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  • Shakespeare in the Undiscovered Bourn: Les Kurbas, Ukrainian Modernism, and Early Soviet Cultural Politics
  • Goran V. Stanivukovic (bio)
Shakespeare in the Undiscovered Bourn: Les Kurbas, Ukrainian Modernism, and Early Soviet Cultural Politics. By Irena R. Makaryk . Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. Illus. Pp. xx + 257. $58.00 cloth.

Post–Soviet Union studies of Shakespeare continue to produce exciting, and hitherto little-known, arguments about the cultural richness and political complexities of the playwright's reception in the former Soviet Union. Irena R. Makaryk's thoroughly documented book makes readers aware that the new scholarship on the cultural and political use of Shakespeare has been made possible only by the opening of the archives in Russia and Ukraine. Yet even now not all the collections are fully available. The rich body of archival sources on which Makaryk draws—"unpublished memoirs, journals, letters, newspapers, advertisements, manifestos, minutes of directorial labs, and meetings of collectives" (7)—coupled with her use of the miscellaneous critical material and examples from the modernist visual arts that place her project in the larger context of modernism on the European continent makes this book a contribution to Shakespearean cultural studies, the history of Shakespearean theater, and Ukrainian modernism before Ukraine gained independence. Yet Shakespeare in the Undiscovered Bourn reads almost as a cultural biography of the recently rehabilitated figure of Les Kurbas, a major Ukrainian director from the Soviet era and a creator of a "conceptual [End Page 112] theatre" (4). Makaryk delineates the circumstances surrounding several major productions of Macbeth, Othello,and A Midsummer Night's Dream, as well as some of Romeo and Juliet and King Lear by Kurbas and several of his contemporaries. Shakespeare is both the center of, and an occasion for, writing about Ukrainian modernism.

A book about the reception of a major writer from one culture in another, distant culture inevitably raises the question of whether the argumentative and analytical thrust of the book focuses on the writer or on the recipient culture. Studies about cross-cultural receptions of Shakespeare often deploy him as a conduit (or "lever," as Makaryk says [7]) for a critical and cultural narrative about the recipient culture; they tell us more about that culture than about Shakespeare. As a contribution to this sort of reception history, Makaryk's book is detailed and very informative, abounding in new evidence about the history of Ukrainian theater, its links with European theatrical culture, the mechanism of the political apparatus's ideological pressure and influence upon cultural production, and finally Les Kurbas's role in the formation of Ukrainian modernism in theater.

Makaryk locates her book within socioliterary approaches to Shakespearean theater, arguing that it represents "an extended foray" (4) into the larger field of postcolonial studies of Shakespeare reception in North America, South Africa, the Caribbean, and India. One cannot help being aware of the differences between the empire (Britain) that once ruled the regions and countries named above and the one (the Soviet Union) that encapsulated Ukraine. Given the cultural, historical, and ideological specificities of these two empires, one would expect a more rigorously nuanced treatment of the idea of postcoloniality. One would have also wished postcolonial theory to be more persuasively and more deeply integrated into the argument, which in fact does not use it coherently. Postcoloniality here functions as a lever to support arguments about the theater and about the politics and aesthetics that conditioned it. Makaryk's (quite plausible) use of the Cuban sociologist Fernando Ortiz and the Uruguayan literary critic Ángel Rama (as well as Mary Louise Pratt, a scholar of Spanish and Portuguese) is a laudable attempt at eschewing names more familiar (at least to those working in Anglo-American cultural theories) in postcolonial theory and at establishing a new theoretical paradigm for the version of postcolonialism that best suits her argument. The two Latin American theorists, however, make up only three pages (and Pratt figures marginally) in the opening section on the theoretical foundations of the book. Thus, the rest of the book reads as a straightforward cultural history, interpreting facts and events without the postcolonial theoretical tilt announced earlier.

The opening chapter, "Ex Nihilo: The Classics, Wars, and Revolution...

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