Turning the pages back... September 9, 1912 (09/05/99)

Turning the pages back...

September 9, 1912

Zenon Tarnavsky was one of the leading lights of 1930s Ukrainian Galicia's "Bohema," a group of witty literateurs and artists, many of whom carried on their careers in the displaced persons camps in Germany and in the post-war diaspora.

Born on September 9, 1912, in Sambir, an ancient town located about 40 miles southeast of Lviv, he began his studies in law at Lviv University, then switched to art history at Warsaw University, but graduated from the Warsaw School of Journalism.

Tarnavsky greeted the decade of the 1930s by publishing his first short story in the journal Novyi Chas and by joining a group of café-going artistes dubbed by Edward Kozak as "Dvanaitsadka" (The Twelve). He took a stab at acting (appearing in Petro Soroka's production of "Akordy" by Hryhoriy Luzhnytsky); translated 19th century French comedies, such as Eugène Labiche's "Tu Seras Mienne" into Ukrainian; and wrote stage adaptations of novels such as Alexandre Duval's "Stéphane" for Volodymyr Blavatsky of the Zahrava theater, and Ulas Samchuk's "Hory Hovoriat" (The Mountains Speak) for Mykola Bentsal at the Tobilevych Theater.

Commissioned to adapt the Austrian writer Jozef Polaczek's "Dr. Berghof" by the City Theater of Lodz, he remained briefly in the Polish city to study directing under Leopold Kielanowski. In 1938 he wrote his own play, "Taras Shevchenko," which Blavatsky premiered that year at the Zahrava Theater.

Inspired by a desire to create "an urban theater close to Lviv's city folk and its streets," he founded and acted as the artistic director of the influential Veselyi Lviv theater in 1942. For two years it drew on the talents of such luminaries as Blavatsky, the Berezil veteran actors/directors Yosyp Hirniak and Olimpia Dobrovolska, the composer/conductor Mykola Kolessa, the painter Myron Levytsky and fellow writer Bohdan Nyzhankivsky (who later made a name for himself as the wise-cracking versifier "Babai" in Kozak's satirical illustrated monthly "Lys Mykyta").

Unfortunately, because of Tarnavsky's conviction that "drama belongs to life in the theater, as a basis for theatrical spectacle, not as reading material in leisure time," few if any of the scripts survived. But, as he noted himself in a letter to a friend, "many of the songs and skits created for 'Veselyi Lviv' are sung and recounted today, as they were by the fighters of the [Galicia] Division and the UPA [Ukrainian Insurgent Army]."

As his collegiate path suggests, Tarnavsky's parallel profession and passion was journalism. In the 1930s, he worked for the Lviv-based daily Ukrainski Visty and the weekly Batkivschyna, and contributed to countless others under various pseudonyms.

In September 1939, as the tanks of the Soviet occupation of Galicia rolled into Lviv, Tarnavsky was moved by an ambition to become the first Ukrainian radio reporter in the region, and joined the Ukrainian Radio Committee. Two years later, from the station's headquarters on Bathory Street, he read out Yaroslav Stetsko's ill-fated proclamation of Ukrainian statehood over the airwaves.

Fleeing westward in 1944, Tarnavsky settled in Munich, where was the first editor of the Munich-based newspaper Ukrainska Trybuna (among the most widely read in the DP camps). He co-founded and served as managing editor of the cosmopolitan literary and arts journal Arka.

Tarnavsky emigrated to the United States in 1949 and settled in Detroit, working as an industrial graphic designer, but also resumed his efforts as a literary translator. He staged and directed his own rendering of the Medieval English morality play "Everyman" and directed its premiere in his adopted city in 1961.

He translated Thornton Wilder's "Our Town," wrote Ukrainian adaptations of the works of Aristophanes and Sophocles, and penned countless radio plays for children.

Reunited in artistic collaboration with Nyzhankivsky, Tarnavsky co-wrote several plays that have been staged but have remained unpublished, including the satirical comedy "Chai u Pana Premiera" (Tea at the Premier's), the historical drama "Attila in Rome," a Ukrainian adaptation of Sophocles's "Antigone." They also began work on a stage adaptation of the medieval "Chronicle of Bygone Years."

Zenon Tarnavsky died in Detroit on August 8, 1962.

A year after his death, his translations of T.S. Eliot's "Murder in the Cathedral" and Georges Bernanos "Dialogues des Carmelites" was published by the prestigious Na Hori series, while a posthumous edition of his selected prose, memoirs, essays and journalistic writings appeared in 1964, titled "Doroha na Vysokyi Zamok" (The Road to the High Castle).

Sources: "Tarnavsky, Zenon," Encyclopedia of Ukraine (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993); Zenon Tarnavsky, "Doroha na Vysokyi Zamok" (Detroit: Institute of Ukrainian Culture in America, 1964); Terem, No. 8 (1982).

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