv Conservatory, 175, 327, 337, 350 Kyiv Group of Yiddish Writers (Eygns Group), 199, 200, 204, 206, 209 Kyiv Institute of Art (formerly Academy of Art), 80, 224, 225, 230–1, 237, 410, 415, 435n4, 436n11 Kyiv landmarks and streets: map, 57; contract market and fair, 53, 54; Dnipro River, 25, 27, 53, 99; Fundukleivska Street, 58, 172; Golden Gates, 97, 100; Khreshchatyk (Vorovsky Street), 61, 70, 86, 124–5, 141, 181, 252, 257; Mykolaivsky Street, 258, 259; Pechers’ka Lavra (Monastery of the Caves), 27, 52, 99, 105, 106; Podil, 52, 53, 54, 73, 86, 268; Prorizna Street, 119; Prospekt, 52, 53; St Sophia Square, pl. 1, 71, 116; Velyka Volodymyrska Street, 118, 119 Kyiv Musical College, 327 Kyiv Opera: ballet company, 80, 298, 311, 345 – productions: Carnival, 264; Madadzhara (Yanovsky), 323; Pershyi budynok Novoho svitu (The First Building of the New World), 261–2; Two Pierrots (Yanovsky), 323 Kyiv Picture Gallery, 10, 410 Kyiv University, 88 Kyrnarsky (Kyrnars’kyi), Marko, 417 Labour Zionist Party (Poalei Zion), 197, 201 Lange, Georg, 345

Index Langhoff, Matthias, 532 Larionov, Mikhail, 21 Latzky-Bertoldy, Wolf, 203 Lawrence, D.H., 155 Lawson, John Howard, 503, 504, 505 Lazarevs’kyi, Borys: ‘Sviatyi horod’ (Holy City), 136n88 Le, Ivan, 210, 211 Le Bargy, Charles: L’Assassinat du duc de Guise, 146 Lebed, Dmytro, 224 Le Corbusier, 389; Pavillon de l’Esprit Nouveau (Pavilion of the New Spirit), 484 Léger, Fernand, 21, 171, 219, 389, 493, 494 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, 77, 83, 84, 386, 445 Lenin Second State Theatre of the Soviet Republic. See Solovtsov Theatre Leninskii deklamator (Lenin’s Reciter), 88 Lentulov, Aristarkh, 21 Leontiev, Aleksei, 525 Leontovych, Mykola, 323, 324, 327, 353; death, 322, 325, 338n2 Leontovych, Volodymyr, 288, 544 Leontovych Kapelle-Studio, 326, 329 Leontovych Memorial Citizens’ Committee, 325, 351 Leontovych Music Society (Muzychne Tovarystvo im. Leontovycha), 325–30; Asosiatsiia Suchasnoi Muzyky (Association of Contemporary Music), 330–1, 351; reorganized as Vseukrains’ke Tovarystvo Revoliutsiinykh Muzyk (All-Ukrainian Society of Revolutionary Musicians), 336; Vivtorky (Tuesday meetings), 327 Leontovych string quartet, 326 Lermontov, Mikhail: Masquerade, 248 Leshchinsky, Jacob: Our National Demands, 198 Lesia Ukrainka State Theatre of Russian Drama, 269 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim: Minna von Barnhelm, 250 Lessingtheatre (Berlin), 43 Levshin, Aleksei, 132n23; Pis’ma iz Malorossii, 131n6

609

Leyda, Jay, 469n5 Liarov, M., 475n66 Liatoshynsky (Liatoshyns’kyi), Borys: and Expressionism, 336; and Impressionism, 331; at Kyiv Conservatory, 350; and Neofolkloricism, 335, 336; and new Ukrainian music, 322, 325, 330, 337–8, 341n37; photograph, 335; as a teacher, 337 – works: Misiachni tini (Moon Shadows), 331, 336; Overture on Four Ukrainian Folk Themes, 330, 335, 336; Second Symphony, 336–7; Sonata for Violin and Piano, 335; String Quartet no. 2, 336; String Quartet no. 3, 336; Third Symphony, 336–7; Vidobrazhennia (Reflections), 336, 337; Zolotyi obruch (The Golden Ring), 335, 336 Libert, Yakov (Iakov), 268 Lifar (Kyfar), Serge (Serhii), 5, 308n89; Le manifeste du choréographe, 310 Ligovskyi Narodnyi Dom (Ligovsky People’s House), 44 Linder, Max (Gabriel-Maximilien Leuville), 147, 148, 153, 160, 161, 470n12 Linytska (Linyt’ska), Liubov, 244 Liokh mystetstva (Art Cave), 258–9 Lishchansky (Lishchans’kyi), Yukhym (Iukhym), 348, 546 Lisovsky (Lisovs’kyi), Leonid, 329 Lisovyi zvir (Forest Beast, film), 455 Lissim, Simon, 175, 511n55 Lissitzky, El (Lazar Markovich Lisitskii): arrival in Kyiv, 80; career, 439n28; and the Kultur-Lige, 5, 193, 439n26; and Pressa-Köln exhibition, 425–6 – designs: cover for Ukrainishe folk mayses (Ukrainian Folk Tales, trans. Kvitko), pl. 20, 211; of exhibition space, 405n3, 425, 426; Kizon’ka (Nannygoat), 439n26; stamp for Kyiv publishing house, 204 Liszt, Franz, 334 Literary Discussion (1925–8), 226–7 Litizdat (Bolshevik Literary-Publishing Department), 82 Little Review, The, 490; coverage of New York International Theatre Exposition

610 Index (Winter 1926), 494–502; illustrations from, 493, 495–6, 498–9, 501–4 Little Russia, 50n42 Litvakov, Moshe, 208, 209 Liubchenko, Arkady, 227, 231 Liubomirsky, Yeshue, 198 Liudkevych, Stanyslav, 323, 324 Livshits, Benedikt, 21, 258 Llewellyn Smith, H., 485–6 Lloyd, Harold, 464, 477n85 Loiter, Noah, 268 Lopatynsky (Lopatyns’kyi), Favst: and Berezil Theatre, 471n26, 494, 501, 546; career, 265–6; film work, 463; and New York International Theatre Exposition, 494, 501; photographs, 265, 501; at Theatre Institute, 382n2 – production: They Made Fools of Themselves (Kropyvnytsky), 265, 266, 267, 438n24 – writing: ‘Dynamo’ (filmscript on story by H.G. Wells), 397, 399, 406n28 Lothar (Spitzer), Rudolf, 271n31; Konig Harlekin (King Harlequin), 248 Louria, Isaak, 525 Loyter, Ephraim, 201, 207, 208 Lozovsky (Lozovs’kyi), Les, 415 Lozowick, Louis, 506 Luchaire, Julien, 443 Luckyj, George: The Anguish of Mykola Hohol, aka Nikolai Gogol, 45 Lukianov, Leonid, 248 Lumière brothers, 139, 145, 146, 455 Lunacharsky (Lunacharskii), Anatoly (Anatolii): as People’s Commissar of Enlightenment, 207, 459, 482, 529; and theosophy, 453; as threatre critic and journalist, 32, 37, 65 Lundin, Aksel, 248, 268, 269, 465 Lurie, Noah, 209 Lyric (imprint), 209, 210 Lysenko, Mykola: death, 469n2; and Glière’s score for Haidamaky (Shevchenko), 351; LK’s knowledge of works by, 343, 347; and Lysenko Conservatory, 40

– works: Eneida (The Aeneid), 323; KozaDereza (The Billy Goat), 348; Nocturne, 323; Taras Bulba, 252, 339n8, 348; Ukrainian Suite (in the Form of Old Dances), 334; Utoplena (The Drowned Maiden), 251–2, 272n52, 339n8, 348; Zyma i vesna (Winter and Spring), 348 Lysenko Music and Drama Institute (formerly Lysenko Music and Drama School), 40, 279, 327, 329, 338n4, 346, 381n2 Lysiak-Rudnytsky, Ivan, 230 MacDonald, Ramsay, 463 MacGowan, Kenneth, 492, 502–3 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 323, 538, 563n1; The Miracle of St Anthony, 308n94 Magne, Henri-Marcel, 486 Magocsi, Paul Robert, 67 Main Aims of the Kultur-Lige, The, 201 Makkaveisky (Makkaveiskii), Vladimir, 258 Makovsky (Makovskii), Konstantin, 157 Maksimov, Vladimir, 155–6 Maksymovych, Mykhailo, 98, 137n93 – art works: ‘A Complex Presentiment (Half-Length Figure in a Yellow Shirt),’ 239; ‘Black Square,’ 548; ‘Kalynivka Miracle,’ 239; peasant portraits, 222; Suprematist composition (1920s), pl. 8; ‘Untitled (Man Running),’ 239 – writing: ‘An Analysis of the New and the Painterly Arts: Paul Cézanne,’ 389; ‘God Is Not Cast Down,’ 194n21; in Nova generatsiia, 194n22, 388–9 Malevich (Malevych), Kazimir (Kazymyr), 236–9; and Exter, 172; and folk art, 172, 184, 232, 238; and Futurism, 388, 389, 448; and Hesychasm, 181; post-Suprematist work, 239; Suprematist work, 170, 172, 184, 219, 238–9, 300, 390; theories on art, 195n22; Ukrainian identity, 21, 230, 236–9; use of colour, 318 Malraux, André: La condition humaine, 519 Malynovska (Malynovs’ka), Vera, 150 Mandelshtam, Osip, 211, 234, 258, 526, 531

