Ukrainian Drama and Theater in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (review)

Today, Ukraine exists as an autonomous state, but its history is one of invasion and occupation by its neighbors and internal discord among its multiple ethnic subnationalities. Any atlas will show Ukraine's enormity, and old atlases will demonstrate the small nations Ukraine absorbed prior to Russian usurpation during the rise of Muscovy. Ukraine is distinguished from Russia to the north by its variety of regional peoples, including Armenians, Crimean Tatars, Cossacks, Jews, Greeks, Moldavians, Roma, and Ruthenes—some autochthonous, others émigré. And, as traced in Paulina Lewin's excellent historical analysis of Ukrainian theatre in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the growth of Ukrainian Orthodoxy from 1087 is marked by the need of Ukraine's indigenous groups to assert not only their local identities, but also their investment in the larger nation, because Ukrainians often succumbed to Russian dominance, Turkish invasion, and Polish territorial ambitions. Ukraine's cultural and political complexity is mirrored in its national drama.

Lewin's excellent work on the liturgical and secular theatre of Ukraine's baroque period is an advanced primer in Slavonic theology with a theatrical derivation. And that is the best way to approach the topic, for Ukrainian theatre was inextricably linked to various subdenominations within the Ukrainian Orthodox Church schools during the centuries she covers. Western historians argue that Ukrainian drama remained medieval well after the Renaissance in Europe. Lewin, however, uses textual analysis and reconstruction of performances based on archival research, to demonstrate its sophistication.

Ukrainian liturgical dramas differ sharply from both Western liturgical drama and Reformation morality plays. For example, one of the oldest extant dramas, The Kingdom of Human Nature Destroyed by Temptation, through Whose Efforts Death Dominated Us Who Had Known No Sin, Re-established and Crowned Us Anew Thanks to the Grace of Christ, the King of Glory (1698), a play whose language was designed to intrigue audiences through "ecstasy evoked by sound and rhythm, enhanced by the playwright's erudition," is about Lucifer's fall from heaven (78). Most notable in these plays is the convention of depicting biblical characters only as allegorical figures. Thus Lucifer is "Lucifer's Malice," and Eve is "Human Nature." The most compelling allegorical character is "Pre-Eternal Wisdom," which stands for God (74), and suggests an "everlasting present" (80)—a Ukrainian theological wisdom distinctly different from Western Christianity's neo-Platonism. Lewin argues that, although it is true that Ukrainian liturgical drama borrowed allegorical characters from Polish Jesuit schools during the mid-seventeenth century, religiously they were virtual opposites, because Ukrainian Orthodoxy applied its own iconic/allegorical structure derived primarily from the Khjiv Mohyla Academy, whose faith was grounded in Greek-Byzantine theology and old Rus heritage.

Lewin shows how multiple iconic formulae protected Ukraine's religious and cultural heritage without attracting undue hostility. Inherently a geopolitical hotspot, Ukraine carved out its own identity through the theatricalization of worship and belief based on local mysticism and aesthetics. For example, it was believed by Ukrainian Orthodox theologians that human language was insufficient for the transmission of divine values, so nearly the whole of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century theology was transmitted via church school dramas, because the allegorical iconography demonstrated an Orthodox code of faith and morality. Lewin captures this allegorical complexity through vivid descriptions of how the dramas might have been performed; in fact, this is the most impressive and risky aspect of her scholarship. But her archival research and sensitive reading of the theatricality embedded in the scriptures upon which the plays are based are ultimately convincing. Thus Lewin unfolds the layered meanings of this dramaturgy of allegory to render a lesson of great value not only to Ukrainian studies scholars, but also theatre semioticians.

In her analysis of the move from liturgical to secular drama in the eighteenth century, Lewin sets up scholarly signposts leading to explanations of the...