Les Kurbas. From revolution in the theater to execution for “bourgeois nationalism”

He threw himself under the train and shot himself because of love

Les Kurbas could have died several times, but fate led him to the Sandarmokh forest massif in Russia, where he, like many artists of the Executed Renaissance, would be killed by the Soviet authorities on November 3, 1937.

What happened before that? The Kurbas family of traveling actors had six children. Only he, the firstborn, survived to adulthood. His brothers and sisters were killed by tuberculosis. Mrs. Wanda, Les's mother, was even called Niobe in the troupe, a character from an ancient Greek myth constantly burying her children.

Because of this, the relationship between mother and son became extremely close and warm. Vanda Adolfivna “lived for her Lesko”: she lived with him, and traveled to all his theaters.

He could have died the second time when he threw himself under the train in Lviv as a young man. All because of unhappy love. It is still unknown who the “Mrs. K” was, with whom the young theater director fell in love without reciprocation. He was a young man, she was married, rich, and expressive, dancing on tables. Kurbas decided that she would become his wife, and he even managed to brag to his mother. But she just grabbed her head.

When Mrs. K and her husband left Lviv, young Les threw himself in front of a train. He was lucky to be saved.

The third time he shot himself. Again for love. Kateryna Rubchakova was a bright beauty. She is six years older than him, the mother of three daughters, and the wife of Kurbas's teacher, Ivan Rubchak. But the main thing is that she is an actress. Not even an actress, but a real prima donna of the Ruska Besida Theater. She and Kurbas played lovers, and his feelings really flared up. When he confessed, she just laughed.

A 26-year-old man left a note saying “I'm sorry I couldn't make you happy!” and shot himself in the heart with a theater pistol. The bullet was well lubricated with oil, so it encapsulated inside and did not reach the heart. Lviv doctors opened the wounded man's chest but decided not to risk it and leave it in place.

“On the one hand, it sounds like a legend that Kurbas lived his entire life with a bullet in his heart. But I believe that it is true. There is an entrance hole in the body, but no exit hole,” Iryna Meleshkina, deputy director of the Kyiv Museum of Theater, Music and Cinema, tells hromadske.

After the suicide attempt, Kurbas would live for another 24 years, glorifying Ukraine and becoming a world-famous theater director and reformer.

Actors were ready to work hungry and without pay as long as they worked with Kurbas

“Make sure that he doesn't leave the university and join the theater,” Les's mother asked Khoma Vodianyi, who was going to study philosophy with her son in Vienna in 1907.

The family, where parents and both grandmothers used to play on the stage, wanted Kurbas to get a “normal profession”. With this condition, they also gave him money for his studies.

However, Les secretly attended theater performances. He got acquainted with Western theater culture.

When he returned to Lviv, he started working as an actor and immediately took on leading roles. He founded his first theater, Ternopil Theater Evenings. There he was a director, choreographer, and leading actor. He was so inspired, so passionate, so full of energy. Then he was invited to Kyiv by Mykola Sadovskyi, a He was one of the ideologists and prominent figures of the Theater of Coryphaei, the first professional Ukrainian theater in the territory of the then Russian Empire, in modern-day Kropyvnytskyi.coryphaeus of Ukrainian theater.

What was the theatrical Kyiv of 1915? It was full of fake Ukrainian folk theater companies; there was also the Russian Solovtsov Theater, which performed either about Russian tsars or plays by Russian classics.

At the same time, there was the first and only stationary theater of ours in post-Russian Ukraine. It is run by Mykola Sadovskyi, the brother of another coryphaeus, Ivan Karpenko-Karyi. They performed mostly classical plays with folk dances. Everything was domestic and simple. And then Kurbas appeared.

“Sadovskyi devoted his entire life to the theater, where the Moscow tsar did not allow Ukrainians to play anyone but peasants. Our actors themselves were not ready for Chekhov or Shakespeare to sound Ukrainian,” explains theater historian Vitalii Zhezhera. He notes, “Even Lesia Ukrainka was afraid to give Sadovskyi her plays. Suddenly Kurbas appeared, unlike anyone else. He was noticed. The actors who wanted a modern, new Ukrainian theater said: ‘Lead us.’ That's how this adventure began.”