Index Mané-Katz, Emmanuel, 440n35 Manuilovych, Sofia (Sofiia), 353 Manzy (Manzyi), Volodymyr, 332 Marc, Franz, 430 Mardzhanov, Konstantin (Kote Mardzhanishvili), 252–6; at Bagrov’s theatre (Odessa), 33–4; photographs, 32, 252; at Solovtsov Theatre, 29, 33, 252, 253, 254, 256; at Svobodny teatr, 34, 45 – productions: Fuente Ovejuna (de Vega), 34, 256, 311; In the Grip of Life (Hamsun), 43; Salome (Wilde), 253, 254–6 Margolin, Arnold D., 90n15 Margoline, Samouil, 493, 511n56; ‘The Russian Theatre of Today,’ 497 Marianenko (Mar’ianenko, né Petlyshenko), Ivan: archives, 453; and Leontovych Music Society, 328; photographs, 35, 244, 446; in Sadovsky’s company, 26, 35, 41, 47n3, 244, 303n16, 422; at Shevchenko Theatre, 251 – productions: Inspector General (Gogol), 35, 244; Macbeth (Shakespeare), 446, 454; Moloda krov (Vynnychenko), 41; Tartuffe (Molière), 244 Markish, Peretz, 206, 212 Marsan, Eugène, 509n29 Marshall, Herbert, 443 Martinet, Marcel: La nuit (The Night), 530, 531 Masiutyn, Yury (Iurii) (pseud. Ya. Yurmas, Iurmas), 329 Matisse, Henri, 170, 172 Matiushin, Mykhail, 232 Maugham, Somerset: Sadie, 527 Maupassant, Guy de, 159 Maurin, E.: Kinematograf v prakticheskoi zhizni (The Cinema in Practical Life), 161 Mayakovsky (Mayakovskii), Vladimir, 15, 526 May Day celebration (1919), 257 Maysky (Mais’kyi), M., 227 McReynolds, Louise, 83 Mehring, Walter, 389 Meisel, Nakhman, 199, 200

611

Meitus, Yuly (Iulii): and Berezil Theatre, 344, 348, 349; LK’s collaboration with, 228, 344, 345, 532; photographs, 344, 350; use of jazz elements, 332 – works: Na Dniprobudi (At the Dnipro Hydroelectric Station), 331, 353–4; score for Hello, on Radio 477, 341n33 Melamed, Zelig, 199–200, 209 Méliès, Georges, 145 Meller, Vadym: and Blaue Reiter group, 219, 430; career, 565n37; collaboration with LK, 10, 228, 299, 414, 434–5, 466, 550–68; as designer for Nijinska, 299, 316, 319, 565n37; and Exter, 3, 5, 175, 219, 309n99; and New York International Theatre Exposition, 494, 496–501, 497, 511n55; in Paris, 3, 21; and Paris Exposition, 489, 490; photographs, 466, 491, 492, 496; and Yermilov, 425–6 – film designs for LK, 455; Arsenal, 467, 476n77; Macdonald, 463, 475n66; Vendetta, 473n38 – graphic designs, 418, 422–3, 430, 434–5; for Barykady teatru, 417, 418, 422, 435; for Mystetsvo diistva (Tereshchenko), 422; for Nova generatsiia, 439n28 – theatre designs: Carnival, pl. 12, 262, 264; Dyktatura (Mykytenko), 440n37; Gas, 301, 369–72, 440n37, 501, 530; Hello, on Radio 477, 492; Jimmie Higgins (Sinclair), 531; Macbeth, 446; Machine Wreckers, 499, 500; Maklena Grasa, 555, 557; Mazepa (Słowacki), 251; Mikado (Gilbert and Sullivan), 440n37; Myna Mazailo (Kulish), 229; The People’s Malakhy (Kulish), 228, 438n24, 550–4; Secretary of the Labour Union (Scott), 11, 479, 489, 490, 494; Tripes d’or (Crommelynck), 440n37; Universal Necropolis, 263, 264; Wozzeck (Berg), 440n37 – visual art, 10; Fear, pl. 10; Mask, 22; Mephisto Valse, pl. 11; representations of Nijinska’s ballets, pl. 10–11, 8, 22, 320n12; street banners and posters, 181, 257 – writing: ‘The Present Is in Need of a Master,’ 435 Melnikov, Kostantin, 483, 485

612 Index Merezhkovsky (Merezhkovskii), Dmitry (Dmitrii): Tsar Aleksei, 256 Merimée, Prosper: Jacquerie, 234, 236, 355, 526 Messiaen, Olivier, 327 Metner, Oleksander, 324 Metzinger, Jean, 389 Meyerhold (Meierkhol’d), Vsevolod, 267, 314, 434, 543; as an actor, 523; actor-poet concept, 525; archives and records, 519; Brotherhood of New Drama, 523; and M. Chekhov, 519–20; death, 519; early career, 522–32; experimental theatre workshops, 525, 534n16; film and film techniques, 162, 355, 536n54; in Germany, 519; and Glière, 349; and Komissarzhevskaia, 42–5; and Kosherov, 37; and LK, 4, 5, 11, 519–33, 534n4; and New York International Theatre Exposition, 498, 502; photograph, 44; portrait by Ulianov, 523; ‘rehabilitation’ of, 521; and Russian balagan (fairground theatre), 522; Scientific Research Laboratory, 524; and Stanislavsky, 34, 519, 520, 522; theatre aesthetics and ideals, 544, 548; theatre of the future, 45, 531–2; and Theatre of the Revolution, 479, 526, 527; theory of biomechanics, 313; use of music, 356, 532 – film: Portrait of Dorian Gray, 162 – theatre productions: Balaganchik (Blok), 42; D.E. (Daios Evropu), 527, 532, 533; Inspector General (Gogol), 534n8, 536n59; The Magnificent Cuckold (Crommelynck), 526, 528, 529, 530; The Mandate (Erdman), 536n59; Salome (Wilde), 253 – writing: adaptation of La condition humaine (Malraux), 519; Afisha GosTIMa (Meierkhol’d State Theatre Playbill), 534n17; On the Theatre, 524, 525 Meyerhold State Theatre. See State Institute of Theatre Arts Meyerhold Theatre (TIM), 511n55, 523, 526–7, 530, 534n16 Mezhenko, Yury (Iurii), 261, 265 Mielziner, Jo, 506

Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig, 389 Mikhailov, Mikhail, 245 Mikhoels (Vovsi), Solomon, 211–12, 455, 473n41, 520 Miklachevsky (Miklachevskii), Konstantin, 526 Milhaud, Darius, 328, 351; ‘Catalogue of Farm Machines,’ 353 Miliukov, Pavel, 68 Miliutenko, Dmytro, 556 Miller, Aleksei, 5, 28, 34, 45 Miller Theatre (New York), 9 Milne, Lesley, 134n62 Milner, John, 230 Ministry of Education of Ukraine, 201 Ministry for Jewish Affairs, 197, 200 Mir iskusstva (The World of Art, St Petersburg), 415, 437n12 Modernism, 18, 81, 484, 485; Ukrainian, 23n12, 220, 313, 331, 350 Mohyla Academy (Kyiv), 50n33, 307n72, 418, 419 Mohyla, Petro, 565n28 Mohylevsky (Mohylevs’kyi), Oleksander, 324 Moissi, Alexander (Alessandro Moissi, Aleksandër Moisiu), 45, 50n41, 522, 539 Mokulsky (Mokuls’kyi), Stefan, 250 Molchanov, Porfyry, 324 Molière, 441n44; Scapin, 36; Tartuffe, 244, 306n58, 441n44 Monastyrska-Bohomazov (Monastyrs’kaBohomazov), Wanda, 181, 194n15 Moniuszko, Stanisław, 348; Halka, 339n8, 348 Monumentalism, 219, 231 Moor, Dmitry (Dmitrii), 82 Moos, David, 236 Mordkin, Michael (Mikhail, Michel): at Berezil, 5, 345; Bondarchuk on, 319n3; career, 306n56, 311, 319n2; at Kyiv Opera, 311; and State Ukrainian Music Drama Theatre, 251, 347; at Young Theatre, 287, 288, 301, 311–12 – productions: Azaide, 301, 312, 319n3, 339n8; evening of choreography, 301;

