Hnat Yura is at last coming back to his dear theater that he directed for over forty years. And what years! The Civil War, Ukrainization, fighting against “nationalism,” mass repressions, World War II and the postwar ruin, “cosmopolitanism,” debunking the “personality cult,” and the “thaw” in intellectual life… The artistic director had to shoulder the burden of a large team of talented (though nervous and vulnerable) actors and the full cycle of theatrical production, including workshops, management, and auxiliary staffing. Communist party and state bosses — often low-cultured but overideologized people highly sensitive to even the smallest anti-Soviet deviations — constantly looked over Yura’s shoulders, with little by way of recompense for all his troubles.
Today, Yura is again breathing the air of a little picturesque park in front of the Ivan Franko Theater (the monument’s authors are Andrii and Volodymyr Chepelyk), which you can see very well from the windows of his apartment in the building on the right. He can now enjoy the company of a bronze statue of Mykola Yakovchenko, the theater’s star comedian, who sat down on a bench here a bit earlier. This monumental duo may soon be complemented by Amvrosii Buchma, another founder of the National Ivan Franko Theater. For it all began as follows.
In 1919 Vinnytsia hosted the New Lviv Theater that had finally come here after wandering across the war-torn Ukraine, including Ternopil and Proskuriv (now Khmelnytsky), with its repertory, scenery and troupe. Amvrosii Buchma was the theater’s artistic director. Vinnytsia also received a group of the former Young Theater actors Hnat Yura, his younger brother Yura-Yursky, Dobrovolska, Vatulia, Koshevsky, Samiylenko, et al. When they entered the theater, Buchma warmly welcomed his colleagues and invited them to join the company.
A unifying constitutive meeting, held in January 1920, resolved to name the theater after Ivan Franko, for most of the thespians came from Galicia. Buchma, who did not have a knack for administrative work, suggested that Hnat Yura be appointed theater director. Incidentally, Yura also found his marital bliss here. He married Olha Rubchakivna, a daughter of the prominent Galician actor Ivan Rubchak and the stage genius Kateryna Rubchakova, with whom a young Les Kurbas had once been in love.
But the cooperation between Yura and Buchma was short-lived. Polina Samiylenko reminisces: “We were very well aware that Hnat Yura was unable to show us any new ways in the theatrical art. An outstanding organizational talent helped him build the theater. He was a very good actor but not a bearer of any fundamental views of the theater. This is why we decided in August 1921 to establish our own theater-cum-studio and name it after Ivan Franko.”
It is interesting to follow the artistic crossroads of Yura and Buchma, the two founders of the Ivan Franko Theater. Before meeting again at this theater, they fell out for 15 years; this period saw the brief existence of the abovementioned theater-cum-studio (Buchma had no strategic organizational talent), the actor’s artistic transformation into a highest-class master at the Berezil theater under the guidance of and in personal friendship with Les Kurbas, and active work on the new art of silent cinema, where he played, in particular, Taras Shevchenko. Buchma won resounding praise and fantastic popularity.
In 1925, Berezil, Ukraine’s best theater at the time, moved from the provincial Kyiv to the capital, Kharkiv, while the Franko Theater went from Kharkiv to Kyiv. Then the capital city changed, and the Ivan Franko troupe became the leading metropolitan theater. After Berezil was disbanded and Kurbas arrested in 1933, the government instructed Buchma and his team to move to Kyiv in 1936 to work with the well-known and, what is more, predictable Yura.
They found it difficult to cooperate, for they had very different personalities. Yet they coexisted in peace and trust, for both of them placed theater above everything else.
The root of the differences between Buchma and Yura stemmed from Vinnytsia and their artistic egos. Buchma was raised in Europe, Lviv, on the traditions of the synthetic and syncretistic Galician theater, on the dramaturgy of Henrik Ibsen and Karl Gutzkow, and a close friendship, since his salad days, with Kurbas, whose artistic pursuit he unconditionally trusted and whom he followed on the path of experimentation. The actor Buchma learned from the stage director Kurbas how to think on stage — to think profoundly and philosophically, and to use this thinking as a source of emotions, personal sensitivity and means of expression. In other words, the mature Buchma was an actor who, firstly, perceived the philosophy of the character he played and the stage production as a whole and, secondly, subtly and deftly expressed this philosophy. Naturally, Buchma was not a cool intellectual. What helped him interpret a character was his sensitivity, the well-developed intuition of an actor, a rich life experience, the creative nature of success, and an empathic perception of the world.