Later Ostap Vyshnia said: “If Sadovskyi had known what would come of that invitation, he would have jumped on his horse like Taras Bulba, grabbed a saber, and cut Kurbas to the very saddle.” Because Les Kurbas changed the entire history of our theater.”Vitalii Zhezhera, theater historian

Then Kurbas left the coryphaei and opened the Young Theater. He had no premises, no scenery, no costumes. The actors served in other institutions and donated money to the Young Theater. The director tried to foster a new outlook among the actors, calling them “harlequins with a mindset”.

He created an atmosphere where half-starved and poorly dressed young people could rehearse a new production all night long without receiving a penny. The actors here studied the history of literature and philosophy and had voice training, as well as fencing, boxing, plastic arts, and dance.

Kurbas did the impossible. The entire world repertoire, from Sophocles to Ibsen, was first performed on the Ukrainian stage, and since then we have been less self-conscious. Everyone who later became the foundation of our twentieth-century theater started here, and it still stands today.Vitalii Zhezhera, theater historian

The continuity of generations has reached the present day. “Here's a living chain: Kurbas had a student, Borys Tiahno, and Bohdan Stupka was his student. There are many such examples. And another interesting thing. The first paragraph of the Young Theater's charter states that its goal is to create European culture, not ‘Ukrainophile’ culture,” notes Zhezhera.

“Berezil” and Kurbas broke down everything old

Kurbas spent the next ten years in Kyiv: this period of his work is called “experimental”. For example, he used the ability of the human body to transform itself in motion.

In the play Gas, the audience sees the actors begin to move in such a way that it becomes clear that they are factory workers. Then they change their movements and become the machines that those workers used to work with. Then they transform into what is produced at the factory — gas. Human bodies turn into snakes. And then the whole factory building explodes. The actors show this explosion by falling in a pattern that Kurbas drew for them. In the end, the actors become victims of the explosion.

“It looks very modern even now, but back then it was never thought of as such,” says American filmmaker Virlana Tkacz.

Kurbas, who was invited to Odesa to make films (unfortunately, none of them have survived — ed.), used cinematic elements in his performances!

All these years of daring experiments preceded the creation of Berezil, the director's main brainchild.

In March 1922, Kurbas borrowed a few karbovanets from the poet Mykhailo Semenko to pay for an announcement in the Proletarska Pravda newspaper about the organization of the Berezil artistic association.

Before that, he announced a contest for the best name. The prize was a bottle of Spanish wine. Pavlo Tychyna, with whom he worked, suggested The Garden (“Sad” in Ukrainian — ed.). The actors laughed at him: “Are we sadists?”

Then Kurbas himself offered his own version of the poem by the Norwegian poet Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson. Although the original text refers to April, Kurbas translated it as March (“berezen” in Ukrainian – ed.).

I choose Berezil.
It breaks everything old,
It makes way for the new
It makes a lot of noise,
It’s a striver.

Everyone agreed on Berezil and drank the prize wine together.

Soon, part of the theater moved to Kharkiv, the capital of Soviet Ukraine at the time. Kharkiv in the 1920s was a city of rapid industrialization, of looking to the future, of creating new things. Kurbas's theater corresponded to this: it was about new meanings and new forms.

He wanted to involve the whole of Ukraine in the theater

“For Kurbas, theater was art, creativity, and a team of like-minded people. At the same time, theater was a production,” says Iryna Meleshkina of the Kyiv Theater Museum. “Berezil encompassed many different institutions that appeared in Ukrainian theater for the first time. He sought to create a perfect theater organization.”

We are talking about six directors' workshops that operated at different times. One of them was about children's theater, the other about experienced authors. Their performances were to be performed in theaters, and other workshops that did not bring in money would be supported by ticket revenues. Kurbas wanted there to be village theaters, theaters with amateurs. He wanted to involve the entire population of Ukraine in theater.

