Modernism in Kyiv: Jubilant Experimentation (review)

From the numerous illustrations that enliven every article in this collection (including over twenty in color) and the evocative, well-translated epigraphs from various sources that set the tone for each essay, to an appendix containing a chronological list of all of Les Kurbas's theatrical productions and a comprehensive, carefully cross-referenced index of names and titles (but, curiously, not places), this volume constitutes a genuine labor of love on the part of its two editors, a love that most of their fifteen contributors seem to share. But love, as Irena Makaryk's own beloved Shakespeare would have it, can be blind insofar as it tends to obscure the critical faculties. For what else could have compelled its editors to repackage a volume that is devoted primarily to the life and works of the great Ukrainian avant-garde theater director Les Kurbas (1887–1937) into the ostensibly grander Modernism in Kyiv Kiev Київ Киев קיצוו? Instead of giving us a collection focused on the legacy of one of the more innovative and multidimensional theater artists of his day—a man whose work, as well as milieu, surely merits undivided attention—the editors took the opportunity to throw Kyiv into the mix, hoping thus to add this Ukrainian city "to the list of major centres of modernist dialogue" (4). The upshot is a volume with a split personality that, consequently, never fully satisfies either of its "clear goals": Kyiv gets lost amid the attention the editors lavish on their true love (Makaryk's own "Dissecting Time/Space: The Scottish Play and the New Technology of Film," for example, is concerned with Kurbas's work at his film studio in Odessa); while the repackaging constrains the contributors to largely ignore aspects of Kurbas's career before and especially after his residence in Kyiv (1917–1926); indeed, either Kyiv or Kurbas end up being little more than afterthoughts in several of the articles, if they appear at all (Oleh S. Ilnytzkyj's otherwise illuminating piece on "abstraction and Ukrainian futurist literature" makes no mention of Kurbas, and the city figures only as a place of publication).

Besides the brief introduction by Makaryk, Modernism in Kyiv consists of twenty contributions (including three by Makaryk and two by her co-editor, Virlana Tkacz) of varying length, quality, and relevance. With the exception of four (on "stages of Kyiv in 1907" by Mayhill C. Fowler; on "late-imperial and early Soviet Kyiv" by Michael F. Hamm; on "the Yiddish Kultur-Lige" by Gennady Estraikh; and on "the choreographic avant-garde in Kyiv" by Maria Ratanova), the essays are by (or, in the case of "Vsevolod Meyerhold and Les Kurbas," co-written by) Ukrainian scholars either from Ukraine (hence the need for translation, which is largely unexceptionable) or from the Ukrainian diaspora. This fact is by no means meant to suggest some sort of disparity in the level of scholarship. As in all such undertakings, the articles run the gamut regardless of provenance—from the mechanistically comparative (Béatrice Picon-Vallin and Veronika Gopko-Pereverzeva's lame juxtaposition of Kurbas and Vsevolod Meyerhold) and the impressionistic (Dmytro Horbachov's wide-ranging, associative piece on Kyiv as "the epicenter of abstraction," which "has been edited to maintain coherence in the narrative" [170]) to the encyclopedic (Hamm's informative survey of society and culture in pre-and post-Revolutionary Kyiv; Myroslava M. Mudrak's excellent historical overview of the graphic arts in early twentieth-century Ukraine) and the academically exegetic (Taras Koznarsky's astute analysis of three novels about Kyiv, by Aleksandr Kuprin, Mikhail Bulgakov, and Valerian Pidmohylny). Rather, the preponderance of contributions by scholars of one Ukrainian ilk or another is a reflection of the provincial status of Ukrainian studies: despite the transformations of the past two decades, it is still a field informed by emotional investment and hence largely confined to and for its own, with all of the complexes that this entails.

That such an artistic phenomenon as...