Conversely, Hnat Yura chose a different path. His first theatrical impressions (and, hence, subconscious benchmarks) came from a high-profile theater in Yelisavetgrad (now Kirovohrad). Enthralled, while still a youth, by the mastery of the romantic and neurotic actor Orlenev, and carried away by powerful emotions on stage, Yura did not accept the intellectual experiments of Kurbas, even though he had worked for some time in the latter’s Young Theater. His role model was the down-to-earth realism of the Moscow Art Theater, which, instead of making the audience understand the performance’s system of signs, reproduced an easy-to-grasp picture of authentic life. Those were Yura’s basic artistic principles. In his work as an actor and a stage director, Yura was an artist of primary sensitivity and open emotions, who perceived and reproduced reality in concrete situations rather than in an integral philosophical continuity of life. From this angle, Yura was closer to the Dnipro-basin Ukraine mentality, which displays strong emotions, sentimentality, decorativeness and specificity in everything. Therefore, his art is close to the theater of our luminaries, whose traditions he established in the new sociopolitical conditions.
It was the art of the Ukrainian countryside, of the good rural ways, the fragrant and cracked land, and peasant individualism rather than of Berezil’s anthropogenic urbanism. Some aspects of the Ukrainian peasant mentality were also found in Yura. He was, above all, a gatherer and a guardian. He gathered a private collection of paintings, mostly Ukrainian and realist. He also picked up actors for the Franko Theater team as if they were jewels — each one personally and demandingly, with due account of their artistic prospects. As a result, the theater was staffed with top-class masters, including lighters, tailors, hairdressers, makeup artists, and prop men. Yura would invite Ukraine’s best actors to his theatrical company. In the 1930s, he took in a large group — Amvrosii Buchma, Natalia Uzhvii, Dmytro Miliutenko, et al. — from Berezil, the banned theater of his artistic antagonist Les Kurbas; he also brought in Polina Niatkom, Evhen Ponomarenko, Yurii Shumsky, Kateryna Osmialovska (a defiant choice, given that her father-in-law Vasyl Lypkivsky founded the Ukrainian Autocephalous Church) from Odesa. He also employed Viktor Dobrovolsky, just released from prison where he was held on charges of nationalism. In the postwar years, too, the Franko Theater continued to bring in younger-generation talented actors from the provinces and theatrical institute graduates, such as Arkadii Hashynsky, Mykola Zadniprovsky, Nonna Koperzhynska, Olha Kusenko, Yulia Tkachenko, and Halyna Yablonska.
As a typical Ukrainian peasant (born in the village of Fedvari, Yelisavetgrad gubernia), Yura always relied on his family. The bulk of the Franko Theater troupe consisted of Yura’s brothers Terentii (older) with his wife Feodosia Barvinska, Hnat (middle) with his wife Olha Rubchakivna, Oleksandr (younger) with his wife Anastasia Shvedenko, and their sister Tetiana with her husband Mykhailo Pylypenko.
Yura maintained strict order and discipline in the theater. Once the theater received orders to spot “venal cosmopolitans” among the staff (a typical thing in the late 1940s), and a general meeting “denounced” the designer Matvii Drak and the stage director Borys Balaban for three days until Buchma came over. Buchma usually ignored meetings, even those of the Party members, although he had joined the Party on the Stalingrad Front. The actor said: “Why are you grilling and reproaching the guys for having worked with Kurbas? They were apprentices and errand boys at the time, while I was a leading actor. So begin with me.” And, relying on Buchma’s statement, Yura left the guys alone.
Yet such actions caused Buchma nothing but pain. The authorities found it hard to hook an outstanding and spiritually independent actor, a matinee idol. But they could still “cut off oxygen,” i.e., deny him roles to play. Would you like to know what Buchma dreamed to play in the 1940s and the early 1950s? Cyrano de Bergerac, about the antagonism between a poet (artist) and the government. The murderous tyrant Richard III. The ruined personality of a vain King Lear. The Venetian merchant Shylock — in the very heat of state-sponsored anti-Semitism campaigns. Yura promised him all this and negotiated with the Moscow-based theater producer Aleksei Dikiy on Richard, but to no avail. In all probability, Yura received an instruction to “alter” his repertoire plans. On his part, he knew how to feel and take into account the vibes, which helped him and the theater survive. The reprisal against Kurbas served as a clear and bitter warning.
So Buchma went, just once in his lifetime, to the “top echelons,” the Party Central Committee, to beg for roles. They patted him on the back and said: Look, you’ve already done so much acting! The actor was not yet sixty and had to play minor parts and stereotyped figures in the plays of Korniychuk, Virta, Ilchenko, Mynk, which were wonderful to behold. Suffice it to recall Makar Dibrova.
