In Beau Monde on Empire’s Edge , Mayhill C. Fowler tells the story of the rise and fall of a group of men who created culture both Soviet and Ukrainian. This collective biography showcases new ...aspects of the politics of cultural production in the Soviet Union by focusing on theater and on the multi-ethnic borderlands. Unlike their contemporaries in Moscow or Leningrad, these artists from the regions have been all but forgotten despite the quality of their art. Beau Monde restores the periphery to the center of Soviet culture. Sources in Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, and Yiddish highlight the important multi-ethnic context and the challenges inherent in constructing Ukrainian culture in a place of Ukrainians, Russians, Poles, and Jews. Beau Monde on Empire’s Edge traces the growing overlap between the arts and the state in the early Soviet years, and explains the intertwining of politics and culture in the region today.
Making Lviv Soviet Fowler, Mayhill C.
Nationalities Papers,
11/2020, Letnik:
48, Številka:
6
Journal Article, Book Review
Recenzirano
The Paradox of Ukrainian Lviv: A Borderland City between Stalinists, Nazis, and Nationalists, by Tarik Cyril Amar, Ithaca, New York, Cornell University Press, 2015, $35.00 (hardcover), ISBN ...9780801453915, $26.95 (paperback), ISBN 9781501735806, $12.99 (ebook), ISBN 9781501700835
This article argues that a focus on Ukraine challenges the general understanding of culture in the revolutionary period, which either focuses on artists working in Moscow making Soviet art, or on ...non-Russian (Ukrainian, Jewish or Polish) artists in the regions making “national” art. Neither paradigm captures the radical shift in infrastructure during the imperial collapse and civil war. Placing the regions at the center of analysis highlights how Kyiv was an important cultural center during the period for later artistic developments in Europe and in the USSR. It shows that revolutionary culture is fundamentally wartime culture. Finally, the article argues that peripheral visions are central to a full geography of culture in order to trace how cultural infrastructures collapse and are re-constituted.
In the Soviet Union theatre was an arena for cultural transformation. This article focuses on theatre director Les Kurbas’ 1929 production of playwright Mykola Kulish’s Myna Mazailo, a dark comedy ...about Ukrainianization, to show the construction of “Soviet Ukrainian” culture. While the Ukrainian and the Soviet are often considered in opposition, this article takes the culture of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic seriously as a category. Well before Stalin’s infamous adage “national in form and socialist in content,” artists like Kulish and Kurbas were engaged in making art that was not “Ukrainian” in a generic Soviet mold, or “Soviet” art in a generic “Ukrainian” mold, but rather art of an entirely new category: Soviet Ukrainian. Far from a mere mouthpiece for state propaganda, early Soviet theatre offered a space for creating new values, social hierarchies, and worldviews. More broadly, this article argues that Soviet nationality policy was not only imposed from above, but also worked out on the stages of the republic by artists, officials, and audiences alike. Tracing productions of Myna Mazailo into the post-Soviet period, moreover, reveals a lingering ambiguity over the content of culture in contemporary Ukraine. The state may no longer sponsor cultural construction, but theater remains a space of cultural contestation.
The years 2017–2022 mark the centennial of war, revolution, and state-making and unmaking across Eurasia. Yet the years 1917–1922 unfolded differently across the collapsing empires. Kyiv’s Central ...Rada, the basmachi rebellions in Central Asia, the Menshevik experiment in Georgia, and the sudden existence of Poland (never mind leftist uprisings in Hungary and in Germany) all emerged from the vacuum of power in Petrograd that inspired and catalyzed social, political, and cultural movements. In Ukraine, in particular, the story of revolution is one of war and multiple and competing political, social, and national projects. This forum aims to address this period in Ukraine, but the question of names poses an initial challenge. The region under investigation is Ukraine— or rather, the southwest provinces of the Russian Empire that eventually became Soviet Ukraine. One might also focus on the eastern provinces of Austrian Galicia, however, which experienced the Polish-Ukrainian war and became part of independent Poland. The competing projects of the region, after all, crossed imperial boundaries. The specification of chronology is equally as challenging. All four forum contributions interrogate the term “Russian Revolution,” attempting to pay attention to the entire “revolutionary” period: World War I, the collapse of the tsarist empire, and the ensuing “civil war,” which encompasses the Polish-Bolshevik war, the Polish-Ukrainian war, violence between the armies of nationalists, Bolsheviks, Symon Petliura, Anton Denikin, peasants and anarchists, and the emergence of new states, in particular independent Poland and Soviet Ukraine.
REVIEW OF: Olga Bertelsen, compiler, editor, and with an introduction and notes. Les' Kurbas i teatr “Berezil'”: Arkhivni dokumenty (1927-1988) Les' Kurbas and the Berezil' Theatre: Archival ...Documents (1927-1988). 2016. Arkhiv Rozstrilianoho vidrodzhennia Archive of the Executed Renaissance, vol. 2, Vydavnytstvo “Smoloskyp,” 2010-16. 2 vols. 504 pp. Illustrations. Appendices. Index of Names.
Questions of collaboration and contestation between Yiddish-language and Ukrainian-language theatrical artists often become confused with who was Jewish, who was Ukrainian, and who used which themes ...in their work. Yet although young artists in 1920s Soviet Ukraine revolutionized theatre in the Yiddish, Ukrainian, and Russian languages, they often did so in the same spaces, with the same plays, and even the same actors and technical personnel. Moreover, neither the form nor the content of ethnic cultures was fixed. A backstage perspective suggests both the hybridity of theatre in the region and the power of the region itself as an analytic category.
PDF
