Ukrainian Culture in the USSR

 

1. Cultural policy in pre-war decades in Ukraine.

2. Ukrainian culture of the “thaw” and the “stagnation period”.

1. Primary cultural policy of Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic was directed on national development. Policy of Ukrainization meant the increasing usage of Ukrainian language and promotion of Ukrainian culture in various spheres of public life: in education, publishing, governing. The latter was accumulated in indigenization policy of the 1920s, i.e. putting down roots. It aimed at strengthening Soviet power on the territory of Ukraine.

While trying to ascertain and consolidate its power, the Bolshevik government was by far more concerned about political oppositions connected to the pre-revolutionary order than about the national movements inside the former empire. Besides, the reversal of the assimilationist policies of the Russian Empire was to help to improve the image of the Soviet government and boost its popularity among the common people.

Until the early-1930s, Ukrainian culture enjoyed a widespread revival due to Bolshevik policies known as the policy of Korenization ("indigenization"). In these years an impressive Ukrainization program was implemented throughout the republic. In such conditions, the Ukrainian national idea initially continued to develop and even spread to a large territory with traditionally mixed population in the east and south that became part of the Ukrainian Soviet republic.

The All-Ukrainian Sovnarkom's decree "On implementation of the Ukrainization of the educational and cultural institutions" (July 27, 1923) is considered to be the onset of the Ukrainization program. The (August 1) decree that followed shortly "On implementation of the equal rights of the languages and facilitation of the Ukrainian language" mandated the implementation of Ukrainian language to all levels of state institutions. Initially, the program was met with resistance by some Ukrainian Communists, largely because non-Ukrainians prevailed numerically in the party at the time. The resistance was finally overcome in 1925 through changes in the party leadership under the pressure of Ukrainian representatives in the party. In April 1925 the party Central Committee adopted the resolution on Ukrainization proclaiming its aim as "solidifying the union of the peasantry with the working class" and boosting the overall support of the Soviet system among Ukrainians. A joint resolution aimed at "complete Ukrainization of the Soviet apparatus" as well as the party and trade unions was adopted on April 30, 1925. The Ukrainian Commissariat of Education (Narkomis) was charged with overseeing the implementation of the Ukrainization policies. The two figures, therefore, most identified with the policy are Oleksander Shumskyi, the Commissar for Education between 1923 and 1927, and Mykola Skrypnyk, who replaced Shumskyi in 1927.

The rapidly developed Ukrainian-language based education system dramatically raised the literacy of the Ukrainophone rural population. By 1929 over 97% of high school students in the republic were obtaining their education in Ukrainian  and illiteracy dropped from 47% (1926) to 8% in 1934.

Simultaneously, the newly-literate ethnic Ukrainians migrated to the cities, which became rapidly largely Ukrainianized — in both population and education. Between 1923 and 1933 the Ukrainian proportion of the population of Kharkov, at the time the capital of Soviet Ukraine, increased from 38% to 50%. Similar increases occurred in other cities, from 27.1% to 42.1% in Kiev, from 16% to 48% in Dnipropetrovsk, from 16% to 48% in Odessa, and from 7% to 31% in Luhansk.

Similarly expansive was an increase in Ukrainian language publishing and the overall flourishing of Ukrainian cultural life. As of 1931 out of 88 theatres in Ukraine, 66 were Ukrainian, 12 were Jewish and 9 were Russian. The number of Ukrainian newspapers, which almost did not exist in 1922, had reached 373 out of 426, while only 3 all-republican large newspapers remained Russian. Of 118 magazines, 89 were Ukrainian. Ukrainization of book-publishing reached 83%.

Most importantly, Ukrainization was thoroughly implemented through the government apparatus, Communist Party of Ukraine membership and, gradually, the party leadership as well, as the recruitment of indigenous cadre was implemented as part of the korenization policies. At the same time, the usage of Ukrainian was continuously encouraged in the workplace and in government affairs. While initially, the party and government apparatus was mostly Russian-speaking, by the end of the 1920s ethnic Ukrainians composed over one half of the membership in the Ukrainian communist party, the number strengthened by accession of Borotbists, a formerly indigenously Ukrainian "independentist" and non-Bolshevik communist party.

In the all-Ukrainian Ispolkom, central executive committee, as well as in the oblast level governments, the proportion of Ukrainians reached 50.3% by 1934 while in raion ispolkoms the number reached 68.8%. On the city and village levels, the representation of Ukrainians in the local government bodies reached 56.1% and 86.1%, respectively. As for other governmental agencies, the Ukrainization policies increased the Ukrainian representation as follows: officers of all-republican People's Commissariat (ministries) - 70-90%, oblast executive brunches - 50%, raion - 64%, Judiciary - 62%, Militsiya (law enforcement) - 58%.

The attempted Ukrainization of the armed forces, Red Army formations serving in Ukraine and abroad, was less successful although moderate progress was attained. The Schools of Red Commanders (Shkola Chervonyh Starshyn) was organized in Kharkov to promote the careers of the Ukrainian national cadre in the army (see picture). The Ukrainian newspaper of the Ukrainian Military District "Chervona Armiya" was published until mid-1930s. The efforts were made to introduce and expand Ukrainian terminology and communication in the Ukrainian Red Army units. The policies even reached the army units in which Ukrainians served in other Soviet regions. For instance the Soviet Pacific Fleet included a Ukrainian department overseen by Semyon Rudniev.

At the same time, despite the ongoing Soviet-wide anti-religious campaign, the Ukrainian national Orthodox Church was created, the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church. The Bolshevik government initially saw the national churches as a tool in their goal to suppress the Russian Orthodox Church, always viewed with great suspicion by the regime for its being the cornerstone of the defunct Russian Empire and the initially strong opposition it took towards the regime change. Therefore, the government tolerated the new Ukrainian national church for some time and the UAOC gained a wide following among the Ukrainian peasantry.

Ukrainization even reached those regions of southern Russian SFSR, particularly the areas by the Don and Kuban rivers, where mixed population showed strong Ukrainian influences in the local dialect. Ukrainian language teachers, just graduated from expanded institutions of higher education in Soviet Ukraine, were dispatched to these regions to staff newly opened Ukrainian schools or to teach Ukrainian as a second language in Russian schools. A string of local Ukrainian-language publications was started and departments of Ukrainian studies were opened in colleges. Overall, these policies were implemented in thirty-five administrative districts in southern Russia.

At the same time, despite the ongoing anti-religious campaign, the Ukrainian Autocephalous Church (from Gr. self-governing) was created in 1921 as Soviet authorities saw the national churches as a tool in their goal to suppress Russian Orthodox Church.

As of 1931 66 out 88 theatres in Ukraine were Ukrainian. L. Kurbas continued to promote the idea of innovative theatre. It was at Berezil in Kiev (1922–1926) and later in Kharkov (1926 – 1933) that Kurbas’s creative genius became the most evident and transformed Berezil into the focal theatre in Ukraine. Of particular importance for the development of Ukrainian drama and theatre was Kurbas’s collaboration with N. Kulish, the prominent Ukrainian playwright of the 1920s.