Index Fuente Ovejuna (de Vega), 311; Nur and Anitra, 304n21, 306n56 Morsky (Morskii), V.A., 143 Moscow Art Theatre: actors in film productions, 157; Andreeva at, 29; and Berezil Theatre, 467; Bersenev at, 48n21; Komissarzhevskaia at, 43; Koonen at, 45; Kosherov at, 37; in Kyiv (1912), 43; Mardzhanov at, 34; Margoline at, 511n56; Meyerhold at, 523; naturalist aesthetics, 176; and Paris Exposition, 479 – productions: Dni Turbinykh (Days of the Turbins, Bulgakov), 226; Uncle Vania (Chekhov), 31–2 Moscow Satire Theatre, 526 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 144 Mozzhukhin, Ivan, 162 Mucha, Alphonse, 398 Municipal Counter-Reform (1892), 57 Munsterberg, Hugo, 379 Murashko, Oleksander, 225 Muraviev, Andrei: Puteshestvie po sviatym mestam russkim: Kiev, 131n6, 132n23 Musset, Alfred de: Lorenzaccio, 308n94 Muzychne Tovarystvo im. Leontovycha. See Leontovych Music Society Muzyka (journal), 329, 330, 336, 351 Muzyka masam (Music for the Masses; later Muzyka mas, Music of the Masses), 336 Mykhailiv, Yukhym (Iukhym), 328, 339n17 Mykhailivsky (Mykhailivs’kyi) Sobor (St Michael’s Cathedral), 107 Mykhailychenko, Hnat, 259; ‘Proletarian Art,’ 260 Mykytenko, Ivan, 210, 211; Dyktatura (Dictatorship), 222, 223, 566n38 Myshchenko, Mykola, 440n35 Mystetstvo (Art, journal), 259–60, 416, 417 Nadenenko, Fedir, 330 Naievich, A., 225 Nalepinska-Boichuk (Nalepins’kaBoichuk), Sofia, 432, 440n38 Nansen, Betty, 152 Narbut, Heorhy (Hryhorii): and Academy of Art, 225; career, 415–17; and folk art,

613

201, 416; and Mir Iskusstva group, 437n12; and Mystetstvo, 260, 416, 417; triangle trademark, 417, 435; as the ‘Ukrainianizer,’ 415, 434; Ukrains’ka abetka (Ukrainian Alphabet), 437n17; Zhuk’s portrait of, 413 Narodin, Kostiantyn, 248 National State Theatre (Derzhavnyi Narodnyi Teatr), 245 Nechui-Levytsky (Nechui-Levyts’kyi), Ivan, 132n23; The Clouds, 122, 129; Kaidasheva simia (Kaidash’s Family), 457; Khmary, 131n6 Neighbourhood Playhouse (New York), 492 Neimae, Ekaterina: Stikhy (Poems), pl. 19 Nemirovich-Danchenko, Vladimir, 31, 34, 356, 522 Neo-Baroque, 323 Neoclassicism, 323, 331, 333–4, 340n28 Neofolklorism, 331, 334–5 Neshchadymenko, Ryta, 295, 297 Neue Sachlichkeit, 389 New Economic Policy (NEP), 77, 84, 86, 322, 383n20 New Playwrights Theatre (USA), 505 New Polish Theatre, 249 newspapers and journals: Afisha GosTIMa (Meierkhol’d State Theatre Playbill), 534n17; Avangard (Avant-garde), 409; Baginen (Dawn), 204, 205; Barykady teatru (Theatre Barricades), 162, 417, 418, 422, 435, 524; Bikher-velt (World of Books), 206; Bilshovyk (Bil’shovyk), 367, 384n37; Borotba (Borot’ba), 297; Chervonyi shliakh (Red Path), 409, 429n28; Der emes (Truth), 208; Di royte velt (Red World), 210, 211; Dziennik Kijówski (Kyiv Daily), 65; Folks-tsaytung (People’s Paper), 210; Generator, 426, 427; Hart (Tempering), 409; Hermes, pl. 21; Hlobus (Globe), 409; Honh komunkulta (komunkul’ta) (Gong of Comm[unist] Cult[ure]), 399, 402; Kanatka (Cable), 426, 427; Kievlianin (The Kyivan), 64, 65, 66, 72, 163; Kievskaia mysl (Kyiv Thought), 58, 60, 64, 72; Kievskaia zhizn

614 Index (zhizn’) (Kyiv Life), 72; Kievskie otkliki (Kyiv Comments), 56; Kino, 469n5; Knyhar (The Bookseller), 63; Kommunist (Communist), 69; Komunistishe fon (Communist Banner), 207, 210; Krytyka (Criticism), 409; Literaturnonaukovyi visnyk (Literary-Scientific Herald), 63; Literaturny yarmarok (Literaturnyi iarmarok, Literary Bazaar), 409; Molodaia gvardiia (Young Guard), 439n26; Muzaget, 414; Muzyka, 329, 330, 336, 351; Muzyka masam (later Muzyka mas), 336; Mystetstvo (Art), 259–60, 416, 417; Naye tsayt (New Time), 65, 201, 210; Nova generatsiia (New Generation), 194n22, 387, 389, 409, 410, 439n28; Nova hromada (New Community), 409; Nova rada (New Council), 65; Nove mystetstvo, 422; Oyfgang (Sunrise), 204; Pluh (Plow), 409; Poslednie novosti (Latest News), 65; Proletarskaia pravda, 266, 267, 366; Rada (Council), 59; Radians’ke kino, 476n80; Robitnycha hazeta, 281, 284; Shtrom (Current), 208; Siluety (Silhouettes), 409, 461, 462; Solntse truda (Labour’s Sun), 77; Sovremennyi teatr, 505; Teatralnaia zhizn (Theatrical Life), 247, 248, 250; Teatralni visti (Theatrical News), 243, 280; Teatral’nyi den (Theatrical Day), 155; Togblat (Petrograd), 197; Vechernee radio (Kharkiv), 459; Vechernie ogni (Evening Lights), 72; Vperiod (Forward), 69; Vsesvit (Cosmos), 409; Zhyttia i revoliutsiia (Life and Revolution), 409; Zoria (Star), 409 New York International Theatre Exposition, 11, 491–503; Little Review illustrations of, 494, 495–6, 498–9, 500–4 Nezlobin, Konstantin, 29, 34 Niatko, Polina, 259 Nicholas I, tsar, 53, 54 Nicholas II, tsar, 61, 115, 138 Nielsen, Asta, 148, 150–1 Nijinska, Bronislava, 298–9, 307n88, 311–20; analysis of movement, 318; birthday greeting to, 319; career parallels with LK, 5, 8, 298–302, 312, 318,

373, 446; departure from Kyiv, 309n100, 318–19; École de Mouvement, 5, 8, 22, 80, 298, 307n88, 311–19; and Exter, 8, 298, 313, 314–16; Jaques-Dalcroze influence on, 314, 316; at Kyiv Opera, 80, 298, 312; in Le Carnival, 312; Meller’s designs for, 299, 316, 319, 565n37; students of, 298, 299, 308n89, 310, 313, 318, 319, 368, 373, 381–2n2; on theatre, 361; on Young Theatre, 318 – choreography and ballets: as avant-garde and abstractionist, 8, 311, 312, 314, 315–16; choreographic sketches and diagrams, 317; Meller’s artistic representations of, pl. 10–11, 8, 22, 320n12; for Nijinski’s Sacre du printemps (Stravinsky), 219; Les Noces (Stravinsky), 8, 301, 314–15, 373 – writing: announcements for École de Mouvement (Kyiv), 315, 316; letter to Nadia Shuvarska, 298, 299, 308n91; ‘Notebook’ (1918), 361; ‘On Movement and the École de Mouvement,’ 316, 318 Nijinsky, Vaslav (Vaclav), 21, 298, 307n88, 312, 313 Nikritin, Solomon, 193, 219 Nikulin, Lev, 256, 258 Nister, Der, 200, 204, 211 Nivinsky (Nivinskii), Ignaty (Ignatii), 175 Nova generatsiia (New Generation, journal), 195n22, 387, 389, 409; Kovzhun’s cover for, 410; Meller’s design for, 439n28 Nove mystetstvo (journal), 422 Novyi Kyivskii Teatr (Kyiv), 535n32 Nusinov, Isaak, 209 Nyzhankivsky (Nyzhankivs’kyi), Nestor, 324 Obelisk Group, 258 Oenslager, Donald, 506 Oles (Oles’), Oleksander (pseud. of Oleksander Kandyba), 245, 303n15, 323; Evening of Études, 282, 283, 285, 303nn16–17, 543 Olesha, Yury (Iurii): Kniga proshchhanii (Book of Farewell), 520; Spisok blagodeianii (List of Benefits), 520

Index O’Neill, Eugene, 503, 513n83; Desire under the Elms, 503 Onoyb (Beginning) Theatre, 268 Opera Studio, 520 Orff, Carl, 351 Orlovsky (Orlovskii), I., 152 Ostap Bandura (film), 452, 453 Osterwa, Julius (Juliusz, Julian Andrzej Maluszek), 162, 249, 271n42, 284 Ostrovsky (Ostrovskii), Aleksandr, 267; Dokhodnoe mesto (A Profitable Position), 36; Enough Simplicity in Every Wise Man, 470n12; The Forest, 527; Snegurochka (The Snow-Maiden), 37 Oulmont, Charles, 510n37 Oyslender, Nokhum, 199, 208, 209 Packson (John Bunny), 148–9, 153 Padalka, Ivan, 431, 432 Paderewski, Ignacy, 555, 566n45 Pailes, Isaak, 193 Pall Mall Theatre of Miniatures (later Shevchenko Red Army Club), 251 Palmov, Viktor, 80, 237 Panch, Petro, 227; Holubi eshelony (Blue Echelons), 222 Panfuturism, 190, 230, 231, 388, 389; Zhovtnevyi zbirnyk panfuturystiv (Panfuturists’ October Anthology), 396, 397 Panina, Countess Sofia, 44 Paradzhanov (Paradzhanian), Sergey (Sergei, Sarkis), 557; Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, 565n48 Paris Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels, 479–90; Berezil representation at, 11, 479, 482, 490; Chardynin’s film Ukraziia at, 473n44; map of, 481; material used for New York International Theatre Exposition, 492; Melnikov’s design for Soviet pavilion, 483, 485; photographs of, 482, 483, 484, 485, 487; poster for, 480; Soviet catalogue, 488; Soviet exhibit, 487 Pascal, Blaise, 184 Passek, Vadim: Ocherki Rossii, 131n6 Pasternak, Boris, 82, 178, 232

