AVANT-GARDE THEATER IN THE CONTEXT OF UKRAINIAN-GERMAN CREATIVE RELATIONSHIP
Introduction
The early 20th century heralded a transformative era for the national theater in Ukraine. Political events in the late 1910s and 1920s such as World War I, the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the Ukrainian Revolution catalyzed significant changes and modernization within the theater. These events ignited public and political thought, stimulating the creative intelligentsia and contributing to a national revival. In the thematic and aesthetic content of the drama of the period, two complementary components emerged. On the one hand, both amateur and professional theaters sought to bring the works of renowned Ukrainian playwrights to a broader audience. On the other, writers became increasingly inspired by Western avant-garde movements such as surrealism, expressionism, and futurism.
Avant-garde Experiments of the Interwar Period
A landmark in this period was “Berezil Theatre” in Kharkiv, active from 1922 to 1933 and led by director Les Kurbas. Having studied at the University of Vienna, Kurbas was well-versed in the innovative approaches of European theater artists, particularly the experiments of Austrian director Max Reinhardt. In his article Nova Nimetska Drama [New German Drama] (1919), Kurbas expressed admiration for German youth, describing them as “strong with muscles, high culture, and high intelligence,” (Kurbas, 2001:34). He valued the expressionist’s “drama of the cry” for its innovative ideological and aesthetic potential, which he believed could lead to fundamentally new possibilities in theater productions. Kurbas emphasized the necessity of creating a theater that could actively engage and influence its audience. In a letter to the troupe of the Young Theatre, Kurbas shared his vision: “I see the theater of the future as one of the stage images, where the director acts as a playwright, providing the script for the performance” (Kurbas, 2001:144). This statement reflects his belief in the director’s autonomy and independence from the written text. The production of the German expressionist Georg Kaiser’s play “Gas”, staged in April 1923, was an undeniable success. According to Les Kurbas, its main goal was “to show the moment in its purest form without any stylization”(Kurbas, 2001:576). Following this idea, the director used complex techniques. For example, to visualize the process of dehumanization and transformation of the individual into an automatic performer of social functions, Kurbas created a complex rhythmic plastic composition of actors, and the final gas explosion was transmitted through a pyramid-like composition of human bodies. The director described his own approach to stage performance as “expressive realism, based on an active worldview and world perception” (Kurbas, 2001:45).
Les Kurbas’s work became one of the important factors in the process of Ukrainisation in the 1920s. A special role in this context is played by the work of Mykola Kulish, who brought fresh ideas to the national drama. The meeting with Les Kurbas in 1925 in the intellectual and artistic environment of Kharkiv was crucial for the aesthetic formation of Kulish as a playwright. According to researchers, it was this meeting that contributed to Kulish’s “reorientation towards the new European drama” (Khorob, 2002:14). It is worth mentioning that M. Kulish’s creative method was based on an organic combination of the old and the new in drama, which made it possible to produce fresh models of artistic reality. In the writer’s work, we can find an echo of psychologism and intellectualism of Lesia Ukrainka’s dramas, V. Vynnychenko’s Europeanism, and the diverse imagery of O. Oles’s plays (Marchuk, 2022:353). Thus, the tragedy of Malakhii is a modification in under the new social conditions and a logical continuation of the prophetic quest of Lesya Ukrainka’s heroes (“Judas on the Field of Blood”), and Marina from “The Pathetic Sonata” is real, not mythological. It is thanks to this approach that the writer achieved a high skill in stage art that can be compared with the best examples of world drama.
Although the plot line of M. Kulish’s dramas is usually a social conflict, with the development of the action it develops into an eternal philosophical confrontation between the individual self and the outside world. The main goal of the writer is not to record reality, but the process of experiencing it. Therefore, depicting different states of a person in diverse settings, he primarily focuses on his mental fluctuations and intellectual searches, thus associatively paving the way from the mental state of the hero to social phenomena and facts. That is, through the conflict of the “little man,” the author reveals “the crisis of the human personality in general” (Marchuk 2022:353), which resonated with the leading trends in twentieth-century world literature. The protagonist’s internal conflict is the loss of not only personal but also national self-identity under the pressure of the emerging social and totalitarian system. His protest goes beyond the internal framework, “growing into the cry of the soul against human depersonalization, violence against the uniqueness of man” (Marchuk, 2022:354).