Les Kurbas (1887-1937) was not only the most important organizer and director of the Ukrainian avant-garde theater, but also one of the most outstanding European theater directors in the first half of the 20th century. Hailed by Vsevolod Meyerhold as "the greatest living Soviet theater director" (and thus, elevated above such giants of Russian and European theater as Konstantin Stanislavsky, Alexandr Tairov, and Meyerhold himself), Kurbas worked to create a new tradition of an intellectual and philosophical theater. His Molodyi Teatr productions revolutionized Ukrainian theater (that was crippled for decades by tsarist draconian decrees and circulars), elevating it in style, esthetics, and repertoire to the level of modern European theater. It was in the 1920s, at his Berezil theater, that Kurbas's creative genius became most evident. At its height Berezil employed nearly four hundred people and ran six actors' studios, a directors' lab, a design studio, and a theater museum. However, Kurbas was given only several years to implement his cultural revolution. Accussed by the Soviet officials of nationalism and counterrevolutionary activities, Kurbas was arrested and executed during the Stalinist terror. All of his productions were banned from the Soviet repertoire and most of his archival materials, including all of his films, were destroyed. No serious study of his artistic legacy was allowed to be published in the USSR until the late 1980s.

Kurbas, Les (Oleksander), (1887 - 1937). Outstanding organizer and director of Ukrainian avant-garde theater, filmmaker, actor, and teacher; son of the Galician actor Stepan Yanovych (stage name: Kurbas) and actress Vanda Yanovycheva. In 1907–8 he studied philosophy at the University of Vienna and drama with the famous Viennese actor Josef Kainz. After graduating from Lviv University in 1910, he worked as an actor in the troupes of the Hutsul Theater (1911–12) and Lviv’s Ukrainska Besida theater (1912–14), founded and directed the Ternopilski Teatralni Vechory theater in Ternopil (1915–16), and worked at Sadovsky's Theater in Kyiv (1916–17).

After the February Revolution of 1917 Kurbas reorganized an actors' studio he had founded in 1916 into the Molodyi Teatr theater (1917–19) in Kyiv and became the secretary of the journal Teatral’ni visty. In Molodyi Teatr’s productions, which included the first performance in Ukrainian of Sophocles' Oedipus Rex (1918), Kurbas revolutionized Ukrainian theater, elevating it in style, esthetics, and repertoire from the provincial to the level of modern European theater. Influenced by Henri Bergson’s philosophy and the theatrical theories and experiments of Max Reinhardt, Georg Fuchs, and Edward Gordon Craig, Kurbas used Molodyi Teatr’s experimental productions to develop his own style of intellectual theater to replace the traditional Ukrainian ethnographic repertoire and traditional, realist psychological theater in general.

Kurbas’s idea of a new, philosophical theater (whose ultimate aim was to return to theater’s ritualistic roots and once again become a religious act) demanded a new type of actor. Rather than reliving the character’s emotions or identifying with him or her, Kurbas’s actor was supposed to objectify the character through the complete control of his or her body and voice and by means of several key techniques. The most important technique, transformation (peretvorennia), represented a theatrical symbol designed to reveal the spiritual and hidden elements by way of concrete images. Another crucial element of Kurbas’s approach was musical rhythm, which had to permeate and unify the entire production. To implement his principles, Kurbas placed much emphasis on his actors' intellectual and technical training, using in the latter the systems of gestures developed by François Delsarte and Emile Jaques-Dalcroze, as well as on architectural design, using the talents of Anatol Petrytsky and Mykhailo Boichuk.

In 1919 the Bolshevik authorities forced Molodyi Teatr to merge with the State Drama Theater, and Kurbas became the codirector, with Oleksander Zaharov, of the new Shevchenko First Theater of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic. There, to great acclaim, he staged an interpretation of Taras Shevchenko's epic poem Haidamaky (The Haidamakas); this monumental production, with music by Reinhold Glière, became the standard by which all Ukrainian productions were measured in the 1920s. By 1920 the situation in Kyiv, devastated by continuous warfare, had become unbearable for actors, and Kurbas formed the Kyidramte touring theater troupe, which toured Bila Tserkva, Uman, and Kharkiv. Kyidramte’s repertoire included the first Ukrainian-language production of a play by William Shakespeare—Macbeth, which premiered in Bila Tserkva in August 1920. At this stage in his career, Kurbas gave up acting to concentrate solely on teaching and directing. Convinced that theater could be used as a powerful political instrument, in 1922 he renounced the estheticism of his earlier period and founded the Berezil artistic association in Kyiv as a left-leaning theater dedicated to the cause of the proletarian revolution.

It was at Berezil in Kyiv (1922–6) and later Kharkiv (1926–33) that Kurbas's creative genius became most evident and transformed Berezil into the focal theater in Ukraine. At its height Berezil employed nearly four hundred actors and staff members and ran six actors' studios, a directors' lab, a design studio, a theater museum, and ten specialized committees. There Kurbas perfected his rigorous system for the intellectual and technical training of actors. It focused on ‘mime-dramas’, which shared many features of early avant-garde abstract dance and had to be fully mastered before actors were permitted to study the use of language. The main stylistic principle of Berezil's productions was the synthesis of speech, movement, gestures (which were supposed to be objectivized and remain separate from the actor's frame of mind and personal experiences), music, light, and decorative art into one rhythm or simple, dramatic language. Utilizing various elements of expressionism, constructivism, and other avant-garde styles, Kurbas’s innovative productions—eg, of Georg Kaiser’s Gas (1923), Upton Sinclair’s Jimmie Higgins (1923) (in which film was used for the first time on a Ukrainian stage), Shakespeare’s Macbeth (1924), and Fernand Crommelynck's Tripes d'or (1926) —challenged the traditional principles of realist psychological theater and often anticipated the later experiments of such directors as Bertolt Brecht and Antonin Artaud. Of particular importance for the development of Ukrainian drama and theater was Kurbas’s collaboration with the most important Ukrainian playwright of the 1920s, Mykola Kulish, three of whose plays became part of Berezil’s repertoire.

In 1925 a lively public dispute about Kurbas and Berezil erupted. Soviet critics and Party officials denounced Berezil’s complex avant-garde style, inaccessibility to the masses, intellectual sophistication, and ‘antidemocratic stance.’ Nonetheless, Berezil was still recognized as Ukraine’s best theater, and in 1926 it moved to the then capital of Soviet Ukraine, Kharkiv. There Berezil became a focal point of a ‘theater dispute’ (part of the broader Soviet Ukrainian Literary Discussion), whose most important public forums in 1927 and 1929 represented confrontations between leading Soviet Ukrainian cultural figures (including Kurbas, Kulish, and Mykola Khvylovy) and theater traditionalists loyal to the Party (eg, Hnat Yura) as well as Soviet critics and officials (eg, Ivan Kulyk). Under mounting Party criticism, Berezil was forced to exclude from its repertoire most of Kulish’s plays and to stage second-rate dramas by Ivan Mykytenko, a Party favorite whose works adhered to the principles of socialist realism. Kurbas defiantly responded to this infringement on artistic freedom by completely rewriting Mykytenko’s Dyktatura (Dictatorship) and turning it into a musical that became one of his most notable directorial achievements.

As the Party’s control over all spheres of cultural and political life in Ukraine tightened in the 1930s, Kurbas’s ideas and his dynamic, innovative, and often controversial productions were condemned as nationalist, rationalist, formalist, and counterrevolutionary. In October 1933 he was dismissed as the director of Berezil, and all of his productions were banned from the Soviet Ukrainian repertoire. To avoid further persecution, he moved to Moscow to join the GOSET (the State Jewish Theater) and work there on a production of King Lear starring Solomon Michoels. But soon after, in December 1933, he was arrested by the NKVD and imprisoned on the Solovets Islands in the Soviet Arctic. There he became a victim of the mass executions of prisoners marking the twentieth anniversary of the October Revolution of 1917. Most of his archival materials, including all of his films, were destroyed.