615

Pasternak, Leonid: Help for War Victims (poster), 82 Pastrone, Giovanni, 153; Cabiria, 152, 153 Paterikon, 105, 125 Paustovsky (Paustovs’kyi), Konstantin, 68, 69, 73, 76, 83 Pavlov, Ivan, 525 Pavlova, Anna, 306n56 Pchilka, Olena (pseud. Kosach), 40 Pechers’ka Lavra (Monastery of the Caves), 27, 52, 99, 105, 106 Peel (Piel), Harry, 464, 476n72 Penrose, A.P.D., 488–9 People’s Conservatory, 325 People’s Party (Folkspartey), 197 Peredvizhnyi teatr (Itinerant Theatre), 44 Perehuda, Oleksander: and Arsenal, 465, 476n77; and Macdonald, 464; on Secretary of the Labour Union, 476n82; and Vendetta, 455; work on LK’s films, 444, 454, 456, 460, 470n11 Peretz (Perets), Isaak (Yitshok) Leib (Leybush), 204, 268, 273n99 Pericles: funeral oration, 537 Peterhans, Walter, 389 Petliura, Symon: Bulgakov’s portrayal of, 113, 114, 116, 120, 135n70; and the Directory, 65, 68, 69, 92n67; and Galician Ukrainian Army, 71; portrayed on posters, 82; as theatre critic, 40 Petrovsky (Petrovs’kyi), Myron, 114–15, 134nn51–2 Petrytsky, Anatol (Anatolii Petryts’kyi): and the Art Cave, 259; career, 303–4n21; collaboration with LK, 251, 259, 434, 435; designs for opera, 339n8, 348; and Exter, 3, 5, 175, 219, 304n21, 309n99, 315; and folk culture, 232; as a graphic designer, 422, 433, 434–5; and Hesychasm, 181; at Kamerny Ballet, 315; and Leontovych Music Society, 328; and Mordkin, 304n21; and Mystetstvo, 260; and New York International Theatre Exposition, 494, 511n55; and Nijinska, 319; photograph, 283; at Sadovsky Theatre, 303n21; at Shevchenko Theatre, 251; at State

616 Index Ukrainian Music Drama Theatre, 251, 325; and Tairov, 45; at Young Theatre, 283, 286, 294, 303–4n21, 315, 415, 543 – art works: portrait of Kozytsky, 328; portrait of Semenko, 221; portrait of Vasylko, 452; portrait of Verykivsky, 334; self-portrait, 259; street banners and posters, 257 – graphic design: for Semenko’s poetry, 398, 400; style and characteristics, 422, 433, 434–5 – theatre designs: Evening of Études (Oles), 283; Halka (Moniuszko), 339n8, 348; Kaminnyi hospodar (Stone Host, Ukrainka), pl. 13, 251; Pershyi budynok Novoho svitu (The First Building of the New World), 261; Secretary of the Labour Union (Scott), 494; Taras Bulba (Lysenko), 252, 348; Utoplena (The Drowned, Lysenko), 251–2, 252, 348; Vertep, 294; Vii (Gogol), 422; The Vikings of Helgeland (Giants of the North, Ibsen), 251; Woe to the Liar (Grillparzer), 291, 494, 545 Picasso, Pablo: ‘Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,’ 233; and Futurism, 389; influence on Exter, 3, 21, 172, 219; influence on Lissitzky, 193; influence on LK, 449; multi-focal portraits, 289; and New York International Theatre Exposition, 494; and primitivism, 231, 232; representational art, 171 Pidmohylny (Pidmohyl’nyi), Valerian (Valeriian), 121, 135n77; Misto (The City), 6, 98, 102, 121–8, 129, 135n88 Pihulovych, Zina, 265, 546 Piłsudski, Józef, 73, 555, 566n44 Piscator, Erwin, 434, 513n82, 530 Plato: Republic, 538 Pleshchynsky (Pleshchyns’kyi), Ilarion, 410 Plisander, Valdemar, 152 Poggioli, Renato, 20 Pogodin, Mikhail, 100 Polgar, Alfred, 296, 297 Polishchuk, Valerian, 396 Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, 50n42, 100

Polish Young Theatre, 249 Poltava, Leonid, 474n44 Polytechnical Institute (Kyiv), 79, 84 Popova, Liubov, 511n55 Porten, Henny, 150, 160 Porter, Edwin S., 384n46 Post-Cubist Expressionism, 80 Poulenc, Francis, 328, 341n31, 351; ‘Excursions,’ 353; ‘Movements,’ 353 Poussin, Nicolas, 174 Pravda, 83, 85, 86 Preobrazhensky (Preobrazhens’kii), A.: Azbuka kommunizma (An ABC of Communism), 83 Pressa-Köln (International Press Exhibition, Cologne), 425, 439n28 Primitivism, 80, 231–3 Prince, Charles (Charles Petit-Demange Seigneur), 149, 161 Priy, A., 546 Prokofiev, Sergei, 331, 340n28, 355, 532; Ognennyi angel (The Fiery Angel), 336 Proletarian Culture Movement (Proletkult), 84, 259 Prosvita (Enlightenment Society), 62 Protazanov, Yakov (Iakov), 163; The Keys of Happiness (film), 155–6 Provincetown Playhouse (New York), 492, 506, 513n83 Provisional Government (Kerensky), 61–4 Pruslin, Naum, 251, 348, 349 Przybyszewski, Stanisław: Sneig (Snow), 249 Pukha, Liudmyla, 469n9, 476n80 Pukhalsky (Pukhal’skyi), Volodymyr, 324 Pulver, Lev, 212 Pushkin, 108, 117 Pylypenko, Natalia, 463, 464, 473n38 Rabinovich, Isaac (Isaak): and Exter, 5, 175; and KhLAM Club, 258; and Kultur-Lige, 193; in Kyiv artistic milieu, 526; and New York International Theatre Exposition, 498, 511n55 – designs: for Fuenta Ovejuna, pl. 15, 253; for Salome (Wilde), 253–6; street banners and posters, 257

Index Rachmaninov, Sergei, 334, 343, 347 Rada (newspaper), 43 Radetska (Radets’ka), Lia (Liia), 248 Radzievsky (Radzievs’kyi), Mykola, 330 Radzyns’kyi, St. (Odesa journalist), 471n15 Rafalsky (Rafalskii), Mikhail (MosheAaron), 198–9, 208 Raich, N.N., 70 Rakitin, Yury, 268 Rambosson, Yvanhoé, 479 Rameau, Jean-Philippe, 334 Rapoport, Shloyme-Zanvl (Semen Akimovich An-sky), 55–6, 204 Ravel, Maurice, 330, 340n28 Red Army: on Khreshchatyk Street, 70; sponsorship of Berezil Theatre, 366, 383n20 Red Army Clubs: Shevchenko Club, 251; Yermilov murals for Central Club, 428, 429 Red Army Day (1919), 257 Redko (Red’ko), Klyment: on Dnieper River, 79; and Exter, 219; Factory, pl. 6; on Galician Ukrainian Army, 71; in Paris, 21, 81; on poster artists, 82, 407; street banners, posters, and agit-trains, 5, 181, 257; on worker’s clubs, 83 Red Star (film studio), 83 Red Theatre. See Bergonier Theatre Red Torch Theatre, 253 Reich, Bernhardt, 539 Reinhardt, Max: directing methods, 150, 249, 353, 356; LK influenced by, 318, 522; theatre aesthetics, 544 – productions: The Miracle, 159; Oedipus Rex (Sophocles), 42, 45, 288, 543 Reisen, Abraham, 213n19 Repin, Ilia, 237 Repnin, P., 526 Republican Choral Kapelle, 325 Revutsky (Revuts’kyi), Dmytro, 326–7, 336–7; collection of Ukrainian Dumas and Historical Songs, 326; Zoloti kliuchi (The Golden Keys), 327 Revutsky (Revuts’kyi), Levko (Lev): death, 337; and Impressionism, 331; at Kyiv

617

Conservatory, 350; and Neofolkloricism, 335; and new Ukrainian music, 322, 325, 330, 337; photograph, 333; use of jazz elements, 332 – works: Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, 331; Halyts’ki pisni (Galician Songs), 333, 335; Preludes, op. 7 and 11, 331; Shchoroku (Every Year), 331; Symphony no. 2, 330, 331, 332, 335 Reznik, Lipe, 209, 211; Der alter seyfer (The Old Book), 205 Riabtsev, Eser Evgeny, 64, 66 Riaisky (Riaiskii) (prosecutor), 521 Rice, Elmer, 503 Rimbaud, Arthur, 174 Rimsky-Korsakov (Rimskii-Korsakov), Nikolai: Christmas Eve, 346 Rodchenko, Aleksandr (Alexander), 340n26, 429, 439n26, 511n55 Rodyna (Family) club, 62 Rolland, Romain: Lilul, 264 Romanov, Konstantin (K.R.), 271n32; The King of the Jews, 248 Romanytsky (Romanyts’kyi), Borys, 245 Rosin, Abraham (Ben-Adir), 198 Roslavets (Roslavets’), Nikolai (Mykola), 9, 324, 338n5 Rostand, Edmond: The Two Pierrots, 308n94 Rudnitsky (Rudnitskii), Konstantin, 438n24 Rudnytsky (Rudnyts’kyi), Antin, 324, 331; Try Hymny industriialnoi doby (Three Hymns of the Industrial Era), 331 Rulin, Petro, 265 Ruska (Rus’ka) Besida, 26, 36, 46n2, 47n3 Russian Archives of Literature and Art, 519 Russian Nationalist Club, 55 Russolo, Luigi: ‘L’Arte dei Rumori’ (The Art of Noises), 405n14 Ryb, Yevhen (Ievhen), 324 Ryback, Sukher Ber. See Ber Ryback, Issachar Rybalchenko, Vsevolod: ‘Sviato mas’ (Festival of the Masses), 354 Rychłowski, Franciszek, 249 Rylsky (Ryl’s’kyi), Maksym, 352