The state of inner turmoil in which the characters find themselves reflects the complex range of feelings and experiences of the author himself. Significantly, that many of the author’s sharply critical thoughts are voiced primarily by negative characters. This allowed him to circumvent censorship restrictions and convey his ideas to the reader. In this context, the elements of the mask and the technique of alienation are particularly significant.
The approach to staging the performances, in which Les Kurbas took an active part, introducing numerous original artistic solutions, was also innovative. A landmark example in this context is the play “People’s Malakhii”, which, thanks to the director’s stage innovations, acquired an expressive expressionist character. It was Kurbas who came up with the idea of dressing the madman Malachi in a hospital gown, which, combined with the bulky furniture of the apartment, symbolised the dominance of routine, impersonal everyday life over human individuality. On the director’s initiative, a reform machine, constructed from various tools, such as a plough, a ploughshare, and tractor wheels, also appears on stage. It is into this machine that Malachi ‘throws” the people he wants to reform. When the machine is started, smoke comes out of it, and then angels with pink wings and hearts on their backs appear, flying off “into the blue distance”. In the play, everyday authenticity, romantic sublimity and elements of farce coexist in a metaphysical combination, creating a situation of grotesqueness that encourages the reader to actively comprehend events and artistic images.
Despite the considerable resonance caused by the play “People’s Malakhii” critical reviews of the play were mostly negative. Kurbas defended the production, accusing the audience of superficiality. He noted with pain that “the audience has forgotten how to treat the performance actively and is gradually beginning to forget that one should take their brains to the theatre” (Kurbas, 2001:721). At the same time, Kurbas clearly outlined his vision of the role of theatre: to bring anxiety, to raise acute, problematic issues, and not to mechanically reproduce self-evident truths. This understanding of art was in stark contrast to the official conception of Soviet culture in the late 1920s, which was focused on creating new, “worker-peasant” literature that was as down-to-earth, simple, and accessible to the mass audience as possible. The production of the play “People’s Malakhii” marked the beginning of the persecution of the Berezil theatre, and especially of L. Kurbas and M. Kulish. Later, the introduction of the method of so-called socialist realism led to a significant deterioration in relations between Ukrainian artists and Soviet authorities. Eventually, Mykola Kulish, Les Kurbas, and many other representatives of Ukrainian intelligentsia were shot in the Sandarmokh tract in 1937.
Conclusion
The artistic and conceptual level of the Berezil theatre, headed by Les Kurbas in creative collaboration with Mykola Kulish, allows us to consider it as a phenomenon that not only determined the vector of development of the Ukrainian stage in the interwar period but also acquired a typological correspondence with the key trends of modernist drama in other national environments. Ukrainian artists, under growing political pressure, demonstrated an even more radical avant-garde potential, both in terms of aesthetics and in their desire to create a synthetic theatrical language. The Berezil theatre not only experimented with the stage form, but also formed an alternative cultural paradigm that openly contradicted the ideological standards of the Soviet system.
Today, in the context of rethinking the national canon and decolonising cultural memory, it is possible to rethink the scope of the artistic search of the Ukrainian theatre of the 1920s, with its corresponding establishment in the global literary discourse.
References
- Kulish, M. (1990). People’s Malakhii https://libruk.com.ua/reader/kulish-mykola/narodnyi-malakhii/
- Kurbas, Les. (2001). Filosofiia teatru [Philosophy of theatre]. Edited by Mykola Labinsky. Kyiv: Solomiya Pavlychko Publishing House “BASICS,” 2001.
- Khorob, S. (2002). Ukrainska moderna drama kintsia XIX—pochatku XX stolittia (Neo-romantyzm, symvolizm, ekspresionizm): monohrafiia [Ukrainian modern drama of the end of the XIX - beginning of the XX century (Neo-romanticism, symbolism, expressionism): monograph]. Ivano-Frankivsk: Plai.
- Marchuk, T., Devdiuk, I. (2022) Ukrainian modernist drama in the European context. Forum for World Literature Studies, Vol 14, No.2, 343-356. https://www.fwls.org/Download/Archives/1007.html