Kurbas left his mark in the history of Ukrainian theater as an innovative organizer and teacher and daring experimental director. At Molodyi Teatr he introduced a modern European repertoire and style of acting. At Berezil he broke down the old forms of Ukrainian theater and, after a long period of searching and enthusiastic experimentation with German expressionist theater and the theories of constructivism, succeeded, in his productions of Kulish's plays, in creating a unique, Ukrainian expressionist theater. With his production of Kaiser's Gas in 1923, Kurbas broke completely with traditional Ukrainian realist, ethnographic theater to present spectacles that forced the audience to become active participants rather than passive observers. He combined his intellectualism and philosophical interpretation of plays with a brilliant synthesis of rhythm, movement, and avant-garde theatrical and visual devices, including the use of film, and managed to gather together the best actors, directors, set designers (eg, Vadym Meller), and playwrights in Ukraine. At the Berezil studios and Kyiv (1922–6) and Kharkiv (1926–33) music and drama institutes (see Lysenko Music and Drama Institute and Kharkiv Theater Institute), he trained an entire generation of Ukrainian actors and directors, including Danylo Antonovych, Borys Balaban, Yevhen Bondarenko, Amvrosii Buchma, Valentyna Chystiakova (Kurbas’s wife), Olimpiia Dobrovolska, Leontii Dubovyk, Sofiia Fedortseva, Liubov Hakkebush, Yosyp Hirniak, Domian Kozachkivsky, Marian Krushelnytsky, Lidiia Krynytska, Ivan Marianenko, Dmytro Miliutenko, Fedir Radchuk, Polina Samiilenko, Iryna Steshenko, Oleksander Serdiuk, Volodymyr Skliarenko, Borys Tiahno, Nadiia Tytarenko, Nataliia Uzhvii, and Vasyl Vasylko.

Molodyi Teatr (Young Theater). A theatre troupe in Kyiv headed by Les Kurbas from 1917 to 1919. The core group of actors consisted of graduates of the Lysenko Music and Drama School and included Vasyl Vasylko, Yona Shevchenko, Marko Tereshchenko, Volodymyr Kalyn, Stepan Bondarchuk, Polina Samiilenko, Sofiia Manuilovych, Antonina Smereka, Oleksii Vatulia, Polina Niatko, and Olimpiia Dobrovolska. Most of the productions were directed by Kurbas, although Hnat Yura, V. Vasilev, and Semen Semdor also directed shows. Anatol Petrytsky was the main stage designer, but Mykhailo Boichuk was invited to create sets for several important productions. Kurbas's articles, such as the ‘Manifesto’ (in Robitnycha hazeta, 1917) and ‘Molodyi Teatr’ (Young Theatre, 1917), called for a new Ukrainian theatre and outlined the artistic goals of the group. Molodyi Teatr rejected the Ukrainian ethnographic repertoire and presented modern Ukrainian plays and world classics. Kurbas strived to create an intellectual and philosophical theater whose ultimate aim was to return to its ritualistic roots and to become once again some form of a religious act. His search for new forms resulted in imaginative uses of rhythm, gesture, music, and design in his productions. The first season included Kurbas's productions of the realist Chorna pantera i bilyi vedmid’ (Black Panther and White Bear) by Volodymyr Vynnychenko, the naturalistic Jugend by M. Halbe, and Doktor Kerzhentsev, based on L. Andreev's Mysl’ (Thought), directed by Yura. These were followed by a stylized presentation of three symbolic études by Oleksander Oles, two of which were directed by Kurbas and one by Yura. Molodyi Teatr concluded its first season with a production of J. Żuławski's impressionistic verse play Jola.

The second season (1918–19) opened with Kurbas's production of Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, the first Ukrainian production of a classical Greek play. Kurbas's subsequent productions included Lesia Ukrainka's U Pushchi (In the Wilderness); F. Grillparzer's Weh dem, der lügt! in the commedia dell'arte style; a stylized Vertep, which used the conventions of the puppet theater; expressionistic stagings of Taras Shevchenko's dramatic poems ‘Ivan Hus’ and ‘Velykyi l'okh’ (The Great Vault); and performances of several lyrical poems as choral movement pieces with music, which Kurbas would later see as his first attempt to create ‘transformed gestures,’ the central concern of his later work. During the season the other directors presented literal stagings of such plays as G. Shaw's Candida (directed by Yura), G. Hauptmann's Die versunkene Glocke (by Yura) Volodymyr Vynnychenko's Hrikh (Sin, by Yura), Moliere's Tartuffe (by Vasilev), and H. Ibsen's En folkefiende (by Semdor).

In the spring of 1919, as the internal artistic conflicts came to a head, Molodyi Teatr was nationalized by the Bolshevik government and forced to merge with the State Drama Theater to form the Shevchenko First Theater of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic. Although it lasted only two seasons, Molodyi Teatr changed the direction of Ukrainian theatre, and from its ranks came the artistic directors of the major theaters of the 1920s, including Les Kurbas, Hnat Yura, Marko Tereshchenko, and Vasyl Vasylko.

Berezil (March). A theater established in 1922 in Kyiv by the Berezil artistic association as an experimental studio under the artistic direction of Les Kurbas. Achieving recognition as Soviet Ukraine’s national theater, it was located in Kyiv until 1926 and then moved to the then capital, Kharkiv. At its height Berezil included six actors' studios (three in Kyiv, one each in Bila Tserkva, Boryspil, and Odesa), close to 400 actors and staff members, a directors' lab, a design studio, a theater museum, and ten committees, including a ‘psycho-technical’ committee that used applied psychology to develop new teaching methods for actors and directors. Berezil also published a journal, Barykady teatru (Theatrical Barricades).

Having renounced the aestheticism of his Molodyi Teatr period, Kurbas saw Berezil as a left-leaning theater dedicated to the cause of proletarian revolution. But he never embraced a single ideology or program; instead, he insisted that Berezil was ‘not dogma, but movement,’ a ceaseless revolutionary search for new forms of artistic expression. Kurbas’s first Berezil productions, Zhovten’ (October, 1922) and Rur (Ruhr, 1923), were designed as agitprop performances and often performed especially for Red Army troops. Nonetheless, they were considerable artistic achievements and contained important formal experiments, especially in their choreography of mass scenes.

Kurbas introduced a sophisticated technical and intellectual training program for Berezil’s actors that emphasized rhythm and focused on ‘mime-dramas’ exhibiting many features of early avant-garde abstract dance. Only after they had mastered the art of ‘mime-drama’ and the use of props were actors permitted to study the use of language. The overarching goal of Berezil's productions was the synthesis of speech, movement, gesture, music, light, and decorative art into one rhythm or simple, dramatic language, based on the belief that theater shapes rather than reflects life. According to Kurbas, this process, which required a ‘new actor’ and directorial approach, was also aimed at creating a new type of theatrical audience and society in general—‘a new, not passive, person.’

Despite its essential differences with expressionist theater, Berezil (whose motto was ‘a committed, reflective theater’) used formal expressionist devices in its subsequent productions of plays by Georg Kaiser, Ernst Toller, and Upton Sinclair. Kurbas’s staging of Kaiser’s Gas (1923) in Ukrainian was Berezil’s first great success, and it was hailed as ushering in ‘a new era in theater.’ Kurbas and Berezil’s even more successful first adaptation of Sinclair’s Jimmy Higgins (1923) in Ukrainian used film to create a thoroughly innovative theatrical effect.

