Shakespeare in the Undiscovered Bourn: Les Kurbas, Ukrainian Modernism, and Early Soviet Cultural Politics (review)

Western scholars who study Russian theatre have wondered for some time whether or not to include the Ukranian Les (diminutive of Oleksander) Kurbas in the pantheon of great postrevolutionary theatricalist directors, who developed their aesthetic in opposition to Stanislavski. Specifically, should Kurbas—who did not even see a Stanislavski production until after 1923—be considered equal in stature to Meyerhold, who admired and may have been influenced by his work, or to Vakhtangov, who came closer to sharing his approach? Both Kurbas and Vakhtangov called for character objectification and a magical re-creation of a moving situational mimesis. Kurbas, who was always something of the eagerly humanistic pedagogue and whose staging sought to clothe philosophy in the player's motley (a theatrical form he dubbed "psychological harlequinade") (63), periodically appeared before the stage curtain dressed as Harlequin to explain to the audience what his theatre and the evening's specific production were attempting to achieve.

The difficulty in answering the question of Kurbas's artistic stature stemmed from both a dea(r)th of sources and the fact that few Western theatre scholars read Ukrainian. As to the first problem, Kurbas was arrested, executed on Stalin's order in 1937, and thrown into an unmarked, multinational mass grave, subsumed even in death by the uniformity and anonymity that Soviet power used to overwrite national and cultural difference. Even Kurbas's death date was falsified, advanced to 1942 to suggest at least the possibility that he was a casualty of war rather than of Stalin. Although the reputations of other Russian and non-Russian artists from the Soviet republics were rehabilitated following Stalin's death and the onset of the Thaw in 1956, Kurbas had to wait until the advent of glasnost in the late 1980s to have his legacy exhumed, and until 1991 to have his basic biographical details published.

Now, Irene R. Makaryk, a scholar who reads Ukranian, has brought home those goods that did not perish with their makers. Makaryk studied all but Kurbas's own documents and materials that were confiscated and apparently destroyed in the 1930s. Her book is a very good introduction to Kurbas and his work, and—as the book's title and subtitle suggest—also an attempt to contextualize her subject's career in both a time and a place that viewed art as being synonymous with politics, and life as an even more-than-usual limit situation. The wider drama Makaryk describes is a quest for national and transnational identity, which logically entails national liberation, even if a number of Kurbas's Ukrainian contemporaries rejected this equation in the name of maintaining a parochial and stunted popular and ethnographic national theatre. The book is most interesting when it burns with the ardor of Kurbas's radically avant-garde thinking, which manifested itself primarily in his Berezil Artistic Association productions of what Charles Marowitz in another context referred to as "quantum leap Shakespeare" (144). This artistic boldness was most prominently displayed in Kurbas's 1924 pre-Brechtian "cubist expressionist" (82) Macbeth (starring Kurbas, an accomplished actor, in the title role), a play which was popular with directors prior to the Revolution for its regicidal theme, and after 1917, for its dark portrait of the tyranny of power under charismatic authority.

Makaryk offers a careful description and analysis of Kurbas's rhythmically scored Macbeth, in which dancing witches, the Porter playing a (between-acts) Fool, light projectors, and modernist typography on giant green screens played central roles. The author likens this Macbeth to Max Reinhardt's A Midsummer Night's Dream for the manner in which it indelibly revealed to the public the director's stylistic signature. Kurbas's production demonstrated his central associative staging technique of transformative gesture (peretvorennia), which Makaryk characterizes as a "theatrical objective correlative, a concrete image presented to the audience to signal another reality" (56). Thus, the shaking...