618 Index Sabinsky, Czesław: Kateryna, 159 Sadanji, Ichikawa, 527 Sadoul, Georges, 151 Sadovsky (Sadovs’kyi), Mykola, and the Sadovsky Theatre, 243, 278–80; career, 30; and LK, 26, 47n3, 278–80, 303n16; at Troitskyi Narodnyi Dom, 26–7, 37–42, 47n3 – productions: Études (Oles), 303n16; Inspector General (Gogol), 34, 35–6, 244, 278; Moloda krov (Vynnychenko), 41; Po revizii (Kropyvntsky), 40; Yiddish plays, 211 Safonov, Vasily (Vasilii), 327 St Andrew’s (Andriivskyi Sobor, Kyiv), 77, 99 St Michael’s Cathedral (Mykhailivs’ky Sobor), 107 St Sophia Cathedral and Square (Kyiv), pl. 1, 71, 116, 179, 180 St Vladimir University, 52, 53 St Volodymyr Cathedral, 101 Saksahansky (Saksahans’kyi), Panas, 38–9, 40, 88, 244, 245 Saltykov, Mykola, 470n10 Samiilenko, Polina, 282, 284, 287 Sarabianov, Dmitry (Dmitrii), 239 Savchenko, Mykola, 382n16 Savchenko, Yakiv (Iakiv), 289, 384n37 Savytsky (Savyts’kyi), Roman, 324 Sayler, Oliver, 499 Sbornik po teorii poeticheskogo iazyka (The Anthology of the Theory of Poetic Language), 220 Scarlatti, Domenico, 334 Schervachidze, Aleksandr, 250 Schiller, Friedrich von, 145, 159, 308n94, 538, 539; The Robbers, 245 Schlemmer, Oskar, 389 Schnitzler, Arthur, 159; La Ronde, 247 Schönberg, Arnold, 330, 336; Erwartung (Awaiting), 340–1n29, 351 Schuré, Édouard, 563n6; Eleusian Drama, 541 Scott, Cyril, 330 Scott, Leroy: The Walking Delegate, 507n3

Scriabin (Skriabin), Aleksandr, 15, 348, 453, 552, 566n40; LK’s knowledge of music by, 343, 346, 347, 348; Preludes, 15, 346 Secessionism (Austrian, Viennese), 247, 323, 413 Second Lenin Theatre of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. See Solovtsov Theatre Sedliar, Vasyl (Vasyl’), 431 Seldes, Gilbert, 494, 500–1 Semafor u maibutnie (Semaphor to the Future), 398, 401, 403 Semdor, Semen (Semen Doroshenko, Simon Goldshtein), 201, 203, 268 Semenko, Mikhail (Mykhail, Mykhailo): and Art Cave, 258; as avant-garde, 5, 10; and Futurism, 10, 219, 220, 229, 387–8, 389–91, 393–6, 419–22; on Impressionism, 389; musical portrait by Kozytsky (Prelude), 339n17; and Mystetstvo, 260; and Nova generatsiia, 439n28; Petrytsky’s book designs for, 398, 400; photograph, 388; poezomaliarstvo (poetry-painting), 10, 389, 419, 421, 434; portrait by Petrytsky, 221 – article: ‘Poezomaliarstvo’ (Poetrypainting), 389 – poetry, 189–93, 352, 419–20; Blok-notes (Bloc-Notes), 400; in The First Building of the New World, 261; in Heaven on Fire, 263; ‘Kablepoema za okean’ (Cablepoem across the Ocean), 390; ‘Longing for the Beast,’ 421; ‘Malenkyi virshyk’ (A Little Poem), 393; ‘Misto’ (City), 395; ‘Moia mozaika’ (My Mosaic), 390, 391, 396, 421; name fragmentation, 394; ‘Self-Portrait,’ 185; ‘Suprepoziia’ (Suprepoem), 390, 391; ‘Svit’ (The World), 396; trolley car poem (1914), 393–4; Verykivsky’s setting of (Hymny sv. Terezi, Hymns to St Teresa), 336; ‘V stepu’ (‘In the Steppe), 393; in Zustrich na perekhresti, 423 Sem’ plius tri (Seven Plus Three), 429, 430 Senchenko, I., 227 Senkin, S., 439n26

Index Serdiuk, Oleksander, 251 Servranckz, Victor, 389 ‘Seven Years of Musical Culture in Ukraine’ (exhibition), 329 Shahaida, Stepan, 458, 463, 473n38 Shakespeare, William, 267, 444, 529, 539; Hamlet, 34, 254, 308n94, 520; King Lear, 211, 455, 473n41, 520; Macbeth (see under Berezil Theatre productions); Midsummer Night’s Dream, 308n94; Romeo and Juliet, 151, 286, 287, 305n50, 308n94; Twelfth Night, 248 Shapiro, Monye, 211 Sharol-Khorol (actor), 255 Shatulsky, Matvy (Matvii Shatuls’kyi), 162, 384nn41, 46 Shavykin, Dmytro, 410 Shaw, George Bernard, 267; Caesar and Cleopatra, 308n94; Candida, 306n58 Shchepanska (Shchepans’ka), Vira, 288 Shcherbakivsky (Shcherbakivs’kyi), Danylo, 328, 329 Shebalin, Vissarion, 532 Sheinin (activist), 70 Sheppard, Richard, 23n12, 233 Shevchenko, Taras, 199, 213n19, 413; An Evening of Shevchenko’s Poetry (LK dramatization; included Jan Hus and Lyric Poems [Lirychni virshi]), 259, 295–300, 301, 306n58, 352–3, 363, 543, 564n13; Haidamaky, 234, 251, 351, 352, 416, 444n47; Hofshtein’s translations of, 211; The Judges’ Meeting, 412; Mandrivka z pryiemnistiu i ne bez morali (A Pleasurable Journey Not without a Moral), 211; verse dramas, 38 Shevchenko, Yona (Iona), 290, 292, 512n74, 513n82 Shevchenko First State Theatre of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (Shevchenko Theatre), 251, 267, 269, 301; Haidamaky (Shevchenko), 251, 351, 352, 416, 444n47 Shevchenko Red Army Club (formerly Pall Mall Theatre of Miniatures), 251 Shevchuk, Valery (Valerii), 557, 566n47

619

Shevelov, George (Iurii), 79, 128 Shifrin, Nisson, 5, 175, 193, 257, 258 Shishkin, Ivan, 237 Shklovsky (Shklovskii), Victor (Viktor), 5, 535n23, 549, 565n35 Shkurupy (Shkurupii), Geo, 229; Baraban, 398; Dveri v den (Door into Day), 392; Dvyhunamy ... (By Means of Engines), 398; name fragmentation, 394; ‘Noise Music,’ 391–2; Psykhetozy, 397, 398; poetry in: Heaven on Fire, 263; Zustrich na perekhresti, 423 Shmain, Kh., 546 Shmit, Fedir, 327, 329 Shostakovich, Dmitry (Dmitrii), 341n37, 350, 351, 371n16, 532 Shota Rustaveli Theatre, 253 Shreter, Viktor, 30 Shterenberg, David, 3, 21, 219 Shtif, Nohum (Nokhum), 7, 203, 207; Jews and Yiddish, 198 Shulgin, Vasily (Vasilii), 65, 66, 72 Shumsky (Shums’kyi), Oleksander, 322 Shumyts’kyi, M., 510n41 Shuvars’ka, Nadia: career, 384n38; choreography for Gas, 298, 368, 373; Nijinska’s letter to, 298, 299, 308n91 Shvartsman, Osher, 7, 199, 205, 206 Shymon, O., 464, 467, 469n10 Silberfarb, Moshe, 197 Simonson, Lee, 492, 506 Sinclair, Upton, 355, 373, 374, 527, 547; Jimmie Higgins (see under Berezil Theatre productions); King Coal, 267; MOB, pl. 16 Sinelnikov, Nikolai, 228 Singaevsky (Singaevskii), Nicholas (Nikolai), 307n88 Siniavsky (Siniavskii), Andrei, 220 Sitkovetskaia, Maia, 519 Six, Les (French composers), 331, 340n27 Skoropadsky (Skoropads’kyi), Pavlo, 67–8, 120, 195n33, 200, 224, 244, 469n3 Skovoroda, Hryhory (Hryhorii), 182, 540, 548, 552, 565n28 Skrypnyk, Leonid: Intelihent, 230