The next period in Berezil’s development was associated with its experimental productions of classic dramas in Ukrainian translation, in particular a radically original and ‘scandalous’ staging of William Shakespeare's Macbeth (1924); Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller's Die Verschwörung des Fiesco zu Genua; Victor Hugo's Le Roi s'amuse; Prosper Mérimée's La Jacquerie; Fernand Crommelynck's Tripes d'or; and Gilbert and Sullivan's Mikado. The theater also staged experimental productions of Ukrainian plays such as Ivan Karpenko-Kary's Khaziaïn (The Master) and Sava Chalyi; Mykhailo Starytsky's Za dvoma zaitsiamy (After Two Hares); Volodymyr M. Yaroshenko's Shpana (Riff-raff); Maik Yohansen, Mykola Khvylovy, and Ostap Vyshnia's Allo na khvyli 477 (Hello on Frequency 477); Kost Burevii's Chotyry chemberleny (Four Chamberlains); and Stepan Bondarchuk and Kurbas's Proloh (Prologue).

Among Berezil’s major achievements were its productions of plays by Kurbas’s close collaborator and the most important Ukrainian dramatist of the 1920s and 1930s, Mykola Kulish. Because of those plays’ political nonconformism, however, the Soviet authorities granted permission to stage only a few of them— Narodnii Malakhii (The People's Malakhii, 1928), which was banned after several performances, Myna Mazailo (1929), and the soon banned Maklena Grasa (1933), whose dress rehearsal was monitored by armed police.

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Kurbas and Berezil became the targets of ever-increasing condemnation by official Soviet critics and Party functionaries. Berezil became a focal point of a ‘theater dispute’ (part of the broader Literary Discussion) in which Kurbas was initially denounced for Berezil’s ‘inaccessability to the masses’ and his own ‘antidemocratic stand’ and, eventually, for being a ‘bourgeois nationalist’ and ‘counterrevolutionary.’ At the end of 1933, after Kurbas’s dismissal as Berezil’s artistic director and his subsequent arrest by the NKVD, Berezil was purged. The theater’s actors who were not arrested and imprisoned during the Stalinist Terror joined the reformed Kharkiv Ukrainian Drama Theater. There, under the directorship of Marian Krushelnytsky, they performed in plays that conformed to the tenets of officially sanctioned socialist realism.

Many notable Ukrainian actors belonged to Berezil—Marian Krushelnytsky, Yosyp Hirniak, Nataliia Uzhvii, Amvrosii Buchma, Ivan Marianenko, Valentyna Chystiakova, Iryna Steshenko, Nadiia Tytarenko, Stepan Shahaida, Oleksander Serdiuk, Danylo Antonovych, Hanna Babiivna, Olimpiia Dobrovolska, and Hnat Ihnatovych—and an entire generation of younger actors and directors were trained there. Besides Kurbas, Yanuarii Bortnyk, Favst Lopatynsky, Borys Tiahno, Volodymyr Skliarenko, Borys Balaban, directed Berezil’s plays. Berezil's primary stage designer was the prominent painter Vadym Meller.

Krushelnytsky, Marian (1897 - 1963). Actor and play director of Les Kurbas's school; educator. Making his stage debut in 1915 in the Ternopilski Teatralni Vechory theater, he subsequently acted in the Ukrainian Theater in Ternopil (1918, 1920–1), the New Lviv Theater (1919), the Franko Ukrainian Drama Theater in Vinnytsia (1920), and the Ukrainska Besida Theater in Lviv (1922–4). Then he was one of the leading actors of the Berezil theater, and after L. Kurbas's arrest and the dissolution of Berezil, Krushelnytsky was appointed in 1934 artistic director and chief play director of the Kharkiv Ukrainian Drama Theater. He modified the theater's profile, particularly its repertoire, according to the demands of socialist realism: preference was given to Oleksander Korniichuk's and Liubomyr Dmyterko's plays and Russian classics. Joining the Kyiv Ukrainian Drama Theater in 1952, he eventually became its chief stage director (1954–63). After the war, he also taught acting at the Kharkiv Theater Institute (1946–52) and the Kyiv Institute of Theater Arts (1952–63).

As an actor Krushelnytsky distinguished himself under Les Kurbas's direction in the Berezil theater. He played a wide range of roles, including Honoré d'Apremout in Prosper Mérimé's La Jacquerie, Barbulesque in F. Crommelynck's Tripes d'Or, and Maloshtan in Ivan Mykytenko's Dyktatura (Dictatorship). He was particularly impressive in Mykola Kulish's plays: as Malakhii in Narodnyi Malakhii (The People's Malakhii), Uncle Taras in Myna Mazailo, and Padura in Maklena Grasa. In the post-Berezil period his better roles were comedic ones such as Kuksa in Marko Kropyvnytsky's Poshylys’ u durni (They Made Fools of Themselves) and Ivan Nepokryty in his Dai sertsiu voliu zavede v nevoliu (Give the Heart Freedom and It Will Lead You into Slavery), the title role in Ivan Karpenko-Kary's Martyn Borulia, Kindrat Halushka in Oleksander Korniichuk's V stepakh Ukraïny (In Ukraine's Steppes), and cantor Havrylo in Bohdan Khmel’nyts’kyi. Krushelnytsky won acclaim for his original interpretation of Tevie in Tevie-molochnyk (Tevie, the Milkman, based on the story by Sholom Aleichem) and of Lear in William Shakespeare's King Lear.

Buchma, Amvrosii (1891 - 1957). Prominent stage and screen actor, director, and teacher. Buchma began his stage career at the Ruska Besida theater in Lviv in 1910. In 1917 he studied at the Lysenko Music and Drama School in Kyiv. In 1920 he worked in the Kyiv Ukrainian Drama Theater and in 1923–6 in the Berezil theater, where he played such memorable roles as Jimmie Higgins in an adaptation of U. Sinclair's novel, Leiba in an adaptation of Taras Shevchenko's Haidamaky (The Haidamakas), Jean in Prosper Mérimée's La Jacquerie, and the Fool in William Shakespeare's Macbeth. At the same time he became a film actor and later left the theater to devote himself solely to the cinema (1926–30). The main roles in which he appeared in these years were those of Jimmie Higgins, Mykola Dzheria, Taras Shevchenko, Taras Triasylo (in films of the same titles), the leading role of Hordii in Nichnyi viznyk (The Night Coachman) and the German soldier in Oleksander Dovzhenko's Arsenal. In 1930–6 Buchma returned to the Berezil theater (called the Kharkiv Ukrainian Drama Theater from 1935), now in Kharkiv, and played such roles as Dudar in Ivan Mykytenko's Dyktatura (The Dictatorship), Puzyr in Ivan Karpenko-Kary's Khaziain (The Master), and Haidai and Krechet in Oleksander Korniichuk's Zahybel’ eskadry (The Destruction of the Squadron) and Platon Krechet. From 1936 to 1954 Buchma worked as an actor and director in the Kyiv Ukrainian Drama Theater and in film. His was one of the best portrayals of Mykola Zadorozhny in Ivan Franko's Ukradene shchastia (Stolen Happiness).

Buchma played in over 200 different roles. He depicted comic, dramatic, and tragic figures equally well. He directed the film Za stinoiu (Behind the Wall, 1928) and the play Nazar Stodolia at the Kyiv Ukrainian Drama Theater in 1942 (he also co-directed this play with Leontii Dubovyk in 1951) and co-directed Ivan Kotliarevsky's Natalka Poltavka (Natalka from Poltava) at the Kyiv Theater of Opera and Ballet with Volodymyr Manzii in 1951. From 1940 Buchma lectured at the Kyiv Institute of Theater Arts and in 1946–8 was the artistic director of the Kyiv Artistic Film Studio.