He had a laboratory where he personally trained young directors. A school for actors. He also had a museum — Les knew in advance that it would be interesting for future generations.

Now in Ukraine, there are many items for exhibitions related to Berezil. He introduced a questionnaire asking the audience whether they understood the play's content, what they thought of the actors' performance, sets, costumes, music, stage lighting, and how this theater differed from other theaters — a total of two pages of questions.

“Kurbas needed a highly intelligent audience,” Iryna notes.

The period from 1922 to 1933 was the time allotted to Kurbas as a reformer of the Ukrainian theater. Those who were with him at that time called themselves “Berezoltsi” to the end.

Slovo House: Mom, monkey, and me

Les Kurbas lived with his mother and his wife, actress Valentyna Chystiakova, in the A residential building in Kharkiv, built in the shape of the letter C by a cooperative of writers in the late 1920s.Slovo house in Kharkiv. They met in Kyiv. The 18-year-old girl fled here from Moscow with her father, an opera singer at the From the 18th century to the present day, it has been one of the world's most famous opera and ballet theaters.Bolshoi Theater. She was going to become a dancer. Kurbas passed by her ballet class every day and fell madly in love. They got married at St. Andrew's Church in Kyiv. The futurist poet Mykhailo Semenko was invited as the groom’s best man.

Kurbas called her a “monkey” for her plasticity and mobility. Valentyna learned Ukrainian and became a Ukrainian actress, even a star. And not thanks to her husband's patronage. She was accepted by leading theaters after his death.

At the Slovo house, one could see him either late at night or early in the morning, before auditions. Meanwhile, he was a radio amateur — he built himself a record player (they weren't sold in stores yet) and caught Western art waves at night. He played the piano and painted. He knew 8 languages: English, Norwegian, Swedish, German, Hebrew, Polish, Sanskrit, French, and Italian. He deliberately did not use Russian.

He adored books, and one of the rooms in Slovo was filled with them. Earlier, in one of the cities where he lived before Kharkiv, his apartment was robbed. A neighbor told him about it when she met him on the street. The director was only interested in one thing: were the books taken? “Who needs them,” the woman said dismissively, and Kurbas was amused. He also once exchanged an expensive winter hat for a rare book.

He had few friends. He was inseparable from Mykola Kulish. Later they would be written about in a book about Ukrainian cultural figures: “What Les Kurbas's Berezil Theater was in the field of theater, Mykola Kulish was in the field of drama. In Kulish, Berezil found its playwright, and Kulish found his theater in Berezil.”

This is aptly described in the documentary A 2017 feature-length documentary directed by Taras Tomenko. He also directed the feature film of the same name about the writers of the Executed Renaissance.Slovo House.

Kulish was created for Kurbas, and Kurbas was created for Kulish. But in life, they were surprisingly different. Kurbas was a dandy, dressed in the latest fashion, while Kulish was a casual man. Kulish was not averse to knocking back a glass of the most vulgar vodka with an onion and a cucumber. Kurbas drank only dry white wine with grilled salted almonds.from the documentary Slovo House, directed by Taras Tomenko

However, Kurbas was not a sophisticated connoisseur of alcohol. His father was an alcoholic, and it hurt Les. And if he had to raise a glass for formality, he chose wine.

They tortured him to confess to the murder

The 1920s were a time of Ukrainization. The Ukrainian language was heard everywhere on the streets of the once completely Russified Kharkiv, and it was the language of instruction in every governmental institution. People here began to think and create freely. The audience of Kurbas's performances was interested in new writers and contemporary artists. For them, Moscow and Russia were no longer the center of the world.

Life in the then-capital of Soviet Ukraine was marked by spontaneous Ukrainization, and Ukrainian art flourished. These were the best years of the development of our culture, and the growth of a new, young, progressive Ukrainian intelligentsia, which soon lost its trail.from the memoirs of director Volodymyr Blavatskyi

In Moscow, this rapid progress of Ukrainian culture was considered dangerous. The course of Ukrainization was curtailed. They would start with arrests of artists and end with repressions and the Holodomor. “They not only wanted to silence the voices but also to break the back of this Ukraine,” says theater historian Iryna Meleshkina.

