Turning the pages back... October 6, 1881 (10/05/97)

Turning the pages back...

October 6, 1881

One of the few playwrights of quality to have survived the Stalinist terror, Ivan Kocherha was born in the village of Novosivka, in the Chernihiv Gubernia, on October 6, 1881.

Having graduated with a law degree from Kyiv University in 1903, he lived in Chernihiv and worked as a theater critic for the newspaper Chernigovskie Gubernskie Viedomosti. He also began writing plays, initially in Russian.

When the first world war broke out in 1914, he moved to Zhytomyr, where he remained, for the most part, throughout the turbulence of the next 20 years.

Kocherha's first play, "Pesnia v Bokale" (Song in a Wine Glass, 1910) was first staged in 1926 in his own Ukrainian translation. This was soon followed with dramas with evocative and winsome titles, such as "Feia Hirkoho Myhdaliu" (The Bitter Almond Fairy, 1926), "Almazne Zhorno" (The Diamond Millstone, 1927), "Marko v Pekli" (Mark in Hell, 1928) and "Svichchyne Vesillia" (Svichka's [Mr. Candle's] Wedding, 1930).

However, because of their unique style, his plays largely escaped notice until his "Maistry Chasu" (Masters of Time) won third prize in an all-union competition in 1933.

In 1934, he moved to Kyiv, and except for the World War II period, lived out his days in the Ukrainian capital. As with most writers who survived the murderous clampdown of the succeeding years, the quality of his subsequent production was compromised, but his quirky strangeness saved him from both a Soviet bullet and the completely disfiguring self-abasement that rendered Pavlo Tychyna's poetry unreadable after the mid-1930s.

By and large, Soviet critics tended to value him less than more properly Socialist Realist dramatists, such as Oleksander Korniichuk, but he was nevertheless accepted into the official canon. His experimentations with form and philosophical symbolism are in and of themselves interesting landmarks in Ukrainian drama. A 25-volume edition of his complete works (which includes over 30 comedies, satires and historical plays) was published in 1956. Kocherha died in Kyiv on December 29, 1952.

Source: "Kocherha, Ivan," Encyclopedia of Ukraine, Vol. 2 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988).

| Home Page |