The Dovzhenko Film Studios Its history begins in 1920's when the All-Ukrainian Photo-Cinema-Directorate (VUFKU) announced concourse on a project proposition for the construction of a cinema-factory in 1925. Out of 20 of them was chosen the project of Valerian Rykov who led his architect group composed of students of the Architectural Department of Kiev Art Institute. With the construction of the O. Dovzhenko Film Studios beginning in 1927, it was at the time the largest in the Ukrainian SSR. Although the filming pavilions were still unfinished a year later, movie production had begun. Many memorial plates are located within the studios in memory of the many film producers which had once worked here. One film pavilion is named Shchorsovskyy, because Olexandr Dovzhenko shot his movie, Shchors, there. This area of the studios is currently used as a museum.

Dovzhenko, Oleksander (1894 -1956). Film director. After graduating from the Hlukhiv teachers' seminary in 1914, Dovzhenko worked as a teacher in Zhytomyr. During the struggle for independence (1917–20) he participated in the revolutionary events in Kyiv and in 1919–20 belonged to the Borotbists. In 1921–3 he worked in Warsaw and Berlin as a member of Ukrainian diplomatic missions. In 1923–6 he drew caricatures for the newspaper Visti VUTsVK in Kharkiv and played an active role in the literary and artistic life of the city. He had begun studying painting in Berlin and continued to paint in Kharkiv.

In 1926 Dovzhenko began to work as a film director at the Odesa Artistic Film Studio. His first films were Vasia—reformator (Vasia, the Reformer), Iahidka kokhannia (The Berry of Love, 1926), and Sumka dypkur'iera (The Diplomatic Courier's Bag, 1927). Drawing on Ukrainian history, in 1927 he created the film Zvenyhora, which is considered to mark the beginning of Ukrainian national cinematography. Dovzhenko's expressionist film Arsenal (1929) is devoted to the revolutionary events in Kyiv in 1918. His last silent movie, Zemlia (The Earth, 1930), dealing with the collectivization drive in Ukraine, is a masterpiece. Dovzhenko was severely criticized as a Ukrainian nationalist for this film and for his next film, Ivan (1932), about the building of the Dnieper Dam. He was forced to move to Moscow, where he lived as if in exile until his death. In Moscow he made Aerograd (1935) about the Far East and spent over four years on the film Shchors (1939), which depicts the struggle of the Bolshevik army against the Ukrainian forces defending Ukraine's statehood during the Ukrainian-Soviet War, 1917–21. During the Second World War Dovzhenko made three chronicle films: Vyzvolennia (The Liberation, 1940), on the annexation of Galicia to the Ukrainian SSR; Bytva za nashu Radians’ku Ukraïnu (The Battle for Our Soviet Ukraine, 1943); and Peremoha na Pravoberezhnii Ukraïni (The Victory in Right-Bank Ukraine, 1945). In 1948 he made his last film, Zhyttia v tsvitu (Life in Bloom), which was devoted to botanist Ivan Michurin. Dovzhenko's rich lyricism, his vivid characters, and the poetic power of his landscapes earned him a reputation as ‘first poet of the cinema’ and as one of the world's leading film directors. An international jury in 1958 ranked his Zemlia among the 12 best films in world cinematography.

From the beginning of the Second World War Dovzhenko devoted more of his time to writing than to directing. He wrote a few dozen short stories, mostly about Ukraine's tragic fate during the Second World War, and a number of novels of a new genre, ‘film novels’: Ukraïna v ohni (Ukraine in Flames, 1943), prohibited from publication by Joseph Stalin because of its nationalism and published posthumously only in excerpts (the full version appeared only in 1990 and 1995); Povist’ polum’ianykh lit (The Tale of Fiery Years, 1945); and Poema pro more (A Poem about the Sea, 1956). His autobiographical novel Zacharovana Desna (The Enchanted Desna, 1955) is a literary masterpiece. All of his novels were published posthumously.).

Constructivism. Artistic movement based on the principle of functionalism and favoring mostly simple geometric forms. In architecture constructivism emphasizes the structure itself and the building materials (reinforced concrete, metals, glass) and avoids decoration. In Ukraine constructivism was popular after 1920 and manifested itself in a series of factorylike buildings: the Building of State Industry and the Projects Building (1925–9, designed by S. Kravets and S. Serafimov), the Post Office (1927–9, by A. Mordvinov), and the Railwaymen's Club in Kharkiv; the Palace of Culture in Kadiivka; the Palace of Labor in Dnipropetrovsk, the Dnieper Hydroelectric Station, and so on. After the war a number of buildings in the constructivist style were built, mostly in Kyiv: the Dnipro Hotel (1960), the Sports Palace (1960), the Boryspil airport (1965); Tarasova Hora Hotel in Kaniv (1961), and a large number of palaces of culture throughout Ukraine.

In painting, constructivism uses abstract combinations of lines, objects, and colored planes. The first constructivist artists in Ukraine were Alexander Archipenko, Kazimir Malevich, A. Ekster, and Mykhailo Andriienko-Nechytailo. The influence of constructivism and cubism is evident in Ivan Kavaleridze's monuments to Fedor Artem (1923–4 in Artemivsk (Donetsk oblast) and 1927 in Sviatohorsk) and to Taras Shevchenko (1926 in Poltava). Constructivism was adopted most widely in stage design. In the 1920s and at the beginning of the 1930s it was the dominant style in the theaters of Ukraine. Its main exponent was Vadym Meller and his students—Dmytro Vlasiuk, Mylitsa Symashkevych, and others—at the maquette workshop of the Berezil theater. Other prominent stage designers who worked in this style were M. Matkovych, V. Miuller, and Yurii Pavlovych at the Odesa Ukrainian Music and Drama Theater; Borys Kosariev, at the Kharkiv Chervonozavodskyi Ukrainian Drama Theater; Heorhii Tsapok at the Kyiv Ukrainian Drama Theater; and Anatol Petrytsky, Oleksander Khvostenko-Khvostov, and Ivan Kurochka-Armashevsky at the Kyiv Theater of Opera and Ballet, the Kharkiv Theater of Opera and Ballet and the Odesa Opera and Ballet Theater. Constructivists took an architectural approach to graphic art and used various scripts. Vasyl H. Krychevsky, Pavlo Kovzhun, Vasyl Yermilov, H. Tsapok, Vladimir Tatlin, Leonid Khyzhynsky, and Olena Sakhnovska were among those known for their graphics.

In literature, elements of constructivism can be found in the poetry of the early Yevhen Malaniuk and Mykola Bazhan, Oleksa Vlyzko, Geo Shkurupii, and other authors of the Nova Generatsiia futurist group. Another literary group, organized by Valeriian Polishchuk, Avanhard (Avant-garde) (1926–9), proclaimed the ideas of constructivism, dynamism, ‘machinism’, and ‘spiralism’.

In music, constructivism was manifest in the works of Borys Liatoshynsky, Borys Yanovsky, Antin Rudnytsky, Mykhailo Verykivsky (in part), and others. In 1932 constructivism was declared in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic to be ‘nationalistic’ and harmful. Yet, because of its purely technical approach and skillful use of building materials, constructivism survived and developed in Soviet architecture, particularly after the cult of Joseph Stalin and the pseudoclassical style of architecture encouraged by him came under criticism.

