72. Socialist realism in the ussr: main representatives

Socialist realism was enforced in literature and the other arts by means of repressions. In the 1930s over 300 writers were executed or otherwise prevented from publishing. Some painters, such as Anatol Petrytsky, survived the terror, but their works were destroyed (an extensive series of Petrytsky's portraits). Many others, including Mykhailo Boichuk, Sofiia Nalepinska, Vasyl Sedliar, and Ivan Padalka, were shot. Theater was also decimated in the name of the new form. The Berezil theater was liquidated, and its founder and director, Les Kurbas, died in a prison camp, as did its principal playwright, Mykola Kulish. Its major actors, such as Yosyp Hirniak, were imprisoned. Writers of the brief literary renaissance of the 1950s and 1960s were persecuted because of their deviations from the officially sanctioned method. Departures from the norm were labeled ‘formalism,’ ‘abstractionism,’ or ‘modernism’ and proscribed. In its last stage socialist realism was praised for its Party orientation and its ‘populism’ (narodnist). Those terms continued to be used as synonyms for devoted service to the interests of the Party. Socialist realism also demanded isolation from the literature and art of the West, with particular emphasis on the ‘revisionism’ of Western Communist critics (eg, R. Garaudy, Réalisme sans rivages).

Theoreticians of socialist realism based their writings on those of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Vladimir Lenin, various resolutions of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and the speeches of various Party leaders. A large body of writings created in several decades up until the 1990s consisted entirely of dogmatic pronouncements and tendentious interpretations of artificially chosen quotes from officially accepted works.

After the announcement of Perestroika and Glasnost in 1985, the dogmatic constraits of socialist realism have been widened. Indeed, reference to socialist realism has largely been avoided, especially since the breakup of the Soviet Union. With time, the use of this term practically disappeared in the contemporary art and literature of independent Ukraine.

73. Les Kurbas and Berezil

Modernism was also manifest in the productions of the Molodyi Teatr theater, the Berezil theater led by Les Kurbas, the Mykhailychenko Theater led by Marko Tereshchenko, the Zahrava experimental theater led by Volodymyr Blavatsky, and the émigré Theater-Studio of Y. Hirniak and O. Dobrovolska. It also had its expression in the 1920s in the films produced by the All-Ukrainian Photo-Cinema Administration (VUFKU) studios in Soviet Ukraine (Oleksander Dovzhenko, Dziga Vertov), in the experimental films of Yevhen Slabchenko (Eugene Deslaw) in France, and in music.

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.