In the museum, where the exhibition “Les Kurbas: Theater Man” is on permanent display, Meleshkina leads us to a window display: a photograph of Kurbas right after his arrest in December 1933. He is so handsome, one of those men who only get better with age. And so confused.

“In other photos, you can already see that he was tortured: there are bruises and sores on his face,” the museum worker sighs.

Two months earlier, he was expelled from the Berezil and stripped of his title of People's Artist of Ukraine. For nationalism and the theater's separation from Russian drama. He was also arrested on charges of intending to kill Pavlo Postyshev, the second secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine and organizer of the Holodomor.

Shortly before that, they had a conversation. Postyshev called Kurbas to his office:

“You are the only director in Ukraine capable of creating a real professional theater. But to do this, you must resolutely publicly condemn the past (i.e. Khvylovyi and Skrypnyk, who committed suicide — ed.) and arm yourself with enthusiasm for our new era.”

Kurbas replied: “I will not condemn my past. It is too late for me to change my views. What enthusiasm should I have today when I step over the corpse of a woman who died of starvation on my way to work for the fourth day?”

“I feel sorry for you,” Postyshev smiled.

“I feel sorry for you too,” Kurbas exhaled.

Pavlo Tychyna allegedly reacted to the retelling of this conversation as follows: “Where is Kurbas getting himself into? He should adapt.” And he wrote the poem “The Party Leads” so that he would not be repressed. After the poem was published, people made up rhyming lines: “And Tychyna, our poet, also goes to the latrine. But he doesn't go there on his own — his party leads him.”

After his arrest, Kurbas initially denied the wild accusations: “I do not plead guilty.” After two weeks of torture, he confessed that he wanted to kill Postyshev along with other party members during the premiere at the theater. He also confessed to being a member of the “counter-revolutionary and terrorist Ukrainian Military Organization”.

He was given five years on A group of islands in northern Russia in the middle of the White Sea. Political prisoners have been exiled there since the tsarist era.Solovki. It is 160 kilometers from the Arctic Circle. A year later, Kulish was also taken away. He was sentenced to ten years.

Killed by the same bullet as Kulish?

While Kulish had already realized that he would remain in exile, Kurbas sincerely hoped that he would return to Ukraine and continue to create.

“He was a Phoenix that was reborn over and over,” says Iryna.

He was not given hard work and was even allowed to create his own theater. He staged plays for the prison authorities. One was about “thieves in law”. He allegedly invited real bandits and prostitutes rather than professional actors, who were in short supply in exile.

1937 was a year of total terror. The regime in the camp is being tightened. Some of the convicts are nearing the end of their sentences. However, the Kremlin did not want active Ukrainians to return home. A plan was sent to each camp about how many people should be shot. New cases were fabricated.

In the theater museum, I look at the execution lists under glass, printed on a typewriter. The header of the document says that the Ukrainian “bourgeois nationalists” who had previously been convicted of “counterrevolutionary espionage activities” in Ukraine continued their activities.

“The accused in the case: number 178. Kurbas Oleksandr Stepanovych, born in 1887 in Sambir, Galicia, an employee, director, higher education, former social democrat.”

And in the next column: “Kurbas Oleksandr Stepanovych — to be shot”.

And next to it handwritten ✔.

According to legend, he and Kulish were killed with the same bullet to save ammunition.

Les's wife received a notification of his death only in 1961. It stated that her husband died of a cerebral hemorrhage on November 15, 1942. After Stalin's death, the Soviet authorities wrote to the families of the victims about the deaths from the most common diseases.

Chistiakova will never know what really happened to her husband.

The woman would die in 1984, and researchers would discover the truth only decades later.

This material is part of a series of articles by hromadske about the artists of the Executed Renaissance.