A movement in the plastic arts that originated during and immediately after the First World War and had the greatest impact in Germany and Austria. The expressionists revolted against representational conventions and sought a new spontaneity and an intensity of inner vision. From this followed the intensely subjective expression, emotivity, exaggeration, and distortion that are typical of the movement. In Ukrainian art expressionism was quite moderate and was represented mainly by Oleksa Novakivsky, Anatol Petrytsky, Oleksa Hryshchenko, Mykola Butovych, Myroslav Radysh, and partly by Alexander Archipenko (in sculpture). Jurij Solovij, Liuboslav Hutsaliuk, and other modern painters in the West have been influenced by American (the so-called New York) expressionism.

In literature, as in painting, expressionism emphasized the inner significance of things and not their external forms. It paid more attention to the effect of imagery, language, and sound than to content, in order to evoke a state of mind. In Ukrainian literature, the reverberations of expressionism did not last long, although they left their mark on poetry, prose, and drama. In the 1920s, the poet Valeriian Polishchuk was influenced by German expressionists such as W. Hasenclever, K. Edschmid, and J. Becher. The most important representative of expressionism in Ukrainian literature was Mykola Khvylovy; his short stories were a combination of expressionism and neoromanticism. The poetic expressionism of Teodosii Osmachka (in his first collection, Krucha [Precipice 1922]) and Mykola Bazhan was fresh and original. In drama Mykola Kulish’s 97 and Narodnyi Malakhii (The People's Malakhii) and Ivan Dniprovsky's Liubov i dym (Love and Smoke) and Iablunevyi polon (Apple-Blossom Captivity) showed an affinity to expressionism. Dniprovsky's prose was also expressionistic (eg, Dolyna uhriv [The Valley of the Hungarians]). Elements of expressionism are also evident in the poetry and plays of Ivan Bahriany. At the beginning of the 1930s socialist realism was imposed by the Soviet authorities and thus expressionism declined and disappeared. The expressionists became victims of political persecution. M. Khvylovy committed suicide; others (V. Polishchuk and M. Kulish) perished in Stalin’s camps, fell silent, or followed the official Soviet cultural line (M. Bazhan).

Futurism. Art movement that originated in Italy in 1909. Its founder is considered to be F. Marinetti, whose main objective was to destroy old art forms, particularly realism and classicism, the dominant trends of the 19th century. Cubism still recognized a certain convention, while futurism rejected all accepted forms and gave individualism free reign. In painting this freedom led to fantastic forms and colors, and in literature, especially poetry, to abstruse language (zaumna mova) consisting of sound-words that often had no meaning. Futurism sought to transmit the ideas and spirit of the future technological and cosmopolitan society, which was opposed to the old conservative esthetic sensibility of the peasants and petite bourgeoisie. Hence, urban and industrial themes were typical of this movement. One of the key devices of the futurists was the ‘shocking of the bourgeois,’ that is, provoking him/her with various inventions and deformations. Futurism did not receive much sympathy in Ukraine before the First World War because of the dominance of the tradition-oriented peasant masses. Such works as Alexander Archipenko's Dance or Medrano I (1912) were produced in Paris and were known in Ukraine only from reproductions.

The first collection of Ukrainian futurist poetry—Mykhailo Semenko's Preliud (Prelude)—appeared in 1913. It was followed by Derzannia (Audacity) and Kverofuturyzm (Querofuturism). As an active proponent of futurism, Semenko founded several Ukrainian futurist organizations and journals: Fliamingo (1919–21), ASPANFUT (Association of Panfuturists, 1921–4), and, after moving to Kharkiv from Kyiv, the journal Nova generatsiia (1927–30). Because only Communist ideals were permitted, the journal became a militant advocate of ‘proletarian art.’ At first it called for the destruction of old forms and, when this was recognized to be of little use for the building of a new society, it propagated constructivism and suprematism. After Kazimir Malevich's expulsion from Moscow, Semenko published a series of Malevich's articles on suprematism in his journal. A number of talented poets belonged to the futurist group: Geo Shkurupii and Oleksa Vlyzko, who like Semenko were executed for ‘nationalism’ in the 1930s, Mykola Skuba, and the theoretician Oleksii Poltoratsky. The eminent poet Mykola Bazhan and the greatest poet of the Ukrainian revolutionary period, Pavlo Tychyna, were for some time influenced by futurism and utilized some of its ideas in their work. The poet Valeriian Polishchuk was closely associated with futurism, on the basis of which he tried to build his own movement of ‘dynamic spiralism.’ The futurists were never as prominent in the Ukrainian literature of their time as the symbolists or Neoclassicists, who never severed their ties with the past. Yet the futurists succeeded in reinvigorating poetry by introducing fresh themes and forms and above all by their experimentation. The group Nova Generatsiia propagated new Western European trends such as Dadaism and surrealism, although this practice conflicted with its journal's official crude sociological declarations. The journal ceased publication under pressure from the authorities.

Besides the organizations mentioned above, there were also local groups of futurists: Kom-Kosmos in Kharkiv (1921), Yugolif (including local Russian futurists) in Odesa, and SiM (Selo i Misto [Village and City]) in Moscow (1925), which embraced Ukrainian writers in the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic. All these groups rejected the classical legacy and advocated ‘the destruction of forms’ for the sake of ‘the Communist future.’ In the 1920s the futurists published the following periodicals: Universal’nyi zhurnal, Semafor u maibutnie, Katafalk iskusstva, and Golfshtrom.

The downfall of the Russian Empire after the First World War, the resulting abolition of imperial censorship, the establishment of an independent Ukrainian state (even if for a very short time), and the relative leniency of the Soviet regime in the 1920s all led to an astonishing renaissance of literary and cultural activity in Ukraine. Scores of new writers and poets appeared and formed dozens of literary groups that changed the face of Ukrainian literature. Perhaps the most charismatic cultural leader was Mykola Khvylovy, a prominent writer, publicist, and founder of the elitist literary organization Vaplite. Among Vaplite's members were a renowned playwright Mykola Kulish, a brilliant symbolist poet Pavlo Tychyna, an avant-garde poet and writer Maik Yohansen, and such writers and poets as Yurii Yanovsky, Arkadii Liubchenko, and Mykola Bazhan. However, the Ukrainian cultural renaissance of the 1920s was brutally quashed by Stalinist terror of the 1930s. As a symbolic act of defiance and concern for his nation in the face of the man-made famine and the growing campaign of political terror, Khvylovy committed suicide in May 1933. The majority of Vaplite members, including Kulish and Yohansen, were imprisoned and executed. Others, including Tychyna, were forced to capitulate to the Soviet regime and begin producing works in the socialist-realist style which glorified Joseph Stalin and the Party. Nonetheless, in a very brief time of relative creative freedom, these writers managed to create a remarkable and lasting literary legacy.

Vaplite (full name: Vilna akademiia proletarskoi literatury [Free Academy of Proletarian Literature]). A writers' organization which existed in Kharkiv from 1925 to 1928. While accepting the official requirements of the Communist party, Vaplite adopted an independent position on questions of literary policy and supported Mykola Khvylovy in the Literary Discussion of 1925–8. Vaplite proposed to create a new Ukrainian literature based on the writers in its ranks who strived to perfect their work by assimilating the finest masterpieces of Western European culture. Joseph Stalin interpreted that goal as a betrayal of the aims of the Party and accused Khvylovy and Vaplite of working under the slogan Away from Moscow. The association rejected decisively the policy of mass participation in masovism proletarian writers' organizations, which were supported by the Communist party. Khvylovy was the actual leader of Vaplite; its official president was first Mykhailo Yalovy (Yu. Shpol) and then Mykola Kulish, and its secretary was Arkadii Liubchenko. Its members were Mykola Bazhan, Vasyl Vrazhlyvy, Ivan Dniprovsky, Oles Dosvitnii, Hryhorii Epik, P. Ivanov, Maik Yohansen, Oleksander Kopylenko, Hordii Kotsiuba, Mykhailo Maisky, Petro Panch, Ivan Senchenko, Oleksa Slisarenko, Yurii Smolych, Pavlo Tychyna, and Yurii Yanovsky. The association published the almanac Vaplite (1926), devoted mostly to literary problems, and five issues of the journal Vaplite (1927). Vaplite's position on literary issues was supported by the Neoclassicists (Mykola Zerov in particular) and by other Ukrainian writers.

