Scholarly evening features Fulbright scholar and her new anthology of Ukrainian drama (04/05/98)

Scholarly evening features Fulbright scholar
and her new anthology of Ukrainian drama

by Tetiana Keis

NEW YORK - On February 14, the Shevchenko Scientific Society welcomed the return from Ukraine of Dr. Larissa M.L.Z. Onyshkevych, a Fulbright senior scholar who taught at the Ivan Franko Lviv State University last fall.

The program was chaired by Prof. Myroslava Znayenko of Rutgers University, who introduced the speaker and noted that the program would consist of Dr. Onyshkevych's impressions of cultural life in Lviv and the presentation of the book she compiled and edited, titled "An Anthology of Drama of the Ukrainian Diaspora: Blyzniata Sche Zustrinutsia" (The Twins Shall Meet Again), Kyiv/Lviv: Chas, 1997.

During opening remarks, Prof. Leonid Rudnytzky emphasized the scholarly and educational value of Fulbright programs for both Ukraine and the United States. This evaluation was upheld by Dr. Hanna Chumachenko (now a Fulbright scholar from Ukraine at the Harriman Institute), who recounted an earlier visit by Dr. Onyshkevych to Ukraine to teach at the Kherson Pedagogical Institute.

In her lecture, Dr. Onyshkevych described the extensive and diverse cultural programs that continue to flourish in Lviv, despite the harsh economic conditions in the country. She especially stressed the role played by the younger generation of poets and scholars, and the atmosphere supportive of individual initiative in the cultural field. There is a visible thirst for scholarly contacts and publications (at some universities the speaker had audiences of 200 to 500). Younger scholars, in particular, appear to be well acquainted with the publications in the diaspora. It was a rewarding feeling to see how greatly these works are appreciated and used she noted.

The speaker also described the December conference in Kyiv on current Ukrainian language and orthography, stressing the benefits of the current period, before a new orthography is approved, since it provides scholars in Ukraine with more opportunity to become acquainted with works the expos the Soviet-enforced changes in the Ukrainian language, as well as to develop more tolerance to pre-Soviet spelling, especially of foreign words.

In the second part of the program, Dr. Tamara Hundorova of the National Academy of Sciences in Ukraine (now a Fulbright scholar at Columbia University) introduced the anthology as representing a historical occurrence, being the first Ukrainian anthology of drama in general. While this volume covers the drama of the diaspora, it also represents various literary styles and trends in drama of this century, and makes them accessible to readers in the West and to the readers in Ukraine. The anthology bridges the gap that existed in Ukrainian literature, making it whole, allowing "the twins to meet."

Dr. Onyshkevych then presented some of her major postulates on Ukrainian drama of the diaspora. She also noted that the anthology includes eight Ukrainian American playwrights, who wrote between the 1920s and today: Ielysei Karpenko, Ludmyla Kovalenko, Juri Kosach, Ilarion Cholhan, Iuri Tys, Bohdan Boychuk, Yuriy Tarnavsky and Vasyl Barka. Volodymyr Vynnychenko, Leonid Mosendz, Yurii Lypa, Ivan Bahrianyi and Vira Vovk lived (or live) in other Western countries. Originally, the playwrights came from different parts of Ukraine, but all of them felt an obligation, perhaps even a mission, to write on topics and genres prohibited by the Soviet regime. They also had a desire to express themselves freely and to experiment with styles and ideas current in the Western intellectual world. Some of the plays, especially those written immediately after World War II, were in the forefront of the literary movements in Western Europe.

This is noticeable in the presentation of problems of communication between individuals, in the decanonization of language, of anti-heroes which Ionesco and later Harold Pinter made famous several years after Eaghor Kostetzky's plays. Similarly Kovalenko's and Kostetzky's plays stressed elements of feminine essentialism, a philosophy that Simone de Beauvior was beginning to articulate then. Another unique element may be found in the Ukrainian existentialist plays in the anthology, which, in contrast to Western European plays, provide their own more optimistic variant for individual self-fulfillment. The plays in the anthology represent almost all the literary styles of the century, from symbolism to the theater of the absurd. The 1948 plays by Kostetzky and Kovalenko were among the earliest Ukrainian post-modernist works.

The program concluded with a tribute to the newly published anthology by two of the distinguished playwrights whose works were included in the volume, Dr. Cholhan and the poet Mr. Boychuk.

In her closing remarks, Prof. Znayenko once against stressed the significance of this timely publication at the close of the century. Last October, in Ukraine, the anthology was listed among the 10 best on a "hit parade of books."

Tetiana Keis is a librarian at Barnard College of Columbia University in New York.