620 Index Skrypnyk, Mykola, 226, 227–8, 322, 555, 566n43 Slatin, Illia, 324 Slisarenko, Oleksa, 227, 229, 263 Słowacki, Juliusz: Balladyna (Ballad), 249; Mazepa, 36, 251 Smirnov, Aleksandr, 313, 526, 535n34 Smirnov, Aleksei, 35, 251, 268, 274n102 Smirnova-Iskander, Oleksandra, 251 Smolych, Yury (Iurii), 39, 46, 227, 258 Sobachko, Hanna, 171 Socialist Realism, 222, 270, 349 Soiuz Semi (Union of Seven), 440n35; Sem plius tri (Seven Plus Three), 429, 430 Soldiers Soviet (Kyiv), 63, 65 Solovtsov, Nikolai, 30, 228 Solovtsov Theatre (after 1919, Lenin Second State Theatre of the Soviet Republic), 29–35, 30, 36, 44, 48n11, 243, 269; Berezil Theatre at, 267; building design, 30–1; Lopatynsky production at, 265; Mardzhanov’s productions at, 29, 33, 252, 253, 254, 256; Meyerhold production of Balaganchik (Blok) at, 42; Russian Drama Theatre at, 266–7; Solovtsov troupe, 31 Somov, Orest, 132n25 Sophocles, 287, 543; Oedipus Rex: LK production, 159, 279, 286, 287–91, 295, 351, 543–4, 544; Reinhardt producton, 42, 45, 288, 543 Sosiura, Volodymyr, 224, 261 Sotnyk, Dan, 439n28 Soviet Medicine (film), 83 Soviet of Workers Deputies, 62 Spengler, Oswald, 204 Stabovy (Stabovyi), Heorhy (Heorhii), 455, 456, 457, 473n38 Stadnyk, Iosyp, 47n3 Stalin, Joseph: ‘cultural revolution,’ 220; policy on churches and religion, 79; Ukrainization policy, 226 Stanislavsky (Stanislavs’kyi), Mykola, 345 Stanislavsky (Stanislavskii), Konstantin: and Exter’s stage design course, 176; and Meyerhold, 34, 519, 520, 522; at Moscow Art Theatre, 31, 32, 34; Opera

Studio, 520, 522; production of Inspector General (Gogol), 534n8; theatre aesthetics and ideals, 356, 519, 544, 548 Stankovych, Yevhen (Ievhen), 338 Starewicz, Władysław (Ładisłas Starewitch), 149, 166n63; Cameraman’s Revenge, 155, 156; Defense of Sebastopol, 155; Night Adventures, 162 Starytska-Cherniakhivska (Staryts’kaCherniakhivs’ka), Liudmyla, 49n32; Hetman Doroshenko, 244, 245; ‘25 Years of Ukrainian Theatre,’ 40 Starytsky (Staryts’ka), Maria, 40 Starytsky (Staryts’ka), Oksana, 40, 42 Starytsky (Staryts’kyi), Mykhailo, 40; Bohdan Khme’lnytsky, 244; Oborona Bushi (The Defense of Busha), 244 State Advanced Workshops for Theatre Directors (GVYRM), 534n16 State Conservatory of Music, 307n88 State Experimental Theatre Workshops (GEKTEMAS), 534n16 State Institute of Theatre Arts (GITIS), 519, 520, 523, 526–7, 530, 534n16 State Jewish Theatre (GOSET, Moscow), 211–12, 455, 473nn40–1, 520; LK’s production of King Lear at, 211, 455, 473n41, 520 State Republican Symphonic Orchestra, 325 State Theatre of Russian Drama (Derzhavnyi Dramatychnyi Teatr), 245, 266–8, 269, 301 State Ukrainian Music Drama Theatre, 251, 325, 328, 347 Steiner, Rudolf: and eurythmy, 470n14, 548, 563n2; LK’s interest in, 532, 539–41, 546, 564n8; photograph, 540; production of Eleusian Drama (Schuré), 541; and Skovoroda, 565n28; and theosophy, 453, 563n2 – writing: The Guardian of the Threshold, 564n8 Stepovy (Stepovyi), Yuri (Iruii), 347 Stepovy (Stepovyi), Yakiv (Iakiv), 272n52, 322, 323, 324, 325

Index Steshenko, Iryna, 564n8 Steshenko, Ivan, 42, 225 Stetsenko, Kyrylo, 322, 324–5, 329, 348, 349, 351 Stijl, De, 389 Stolypin, Piotr, 17, 62 Stopyk and Maniurochka (play), 250 Stradomsky (Stradomskii), Nikolai, 62 Strakhov, Adolf, 396 Strauss, Richard, 323 Stravinsky (Stravinskii), Igor, 318, 330, 355; Neoclassicism, 330, 340n28; Neofolkloricism, 341n30 – works: Les Noces, 8, 301, 314–15, 373; Le Sacre du printemps, 298, 313 Strielkova, Yevhenia (Ievhenia), 369 Strindberg, August: Samum, 308n94 Studio of Borodin Street (St Petersburg), 526 Studio Theatre (Polish), 249 Subtelny, Orest, 322 Sudermann, Hermann: The Fires of St John, 244 Sukhodolsky (Sukhodolskii) family, 45 Sukhovo-Kobylin, Aleksandr: Death of Tarelkin, 526 Sullivan, Arthur: The Mikado, 440n37, 527 Suprematists: Exter, 170, 232; LK and, 300, 301, 549; Malevich, 170, 172, 184, 193, 219, 238–9, 300, 390; street banners and posters, 257 Suprunenko, N.I.: Istoriia Kieva (The History of Kyiv), 61 Svashenko, Semen, 347, 474n47 Svoboda, Josef, 254 Svobodny (Svobodnyi) teatr (Free Theatre), 34, 45 Sweet Michael and the Golden Gates (legend), 97 Sylvestrov, Valentyn, 338 Symbolists and Symbolism: of Blok, 199, 205; and colour, 174; and Futurism, 245, 246, 392, 401, 436n7; in graphic art, 413–15; of icons and folk art, 183, 233, 239; of Maeterlinck, 323, 538; in music, 323, 336; of Oles, 283, 285–6, 323;

621

Russian, 199, 206; in theatre and LK’s work, 28, 248, 262, 283, 285–6, 367, 415, 524, 543; Ukrainian, 205, 220 Syniakova, Maria, 232 Szymanowski, Karol, 328, 331, 341n30 Tairov, Aleksandr (né Aleksandr Kornblit): early career, 44–5; Exter’s stage designs for, 171, 175, 304n21, 313–15; in Fairground Booth (Blok), 43; at German theatre exhibition (1927), 508n14; Jewish origin, 50n38; at Kamerny Theatre, 45, 248, 479, 502, 504; and New York International Theatre Exposition, 502, 504, 511n55; photographs, 44, 502; as Ukrainian avant-garde, 21 – productions: Famira Kifared (Annensky), pl. 9, 171, 175, 314; Salome (Wilde), 253, 255, 314 Talalaevsky, Motl, 211 Tamara, Natale, 255 Taran, Andry, 237 Tarnawsky, Maxim, 122, 127, 128 Tasin (Tassin), Georgy (Georgi, Heorhii, Georgii, G.M., George), 465, 467, 468, 476n77 Tatishchev (Harting), Volodymyr, 253, 272n57 Tatlin, Vladimir (Volodymyr): Constructivist style, 219, 340n26, 448; design for Zustrich na perekhresti, 423; and Hesychasm, 181; at Kyiv Art Institute, 237; in Kyiv artistic milieu, 21, 526; in Paris, 3, 81; Ukrainian identity, 230, 236 Taylor, Frederick Winslow, and ‘Taylorism,’ 11, 427, 439n33, 500 Tchaikov, Joseph: cover for Baginen, 204, 205; and Kultur-Lige, 203 Tchaikovsky (Chaikovskii), Pyotr Ilyich, 343; Evgeny Onegin, 43; The Seasons, 347; string quartet, 326 Tchelitschev (Tchelitschew, Chelichev), Pavel, 21, 175, 257 Tcherikower, Elias, 203 Teatr Koryfeiv, 39, 40

622 Index Teatr obshchestva gramotnosti (Theatre of the Literacy Society), 36 Teitel, Yakov (Iakov), 208 Terapiano, Yury (Iurii), 258 Terentiev, Igor, 265 Tereshchenko, Marko, 260–4; at Goldfaden Kunst Vinkl Theatre, 268; at Hnat Mykhailychenko Theatre (formerly All-Ukrainian Central Studio Drama Group), 260–4, 269, 364, 382n9; photograph, 261; at Young Theatre, 260, 364 – productions: Carnival, pl. 12, 262, 264; Nebo horyt (Heaven on Fire), 263–4; Pershyi budynok Novoho svitu (The First Building of the New World), 261–2; Trud i kapital (Work and Capital), 262–3; Universal Necropolis, 263, 264 – writing: Mystetstvo diistva (The Art of Performance, pamphlet), 264, 423 Tereshchenko, Mikhail Ivanovych, 60 Tereshchenko (Tereschenko), Mykola, 210, 468 Terniuk, Petro, 246 Ternopil Theatrical Evenings, 26, 166n63 Theatre Creative, The, 503 Theatre Guild (New York), 492 Theatre of the Revolution (Moscow), 479, 526, 527 Theatre Studio, 243 Thomsen, Ebba, 152 Throckmorton, Cleon, 492, 493, 504, 506 Tiahno, Borys: and Berezil company, 159, 546; film work, 463; and New York International Theatre Exposition, 494, 496; photographs, 496, 546 – productions: Gas Masks (Tretiakov), 526; Secretary of the Labour Union, 11, 476– 7n82, 479, 489, 494, 507n3 Tobilevych brothers. See Karpenko-Kary, Ivan; Sadovsky, Mykola, and the Sadovsky Theatre; Saksahansky, Panas Todorov, Tzvetan, 220 Toller, Ernst, 546; Broken Brow, 267–8; Machine Wreckers: Berezil production, 494, 499, 500; —, Repnin/Meyerhold production, 526; Man and the Masses:

Berezil production, 504; —, Velizev/ Meyerhold production, 526 Tolstoy (Tolstoi), Alexei, 226; Piotr Pervyi (Peter the First), 117 Tolstoy (Tolstoi), Lev, 539; Vlast t’my (Power of Darkness), 33 Tomsky (Tomskii), Mikhail, 87 Tovbin, Yevhen (Ievhen), 534n4 Tovstonogov, Georgy (Georgii), 532 Trauberg, Leonid, 460 Treniov, Konstantin: Liubov Yarova (Liubov Iarovaia), 550 Tretiakov, Sergei, 530, 531; The Earth in Turmoil (adapted from Martinet, The Night), 526, 527, 529, 530, 531; Gas Masks, 526 Troitsky Narodny Dom (Troitskii Narodnyi Dom, Trinity People’s House), 27, 34–42, 36, 44, 245 Troitsky Theatre of Miniatures (Petrograd), 253 Trotsky, Leon (Lev, pseud. Antid Otto), 65, 76, 84, 138, 519 Tsapok, Hryhory (Hryhorii), 430, 440n35; design for Kozak Holot, 438n24; Portrait of Citizen Peter Wakkenskel from San Francisco, 429 Tsar Maximillian (folk drama), 250 Tschichold, Jan, 396, 406n26 Tsentrostudio. See Hnat Mykhailychenko Theatre Tsivian, Yuri, 452–3 Tsvetaeva, Marina, 506; On Art, 479 Tsybys, Boleslav, 440n35 Tugendkhold (Tugenkhol’d), Yakov (Iakov), 172 Turkeltaub (Turkel’taub), I., 465, 528 Turkevych-Lukiianovych, Stefania (Stefaniia), 324 Turkin, Valentin, 157 Tychyna, Pavlo: Futurist criticism of, 393; and Hesychasm, 181–2; and the Leontovych Music Society, 328; musical portrait by Kozytsky (Prelude), 339n17; novel-diary, 338n6; portrait by Dovzhenko, 260; and Suprematism, 172, 300; and

Index textuality of Kyiv, 102; and VAPLITE, 227; Zhuk’s portraits of, 436n9 – poems performed, 300; at Art Cave (Young Theatre Tychyna Evening), 259; in The First Building of the New World, 261; at KhLAM Club, 258; at Lysenko Music and Drama Institute, 329; in Trud i kapital (Work and Capital), 262–3 – works, 191; ‘A Spring Evening,’ 259; Instead of Sonnets or Octaves: ‘Dawn,’ 51; ‘Lull,’ 342; ‘Rhythm,’ 442; ‘The Highest Power,’ 321; ‘You Tell Me,’ 218; ‘In the Church Square,’ 259, 261; In the Orchestra of the Cosmos: ‘Blessed Be, 277; ‘Plow,’ 261; Podorozh z kapeloiu Stetsenka, 338n6; ‘Psalm to Iron,’ 261; ‘Soniashni kliarnety’ (Clarinets of the Sun), 259, 352 Tyshler, Aleksandr, 175, 193, 219, 257, 258, 526 Tzara, Tristan, 490 Ukraine (almanac), 210 Ukrainian Academy of Arts. See Academy of Art Ukrainian Academy of Science. See Academy of Sciences Ukrainian Art Academy. See Academy of Art Ukrainian National Republic (UNR): Bulgakov’s portrayal of, 120; cultural figures in, 224; defeat of, 84, 322; and the Directory, 69; establishment of, 9, 65, 75, 224, 324; musical activities during, 324–5; policy regarding Jews, 7 Ukrainian National Theatre (Ukrains’kyi Natsionalnyi Teatr), 244, 245 Ukrainian Social Democratic Party, 40 Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, 20, 225 Ukrainian State Publishing House (Derzhavne Vydavnytstvo Ukrainy, DVU), 329, 409 Ukrainian State Yiddish Theatre (Kharkiv), 207 Ukrainka, Lesia (pseud. of Larysa Kosach, later Kosach-Kvitka): family, 40; as a

623

playwright, 39, 211, 279, 543; political activity, 42, 49–50n32; recording of Ukrainian folk melodies, 325 – plays: Babylonian Captivity, 153; Kaminnyi hospodar (The Stone Host), pl. 13, 39, 251; Lisova pisnia (The Forest Song), 245, 246; U pushchi (In the Wilderness), 306n58, 543, 545 Ukraziia (or 7 + 2, film), 455, 456, 473n44, 476n77 UkrROSTA (Ukrainian chapter, Russian Telegraph Agency), 424 Ulianov, N.: portrait of Meyerhold, 523 Undzer Vinkl Theatre, 268 Union of Soviet Composers, 336 United Jewish Socialist Labour Party (Fareynikte), 197, 210 Universal Learning Day (1919), 258 Urazov, D., 528 Urbanek (Czech composer), 522 Urbanism, 331–2, 340n27, 352 Ursa Major Group, 258 Usachov, Oleksy, 410 Uzhvy (Uzhvyi), Natalia (Nataliia), 413, 561 Uzwyshyn, Raymond, 467 Vakhtangov, Evgeny (Evgenii), 356, 531, 544 Valentey (Valentei), Maria (Mariia), 521 Valgemae, Mardi, 505, 512n74 Van Gogh, Vincent, 548 VAPLITE (Vilna Akademiia Proletarskoi Literatury, Academy of Proletarian Literature), 209, 211, 227, 409 Vasnetsov, Viktor, 157 Vasylchenko (Vasyl’chenko), Stepan, 328 Vasylenko, Vasyl (Vsasyl’), 263–4 Vasylko (Vasyl’ko), Vasyl (Vasyl’) (né Vasyl’ Mylaiv): and Berezil Director’s Lab, 546; on Duncan, 305–6n54; on film vs theatre, 476n75; film work, 463, 464, 475n66; on Heaven on Fire, 263–4; on LK and music, 345, 347, 351, 352; on LK and Yiddish theatre, 473n41; on LK’s film work, 451, 454, 468; on LK’s

624 Index interpretation of poetry, 296; on LK’s move to Odessa, 471n26; on LK’s production of Gas, 354; on Moscow Art Theatre, 43; on M. Tereshchenko, 382n9; on Neshchadymenko, 295; Petrytsky’s portrait of, 452; on Petrytsky’s set for The Drowned (Lysenko), 251; on Petrytsky’s set for Taras Bulba (Lysenko), 252; production of Black Panther, White Bear (Vynnychenko), 251; on starving actors, 366, 383n20; on Tasin’s film of Jimmie Higgins, 476n79; use of circus elements, 265; in Woe to the Liar, 292 Velizev, A., 526 Vel’tman, Aleksandr, 132n25 Velychkivsky (Velychkivs’kyi), Ivan, 189–90, 191, 195n29 Vengrov, Natan, 258 Verbitskaia, Anastasia, 155 Verdi, Giuseppe: Aida, 258; Rigoletto, 522 Verhaeren, Émile, 206; The Drum, 261 Verkhovynets (Verkhovynets’) (composer), 329 Vertov, Dziga (Denis Arkadevich Kaufman), 443 – works: Duma pro divku-branku Marusiu Bohuslavku (Duma about Marusia Bohuslavka), 335; Eneida (The Aeneid), 355; Hymny sv. Terezi (Semenko), 336; Koval (The Blacksmith), 329; score for Carnival, 264; score for Jacquerie (Merimée), 355; score for Naperedodni (On the Eve), 355; score for Proklamatsia sezonu (Proclamation of the Season), 355; Three Piano Preludes, 333 Verykivsky (Verykivs’kyi), Mykhailo: and Expressionism, 336; at Kyiv Conservatory, 350; modal structures and super modality, 333; and Neofolkloricism, 335; and new Ukrainian music, 322, 325, 330, 337; photographs, 330, 356; portrait by Petrytsky, 334; and Socialist Realism, 349; work with LK and Berezil Theatre, 348, 349, 355; writing for Muzyka, 329; and Yavorsky, 327, 333, 350 Veselovska (Veselovs’ka), Anna, 159