The ideas of Khvylovy and Vaplite came under vehement criticism not only from their literary rivals and key Soviet leaders of Ukraine (eg, Vlas Chubar, Volodymyr Zatonsky, Mykola Skrypnyk, Teodosii Taran, and Andrii Khvylia) but also from the Communist Party of Ukraine. Neither the admission of political ‘errors’ by Khvylovy and others in December 1926 nor the expulsion of Khvylovy, Mykhailo Yalovy, and Oles Dosvitnii from Vaplite in January 1927 could save the organization. Khvylovy's novel Val’dshnepy (The Woodcocks, first part pub in Vaplite, no. 5, 1927) came under particularly severe criticism. The sixth and last issue of Vaplite, containing the continuation of the novel, was confiscated at the printing office and Vaplite was forced to dissolve. Members of the association continued their literary work in association with the journal Literaturnyi iarmarok and in the organization Prolitfront.

Hvylovy, Mykola (1893 - 1933). Prominent Ukrainian writer and publicist of the Ukrainian cultural renaissance of the 1920s. Born Mykola Fitilev, he graduated in 1916 as an extension student from the Bohodukhiv Gymnasium. In 1919 he joined the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Ukraine. In 1921 he moved to Kharkiv, where he worked as a millwright and also joined a body of writers grouped around Vasyl Blakytny and the newspaper Visti VUTsVK. In 1921, with Volodymyr Sosiura and Maik Yohansen, he signed the literary manifesto ‘Our Universal to the Ukrainian Workers and Ukrainian Proletarian Artists’ (published in the collection Zhovten’). In the same year his poem ‘V elektrychnyi vik’ (In the Electrical Age) and his poetry collection Molodist’ (Youth) were published.

After his second collection, Dosvitni symfoniï (Twilight Symphonies, 1922), appeared, he switched to writing prose. His first short story, ‘Zhyttia’(Life), was published in 1922. His first collections of short stories— Syni etiudy (Blue Etudes, 1923) and Osin’ (Autumn, 1924)—immediately won him the acclaim of various critics including Serhii Yefremov, Oleksander Biletsky, the party critic Volodymyr Koriak, and the émigrés Yevhen Malaniuk and Dmytro Dontsov.

The ornamental, impressionistic style of these and later lyrical-romantic stories—which exhibited the influence of expressionism (including its inherent naturalism)—became paradigmatic for most young Soviet Ukrainian writers then beginning their careers. Khvylovy experimented boldly in his prose, introducing into the narrative diaries, dialogues with the reader, speculations about the subsequent unfolding of the plot, philosophical musings about the nature of art, and other asides. In his brief period of creativity (less than five years) he masterfully depicted the revolution in Ukraine and the first hints of its degeneration, using a rich gallery of characters, most of them members of the intelligentsia. The characters' initial infatuation with the revolution ends in disillusionment, and their expected rebirth of Ukraine reifies into a new embodiment of the ‘snout of the indomitable boor’ in such stories as ‘Redaktor Kark’ (Editor Kark), ‘Na hlukhim shliakhu’ (On the Overgrown Path), and ‘Synii lystopad’ (Blue November). A later cycle of stories consists of merciless satires of insipid philistines and the transformation of former revolutionaries into bureaucrats and parasites. From 1924 on, Khvylovy's stories depict life much more psychodramatically and tragically, as in the novella ‘Ia’ (I) and ‘Povist' pro sanatoriinu zonu’ (Tale of the Sanatorium Zone).

At the same time Khvylovy played a key role in the life of literary organizations. One of the founders of the proletarian-writers' group Hart in 1923, he soon became dissatisfied with its toeing of the official line and left it with a small group of writers to form the group Urbino. Later he opposed both Hart and the peasant-writers' group Pluh for promoting mass participation in literary work instead of striving for artistic quality. He initiated and inspired with his ideas the group Vaplite—the Free Academy of Proletarian Literature. Formed in November 1925, it numbered among its members the most talented writers, most of them former Pluh or Hart members. During Vaplite's brief existence (1925–8), Khvylovy tried his hand at large prose works. Around 1925 he began working on the novel ‘Iraïda,’ of which only one excerpt was published under the title ‘Zav'iazka’ (The Beginning). It reveals a change in Khvylovy's style: instead of being lyrical-ornamental and fragmentary, his narrative becomes balanced and more realistic. This change is also discernible in the novel Val’dshnepy (Woodcocks), of which only the first part was published (in the periodical Vaplite, no. 5, 1927); the second part, although it had been printed, was confiscated at the press by the authorities and destroyed. Despite diverse assessments of the purely literary aspects of the novel, Khvylovy's followers saw Val’dshnepy as the culmination of his literary work, while others, like Yevhen Malaniuk, considered it an ‘obvious failure.’

Khvylovy was a superb pamphleteer and polemicist. His polemical pamphlets provoked the well-known Ukrainian literary discussion of 1925–8. In the first series of pamphlets, published in the supplement Kul’tura i pobut to Visti VUTsK in April–June 1925 and later that year separately as Kamo hriadeshy? (Whither Goest Thou?), he raised the decisive question ‘Europe or "enlightenment"?’ using the term ‘enlightenment’ to refer to Ukraine's provinciality and backwardness under Russian oppression. And his reply was, ‘For art it can only be Europe.’

In the second series, ‘Dumky proty techiï’ (Thoughts against the Current), which appeared in Kul’tura i pobut in November–December 1925 and separately in 1926, Khvylovy further developed his argument against the ‘cult of epigonism.’ By adopting a psycho-intellectual orientation on Europe, he argued, Ukrainians can enter onto their own path of development. To this they have a perfect right, ‘Insofar as the Ukrainian nation sought for several centuries its independence, we accept this as evidence of its unconquered desire to manifest and fully develop its national (not nationalist) being.’ Again he underlined the necessity of overcoming its cultural backwardness and the psychological dependence on Moscow, in the belief ‘that a nation can manifest itself culturally only if it finds its own, unique path of development.’

The third series of pamphlets, ‘Apolohety pysaryzmu’ (The Apologists of Scribbling), was published in Kul’tura i pobut in February–March 1926, but not separately. The idea of a completely independent development for Ukrainian literature, oriented ‘at least not on Russian [literature],’ was developed further, and the idea of Ukraine's right to sovereignty was formulated as follows: ‘Is Russia an independent state? Yes, it's independent! Well then, we too are independent.’ His last, and probably most radical, polemical work, ‘Ukraïna chy Malorosiia?’ (Ukraine or Little Russia?), was suppressed by the authorities; only a few quotations from it that appeared in the official critiques—Andrii Khvylia's Vid ukhylu v prirvu... (From Deviation to the Precipice...) and Yevhen Hirchak's Na dva fronta v bor’be s natsionalizmom (On Two Fronts in the Struggle with Nationalism)—are known.

