The Cinema of Sergei Parajanov

2. Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors: Ukrainian Revival

56 2 Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors Ukrainian Revival Judging solely by the films Parajanov had made so far, no one could have predicted what would happen when he was given his next assignment. At the urging of Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky’s daughter, the Dovzhenko Film Studio agreed to produce an adaptation of the Ukrainian writer’s masterpiece Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors to commemorate the centenary of his birth. Renata Korol, a member of the studio’s Script-Editorial Board, gave the project to Ivan Chendei, who accepted it and agreed to postpone adapting his own novel, The Bridge.1 As a noted writer from the Transcarpathian region of Western Ukraine, Chendei was uniquely suited to adapt Kotsiubynsky’s novella, which was set among the Hutsuls, a people living in that region.2 Initially Korol offered the script to Ivan Kavaleridze, one of the studio’s oldest and most well-established directors, but he declined due to a prior commitment. She then offered the project to Parajanov, with whom she had worked as the script editor on previous films, so she was well aware of his long-standing interest in folk culture.3 It was the creative opportunity that Parajanov had long needed: an adaptation of a genuinely great literary work that resonated with his artistic sensibilities and challenged him to rise to its level. The resulting film brought Parajanov his first international success, largely set the stylistic and thematic agenda of the poetic school of Ukrainian cinema that followed in its wake, and thrust him into the fraught arena of Ukrainian cultural politics. Ukrainian Revival  57 Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky’s Novella Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky (1864–1913) was a complex figure whose work resonated on multiple levels.4 He appealed to the Soviets because of his political and social commitments; as someone educated during the late 1870s and early 1880s in a theological seminary—institutions that the literary scholar Bohdan Rubchak characterizes as “hornets’ nests of clandestine revolutionary political activity”— Kotsiubynsky participated in various student protests and secret organizations that resulted in periodic surveillance by the Tsarist police throughout his life.5 Afterward, he continued to express sympathy for the oppressed classes and hatred for the world of the Tsarist bureaucracy, though he was forced to support himself and his family as a clerk in that very bureaucracy. His subsequent membership in Prosvita (Enlightenment), an organization that supported activities such as developing Ukrainian-language libraries and schools, which were illegal at the time, no doubt helped cement his appeal during the 1960s among intellectuals concerned with promoting Ukrainian language and culture. This would bear significant consequences when Parajanov’s film was released. At the same time, as Rubchak points out, Kotsiubynsky was an intensely private individual whose writings often pit the solitary “dreamer” or “poet” against the collective. His writings are also noteworthy from a purely aesthetic standpoint, given Kotsiubynsky’s “painterly” attention to color in terms of character psychology and the “musical” effects of his language.6 Parajanov was attracted to the rich aesthetic dimensions of Kotsiubynsky’s prose in general and tried to engage it cinematically both in Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (Teni zabytykh predkov, Dovzhenko Film Studio 1964) and in a subsequent, unrealized adaptation of the short story “Intermezzo” (discussed in chapter 5). The 1911 novella Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors arose from Kotsiubynsky’s encounter with the Hutsuls during a trip to the Carpathians the previous year. The Hutsuls live mainly in the Ivano-Frankivsk region of Western Ukraine, with some populations also found in the neighboring countries of Slovakia, Romania, and Poland. Traditionally subsisting on forestry and animal husbandry , they have maintained a markedly pagan world view, at least up to the Soviet era. Their belief in sorcery, devils, and forest spirits such as wood nymphs has lain beneath a thin veneer of Christianity. Among Ukrainians it is widely thought that Hutsul traditions reflect older beliefs in Ukraine as a whole. The Hutsuls are also noted for their keen artistic sensibility as expressed through folk music, intricate woodcarvings, and beautifully embroidered traditional costumes. Accordingly, the novella contains a vivid ethnographic component, 58  Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors with its skillful weaving of Hutsul beliefs and customs into the fabric of the narrative . Kotsiubynsky draws extensively upon the Hutsul oral tradition through everyday vocabulary, legends, jokes, and kolomyikas (song settings of rhymed quatrains). Ivan Paliichuk, the main character of the novella, is a young boy who displays a...