Vesiolaia smert (Happy Death) (play), 250 Vesnin, Alexander, 175 Vetrov (writer), 486, 490 Vetrova, Nina (Nina Vetrovna Robinson), 12n5, 320n12 Vidervuks (New Growth), 210 Vinaver, M.M., 68 Vlasiuk, Dmytro, 381, 534n6 Volkenstein, David, 209 Volodymyr, Prince (Saint), 117, 123, 126 Voltaire, François Marie Arouet de, 539 von Unruh, Fritz, 546, 564n24 Vorony (Voronyi), Mykola, 42, 244, 246 Voznesensky (Voznesenskii), Aleksandr: Sliozy (Tears), 34 Vrona, Ivan, 410 Vseukrains’k Akademiia Nauk (VUAN). See Academy of Sciences Vseukrains’ke fotokinoupravlinnia (VUFKU, All-Ukrainian Film Directorate): formation and aims, 443; LK’s association with, 451–2, 455, 464, 475n57, 530; logo, 444, 468; Odesa studio, 455; Soviet control of, 475n57, 477nn86, 88 Vseukrains’ke Tovarystvo Revoliutsiinykh Muzyk (All-Ukrainian Society of Revolutionary Musicians), 336 Vygotsky (Vygotskii), Lev, 525 Vynnychenko, Volodymyr: and the Directory, 68, 69; plays at Sadovsky theatre, 41, 279; plays at Ukrainian National Theatre, 244; writing style, 39, 42, 102, 234, 244 – works: Bazar, 302n4; Chorna pantera i bilyi medvid (The Black Panther and the White Bear), 159, 251, 267, 280, 281, 543, 545; Mizh dvokh syl (Between Two Forces), 246; Moloda krov (Young Blood), 41, 245; Pryhvozhdeni (Downtrodden), 244; Sin, 306n58 Vyshnevetska (Vyshnevets’ka), Sofia, 257 Vyshnia, Ostap (pseud.), 211 Wagner, Richard: The Valkyrie, 429 War Industry Committee (Kyiv), 60

Index Webern, Anton, 336 Wegener, Paul, 150 Wells, H.G.: Lopatynsky filmscript of ‘The Lord of the Dynamos,’ 397, 399, 406n28 White Volunteer Army, 71–3 Whitman, Walt, 206 Wilde, Oscar, 323; Salome, 159, 253–6, 314 Wilhelm, Carl, 150 Wilson, Andrew, 78 Wilson, Woodrow, 486 Wohl, Robert: ‘The Generation of 1914 and Modernism,’ 322, 338n1 Wood, Ruth Kedzie, 52 Workers Drama League (USA), 504 Workers Soviet (Kyiv), 63, 65 Wysocka, Stanisława, 249 WyspiaĔski, Stanisław: Wyzwolenie (Liberation), 249 Yadov (Iadov), Yakiv (Iakiv), 181 Yakymenko (Iakymenko), Fedir, 322, 323, 324 Yampolsky (Iampolskii), Mikhail, 475n62 Yanovsky (Ianovs’kyi), Borys, 324, 336, 338n5 – works: Duma Chornomorska (Black Sea Duma), 335; Madadzhara, 323; Two Pierrots, 323; Vybukh (Explosion), 329, 332, 341n32 Yanovsky (Ianovs’kyi), Yury (Iurii), 231; Chotyry shabli (Four Swords), 222; Maister Korablia (Master of the Ship), 417; Vershnyky (Cavalry), 222 Yanovsky (Ianovskii), Yevgeny (Ievgenii): King Coal, 267 Yanovych (Ianovych), Stepan (stage name of Stepan Kurbas, father of LK), 47n3, 302n1, 474n50, 538 Yanovych (Ianovych), Wanda (Vanda) (mother of LK), 554 Yaremych (Iaremych), S.P., 409 Yaroshenko (Iaroshenko), Volodymyr, 258; Riff-Raff, 234 Yavorsky (Iavors’kyi), Boleslav (Boleslaw), 324, 325, 327, 329, 333, 350–1 Yeats, William Butler, 19, 20, 22n1, 475n62; ‘Easter, 1916,’ 22n1

625

Yefremov (Iefremov), Serhy (Serhii), 25, 79, 328 Yehoash (Solomon Bloomgarden), 207 Yeleva (Ieleva), Kostiantyn, 251 Yermilov (Iermilov), Vasyl (Vasyl’): advertising grids, 435; agit-trains, pl. 14, 424, 439n33; background, 438–9n25; and the Boichukists, 432; and Hesychasm, 181; influence of, 429; and Meller, 425–6; posters and banners, 424, 432; wall newspapers, 426, 427 – art and graphic design: ‘Construction of National Home’ (poster), 425; cover for Sem’ plius try, 430; cover of Stikhy Ekateriny Neimaier (Poems by Ekaterina Neimae), pl. 19; murals for Red Army Club, 428, 429; Red Ukraine (agit-train), pl. 14; for wall newspapers Kanatka and Generator, 426, 427 Yiddish Chamber Theatre (Evreiskii kamernyi teatr; later State Yiddish Theatre, Gosudarstvennyi evreiskii teatr), 211 Yiddish Volksbuhne (People’s Theatre), 268 Yohansen (Iohansen), Maik, 227, 231, 336 Yorysh (Iorysh), Volodymyr: Opera pro stal (Opera about Steel), 331; Poema pro stal (Poem about Steel), 329 Youngblood, Denise, 459 Young Theatre (Molodyi teatr, 1917–19): actor training, 284–5, 287, 347; and Art Cave, 258–9; at Bergonier Theatre, 139, 303n14; as a collective, 243, 270n2, 302n9, 415; dissolution of, 251, 301; formation, repertoire, and theatrical style, 8, 243, 280, 441n44, 541, 543–5; Maksimov on, 155–6; and Meyerhold, 526; Mordkin’s work with, 287, 288, 301, 311–12; music at, 347; Tereshchenko at, 260, 261, 364; transition to Berezil, 415 – productions: The Black Panther and the White Bear (Vynnychenko), 159, 280, 281, 543, 545; Candida (Shaw), 306n58; An Enemy of the People (Ibsen), 306n58;

626 Index evening of choreography (Mordkin), 301; Evening of Études (Oles), 282, 283, 285, 543; An Evening of Shevchenko’s Poetry (LK dramatization; included Jan Hus and Lyric Poems [Lirychni virshi]), 259, 295–300, 301, 306n58, 352–3, 363, . 543, 564n13; Ijola (Zuławski), 249, 283–4, 304n30, 543, 545; Koza-Dereza (Lysenko), 348; Oedipus Rex (Sophocles), 159, 279, 286, 287–91, 295, 351, 441n44, 543–4; production photographs, 286, 289–91, 544; Sin (Vynnychenko), 306n58; The Sunken Bell (Hauptmann), 306n58; Tartuffe (Molière), 306n58, 441n44; Thought (Andreev), 283; Tychyna Evening at Art Cave, 259; Vertep (Nativity puppet play), 292–5, 293, 294, 306n58, 367, 368; In the Wilderness (Ukrainka), 306n58, 543, 545; Woe to the Liar (Grillparzer), 291, 292, 306n58, 545; Youth (Halbe), 281, 282, 304n30 Yung (Iung), Volodymyr, 410 Yunge, Di (The Young Ones, New York), 206 Yura (Iura), Hnat, 290, 303n17, 308n94; production of Doctor Kurzhentsev, or Thought (Andreev), 283; production of Vii (Gogol), 422 Yureneva (Iureneva), Vera: in Broken Brow (Toller), 267; at KhLAM Club, 258; on Moscow Art Theatre, 31–2, 43; photographs, 32, 257; in Salome (Wilde), 254, 255–6; in Sliozy (Voznesensky), 34; and Solovtsov Theatre, 30, 31 Yurmas (Iurmas), Ya. (Ia.) (Yury Masiutyn), 329 Yutkevich (Yutkevitch), Sergei: and Harlequin Multi Theatre, 253; on KhLAM Club, 258; at Moscow Art Theatre, 511n56; photograph, 460;

pre-film work, 448–9; on Rabinovich, 254; on street banners and posters, 257 Zaborovsky (Zaborovs’kyi), Raphail, 418 Zaderatsky (Zaderats’kyi), Vsevolod: Avto (Automobile), 331; Carousel, 331 Zagoskin, Mikhail, 132n25 Zaharov (Fessing), Aleksandr (Oleksander), 245, 246, 251, 271n22, 301 Zahortsev, Volodymyr, 338 Zankovetska (Zankovets’ka), Maria (stage name of Maria Adasovsak), 39, 40, 88, 245, 453 Zankovetska Theatre, 88, 245, 269 Zapolska (Zapol’ska), Gabriela: Moralnist pani Dulskoi (Morality of Mrs Dulska), 36 Zaporozhets, Alexander (Oleksander Zaporozhets’), 362–3, 369, 381n1, 525, 546–7 Zarytsky (Zaryts’kyi), Solomon, 269 Zatyrkevych-Karpynska (ZatyrkevychKarpyns’ka), Hanna, 40 Zauze, Volodymyr, 436n6 Zavelev (Zavielev), Boris, 454, 455, 472nn37–8 Zhadan, Serhiy: ‘The End of Ukrainian Syllabotonic Verse,’ 517–18 Zhdanko, Iryna, 410 Zholkovskii, Aleksandr, 131n18 Zhuk, Mykhailo, 413–14, 436n9; cover for Muzaget and drawing, 414; portrait of Skovoroda, 540 Zimovy (Zimovii), V., 149 Zinoviev, Grigory (Grigorii), 89, 224 Zola, Émile, 159 Zolotariov, Vasily (Vasylii), 324 . Zuławski, Jerzy: Ijola, 249, 283–4, 304n30, 543, 545 Zustrich na perekhresti (Meeting at the Station Crossroads), 423 Zveno (The Link, exhibition), 80, 219