Khvylovy's prose, particularly Val’dshnepy, which Khvylia described as antiparty, counterrevolutionary, and even fascist, and his polemical pamphlets make him the central figure in the above-mentioned literary discussion, which by its very nature turned into a political discussion of the direction Ukraine should take in its development. The national-communist opposition in the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Ukraine, led by Oleksander Shumsky, the Neoclassicists (particularly Mykola Zerov), and the entire nationally conscious, progressive Ukrainian intelligensia more or less openly sided with Khvylovy. On the opposing side were not only Khvylovy's literary opponents, such as Serhii Pylypenko, Samiilo Shchupak, and Volodymyr Koriak, but also the party leaders Andrii Khvylia, Lazar Kaganovich, Vlas Chubar, Hryhorii Petrovsky, and other members of the Politburo of the CP(B)U. Moscow's chauvinistic proponents of a great (unitary ‘Russian’) state—V. Vaganian, Yu. Larin, and Joseph Stalin himself—threw their support behind Khvylovy's opponents. In a letter to Kaganovich, Stalin warned the CC CP(B)U against adopting Khvylovy's Western orientation and condemned it as ‘bourgeois nationalism.’

Thenceforth Khvylovy was subjected to unrelenting persecution and was forced to move gradually from an offensive to a defensive tactic. To save Vaplite from forced dissolution, in December 1926 he was compelled to admit his ‘errors,’ and in January 1927 he, Mykhailo Yalovy, and Oles Dosvitnii agreed to expulsion from Vaplite. From December 1927 to March 1928 Khvylovy lived in Berlin and Vienna, and according to some accounts in Paris. In January 1928, before returning to Ukraine, he sent an open letter from Vienna to the newspaper Komunist renouncing his slogan ‘Away from Moscow’ and recanting his views.

Yet he did not truly surrender: on his initiative an unaffiliated journal, Literaturnyi iarmarok, was established in 1928, and it continued Vaplite's orientation. In it Khvylovy's satirical stories ‘Ivan Ivanovych’ and ‘Revizor’ (The Inspector-general) appeared. In 1930 Literaturnyi iarmarok ceased publication, and Khvylovy inspired one last organization, the Union of Workshops of the Proletarian Literary Front, or Prolitfront, which published a journal Prolitfront. None of his stories, but only his polemical articles refuting the hostile criticism of Nova Generatsiia and the All-Ukrainian Association of Proletarian Writers (VUSPP), appeared in the journal. When Prolitfront was disbanded in 1931 and many of its members joined VUSPP, Khvylovy no longer had a journal in which he could express his ideas. His attempts at writing on party-approved themes, as in the stories ‘Maibutni shakhtari’ (The Future Miners), ‘Ostannii den’‘ (The Last Day), and ‘Shchaslyvyi sekretar’ (The Happy Secretary), were dismal failures. Thus, by the early 1930s Khvylovy's every opportunity to live, write, and fight for his ideas was blocked. Since he had no other way to protest against Pavel Postyshev's terror and famine that swept Ukraine in 1933, he committed suicide. This act became symbolic of his concern for the fate of his nation.

Immediately after his death, Khvylovy's works and even his name were banned from the public domain. Even after the post-Stalin thaw, when many other writers were ‘rehabilitated’ and selected works of some were published, the ban on his works and ideas has been enforced.

Khvylovy expressed in his works his own concept of Ukraine's renaissance spawned by the Revolution of 1917. Ukraine could overcome its slavishness and provinciality and ‘catch up to other nations,’ he believed, only by unreservedly breaking ‘away from Moscow’ and orienting itself psychologically and culturally on the progressive aspects of ‘Europe.’ As an alternative to both ‘Moscow’ and ‘Europe’ Khvylovy proposed the romantic idea of an ‘Asiatic renaissance’—an awakening of Asia and other colonial, underdeveloped parts of the world. This renaissance was to begin in Ukraine, situated as it was between the West and the East, and spread to all parts of the world. Like Mykola Zerov, he considered Ukraine's orientation towards ‘psychological Europe’ a necessary precondition for Ukraine to fulfill its messianic role in this renaissance. As a romantic writer and thinker, Khvylovy believed that a ‘vitalized romanticism’ (romantyka vitaizmu) would be the literary style of the first period of the Asiatic renaissance.

The nucleus of the group of the Ukrainian Neoclassicists of the 1920s consisted of Mykola Zerov, Maksym Rylsky, Pavlo Fylypovych, Mykhailo Drai-Khmara, and Oswald Burghardt (Yurii Klen). They never established a formal organization or program, but they shared cultural and esthetic interests. Mykhailo Mohyliansky, Viktor Petrov, and others are also included in this loose grouping. The group's name is derived from their use of themes and images of antiquity and was given to them by their opponents in the Literary Discussion of 1925-8. The Neoclassicists were self-consciously concerned with the production of high art and disdained 'mass art,' didactic writing, and propagandistic work. Their opponents, in contrast, organized themselves around writers who were supported by the Communist party, and viewed literature in a primarily utilitarian fashion, that is, as a means of strengthening Soviet rule in Ukraine. In the 1930s Mykola Zerov, Pavlo Fylypovych, and Mykhailo Drai-Khmara were sent to Soviet concentration camps and perished there. Maksym Rylsky was forced to publish socialist-realist works, and Burghardt emigrated to the West, where he wrote under the pseudonym Yurii Klen. The tradition of the Neoclassicists was continued among emigre poets, most notably by M. Zerov's brother, Mykhailo Orest...

Neoclassicists (neokliasyky). A literary movement of the 1920s. The nucleus of the group consisted of Mykola Zerov, Maksym Rylsky, Pavlo Fylypovych, Mykhailo Drai-Khmara, and O. Burghardt (Yurii Klen)—the piatirne grono (cluster of five), as Drai-Khmara called them in his sonnet ‘Lebedi’ (The Swans). They never established a formal organization or program, but they shared cultural and esthetic interests. Mykhailo Mohyliansky, Viktor Petrov, and others are also included in this loose grouping. The group's name is derived from their use of themes and images of antiquity and was given to them by their opponents in the Literary Discussion of 1925–8. The Neoclassicists were self-consciously concerned with the production of high art and disdained ‘mass art,’ didactic writing, and propagandistic work. Their opponents, in contrast, organized themselves around writers who were supported by the Communist party, and viewed literature in a primarily utilitarian fashion, that is, as a means of strengthening Soviet rule in Ukraine.

The works of the Neoclassicists were anti-Romantic and antifolkloric. They sought universal themes and considered Ukrainian culture to be an organic part of Western European culture. The closest to what could be considered their program is clearly set out in Mykola Zerov's Do dzherel (To the Sources, 1926). ‘We should,’ he wrote, ‘assimilate the highest culture of our times, not only in its latest manifestations, but also in its original forms.’ From that commitment stemmed the demands the Neoclassicists made of a writer: (1) a comprehensive knowledge of the best works of Ukrainian literature; (2) a comprehensive knowledge of the achievements of world literature; and (3) poetic craftsmanship of the highest level. High art, in their view, could be conveyed only through clarity of thought and mastery of form. Their poetry, therefore, is characterized by balance, plasticity of image, and logical ordering of subject and composition. The main purpose of literature, as they perceived it, was esthetic; they rejected the tendentiousness, agitation, and moralizing of their contemporaries. In order to gain a knowledge of world literature most of them translated into Ukrainian selected works, ranging from those of antiquity to those of the Parnassians in France. Individual Neoclassicists gravitated toward particular styles: Maksym Rylsky and Pavlo Fylypovych to symbolism, Yurii Klen (Burghardt) to neoromanticism.

In the 1930s Mykola Zerov, Pavlo