Ukrainian Theatre of National Identity - Intro

The following is the introduction to my Master's Thesis, The Construction of National Identity through Theatre in Ukraine in the 1920s and 2020s. In the coming days, I will be posting the full thesis, chapter by chapter. I struggled deciding whether or not to post this here, but I decided ultimately that if it were submitted to academic journals, it would be behind a paywall. This information is important to me, and I would like it to be shared as freely as possible. If you would like the full PDF, click here.

The Construction of National Identity through Theatre in Ukraine in the 1920s and 2020s

Parallels, Practices, and Homages

On February 24, 2022, the Russian Federation launched an invasion into Ukraine, a former Soviet member-state which had, in recent years, turned further and further West in its political alignments. Missiles struck every populous Ukrainian city while over nine hundred thousand Russian soldiers blitzkrieged into Ukrainian territory, taking large swaths of land from Kherson to Kharkiv. In days, the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv had nearly been encircled. However, by the end of March, due to logistical issues plaguing the Russian military, the Russians fell back, leaving a trail of destruction in their wake. Falling back to more easily defensible positions, the Russians brought the war to a stalemate, broken occasionally by massive counter-offensives that carve out vast swaths of occupied Russian territory and bring them back under control of Ukraine. The Russo-Ukrainian War is the first major land war on mainland Europe since World War II. The invasion itself is the largest land-based invasion since Adolph Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa, a military quagmire that pitted 3.6 million Nazi troops against the USSR.

Egret Acting Editions’ A Dictionary of Emotions in a Time of War: 20 Short Works by Ukrainian Playwrights is the most notable English-language anthology of Ukrainian drama to come out of Ukraine in recent years. It is composed of 20 short pieces of drama by various old and new Ukrainian playwrights. The volume is generically diverse as well, spanning monodrama, slam poetry, farce, and verbatim, among others. Overall, it offers an excellent survey into the dramatic world of early-wartime Ukraine, especially Kyiv. Most notable, however, is the reason for the volume’s existence. On March 12, 2022, the Theater of Playwrights, a new theater to be situated in the Podil district of Kyiv, was set to open under the leadership of Artistic Director Maksym Kurochkin. When the invasion began, Freedman reached out to Kurochkin, wanting to set up a series of readings of Ukrainian plays, so as to raise money for Ukrainian humanitarian projects; Kurochkin agreed, but refused to send any scripts written for the Grand Opening of the Theater of Playwrights. Said Kurochkin elsewhere, “I think it would be wrong to give out those short plays. They already belong to another, prewar era. . . . I think it would be logical for the theaters of the world to commission from Ukrainian playwrights hastily-written plays about the day-to-day situation. . . . [T]his way we will retain control of the discourse. That is important.”

Kurochkin’s words bring up important problems with Ukrainian drama of today. Primarily, Ukrainian drama of the current era is inundated with war. It guides subject matter, manner of performance, and the theatrical culture surrounding it as a whole. On the other hand, control of the discourse has never been a luxury that Ukrainian theatre has had. A look into Ukrainian literary history will reveal centuries of subjugation under the Russian Empire, the USSR, and the echoes of Russian colonization. Ukrainian drama stands at an inflection point, one in which Kurochkin’s assertion of a new era rings partially true. However, this era of experimentation, westernization, generic diversity, and above all an assertion of Ukrainian national identity is inextricably linked to the Ukraine of the 1920s, when artistic freedom and experimentation took on a life in Ukraine that it never had experienced before. Rather than setting modern Ukraine up as a wholly new era, I posit that the theatrical practice we see now is a continuation of the 1920s Ukrainian Modernist movement, which was cut unduly short due to Stalinist repressions and forced famines. Similar repressions attempted by Putin in the present day seek to rewrite Ukrainian history, destroy the Ukrainian language, and decimate all hope of a westernized Ukraine. These horrific acts have inspired in Ukrainians a desire to rediscover a cultural heritage in Ukraine that brings the Ukrainian Modernist ideals of the 1920s in full conversation with the present day, galvanizing the construction of the cultural Ukrainian nation.

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