BOOK NOTES: Discovering Les Kurbas and modernism (02/20/05)

BOOK NOTES

Discovering Les Kurbas and modernism

"Shakespeare in the Undiscovered Bourn: Les Kurbas, Ukrainian Modernism and Early Soviet Cultural Politics" by Irena R. Makaryk. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. 257 pp., $50 (hardcover).

Irena R. Makaryk, a professor in the department of English at the University of Ottawa, began the research contained in this book after hearing a paper that was presented at the 1994 Shakespeare Association of America seminar "Nationalist and Intercultural Aspects of Shakespeare Reception" led by Werner Habicht (University of Würtzburg). As a Shakespearean, Prof. Makaryk has researched Les Kurbas, along with other Soviet playwrights' Shakespearean works and their impact on Ukrainian modernism and theater in a setting of Soviet-ruled Ukraine. Using sources that until recently were unavailable, Prof. Makaryk has tapped into the "undiscovered bourn" of Ukraine's cultural history which has frequently been submerged within a homogenized Soviet experience. According to Myroslav Shkandrij, department of German and Slavic studies, University of Manitoba, "Shakespeare in the Undiscovered Bourn" is a marvelous study of the theater in Kyiv and Kharkiv in the years following the 1917 Revolution." Les Kurbas - director, actor, playwright, filmmaker and translators - was the first to introduce Shakespeare to the Ukrainian stage. Creating the foundation of Soviet Ukrainian theater and cinema, he was also responsible for its avant-garde direction. According to Prof. Makaryk, [though] Les Kurbas was one of the great Soviet stage directors of the early 20th century, on par with Meyerhold and Tairov, almost no one in the West seemed to know this." "Shakespeare in the Undiscovered Bourn" is the first book-length study in the English of Kurbas's modernist productions of Shakespeare and the first book on Soviet Shakespeare productions in Ukraine in any language.

This five-chapter book also contains information concerning Panas Saksahansky's "Othello," Hnat Yura's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and Kurbas' staging of Ivan Mykytenko's works. According to Prof. Makaryk, Saksahansky's "Othello" fit a symbolist poet and literary critic Yakiv Savchenko's description of the kind of Shakespeare Ukrainians had seen performed by Russian provincial companies until that time: a historical costume drama focusing on character and performed in a heroic-romantic mode. Only the second Shakespeare play to be produced on the Ukrainian stage, Saksahansky's "Othello" became the future model for nearly 70 years of Soviet Ukrainian, and in many cases, Russian and other Soviet republics' Shakespeares.

Prof. Makaryk discusses Yura's staging of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and how it proved to be unsuccessful as the Soviet sentiment leaned toward socialist realism. Critics of the play were not impressed by its technical success, such as a revolving stage. Instead they disapproved of the lack of cohesiveness in its concept, its coarseness and its lack of relation to Soviet reality.

Mykytenko and his emergence as the Soviet Shakespeare is the last topic to appear in "Shakespeare in the Undiscovered Bourn." His dramatic works emerged in response to the push to industrialize the country and to collectivize the farms. Through the Soviets' recognition of Mykytenko's works, they ensured that banality and provincialism were reintroduced and institutionalized in Ukrainian culture. "Shakespeare in the Undiscovered Bourn" makes an important contribution to the fields of Slavic studies, theater history and the burgeoning field of Shakespeare across cultures.

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