Yura, who had once spotted Oleksandr Korniychuk’s dramaturgical talent in a student hall of residence, put on all his plays. He would only assign those excessively schematized works to other directors. For example, the anti-American lampoon Mr. Perkins’ Mission to the Bolshevik Country was staged in 1945 by Kost Koshevsky, and after his premature death the play was premiered under the guidance of Buchma, who also played the role of Perkins. Yura also entrusted Benedict Nord to put on Makar Dibrova. And when Nord and Buchma were clearly on the way to success, Yura joined the production and was awarded, together with Buchma, Uzhviy and Niatko, another Stalin Prize. The five-minute-long silent inner monologue of Buchma as Makar, over his dead son’s padded jacket, was a marvel of Ukrainian theater. Yet they had to cut the monologue’s lengthy text to three words: “Son, my son…” Korniychuk allowed it, for he loved Buchma. But the actor had to use himself to fill the void.
Having creatively worked in the theater and the cinema with such giants of direction as Kurbas, Dovzhenko, and Eisenstein, and such talents as Okhlopkov, Tasin, Barnet, Braun, Nord, and Koshevsky, the actor Buchma took a skeptical view of Yura’s down-to-earth style of stage direction. In Berezil he had learned to present — on his own — the role and the overall atmosphere of a production. Instead of dominating the performance he worked in unison with his fellow actors. For instance, there is practically no direction of Yura in the famous Stolen Happiness. Buchma began working as director on Franko’s text in 1939, with Yura and Buchma to play Mykola Zadorozhny and Mykhailo Hurman, respectively. But they failed to be good partners. So the wise Yura took up stage direction and assigned the role of Mykola to Buchma and that of Mykhailo to the young Dobrovolsky. But, all the same, the production revolved around Buchma.
We must give Hnat Yura his due. He highly esteemed the talent of Buchma. On the Party Central Committee’s instructions, Ukraine’s theaters were to re-create the figure of Vladimir Lenin on stage to mark the 20th anniversary of the October Revolution. Korniychuk wrote Pravda, and Yura directed. Buchma was to play the Leader — one scene at the Smolny. Things just plodded along. There were problems with facial makeup, the rhythm of Ukrainian speech did not coincide with Lenin’s rhetoric, and it was difficult to picture this man’s inner world. Instead of rehearsing, Buchma went fishing to “nurture” the role to be played. Yura did not disturb him, for he knew that the actor was undergoing a creative process, unnoticeable and mysterious to somebody else’s eye. When Buchma finally showed up for a rehearsal, a high door and a podium had been put up for Lenin in the center of the stage, to re-create “the appearance of Christ before the people,” so to speak. But the actor upset all the director’s mise-en-scenes. He came out of the wings, surrounded by people crowed around Lenin and sometimes even blocking him from the audiences’ view. This vividly demonstrated the Leader’s proximity to the masses and, at the same time, denied the audience the temptation of questioning the similarity. In fact only the general features bore some likeness because the makeup turned the actor’s face into made a still mask that had lost mimic and expression. So Buchma ventured to risk, showing an approximate general likeness, and finally won. Incidentally, he would take curtain calls after hastily removing the makeup and the wig — it was the actor, not the leader of the world proletariat, who bowed to the audience.
It is difficult to understand how the director Yura was able to bear to the last minute this uncertainty about the figure of Vladimir Lenin in his production for the first time in Ukraine, for it was in the terrible year of 1937. At the time, one could be arrested even for wrapping a herring with a newspaper that carried a picture of Stalin. And here came along a theater, and “the alive and never-dying” Lenin was running all over the stage… But Yura had high expectations for Buchma’s talent, which he lived up to.
Such strong actors as Buchma and Yura had never been partners as actors, for their manners of acting differed. In Ivan Karpenko-Kary’s Sea of Life Buchma was to play Ivan Barylchenko, while Yura had the role of Stiopochka Kramariuk. But Buchma disagreed with the production concept and ceded the role to Serhiienko. Only once did Buchma and Yura perform together. As the Moscow Maly Theater celebrated its 125th anniversary, they played before the glorious troupe a dramatized sketch, Encounter, by Chahovets: Buchma as Shevchenko and Yura as Shchepkin.
Does it really matter that Yura and Buchma were not close friends in private life? Hnat and Bronek (as his friends called him, while he was “father” to younger actors) were too different and existed in different worlds. They could not agree on many things. But they possessed enough wisdom, common sense, and professional ethics not to make their personal conflicts public, not to extend their differences to art, to THEATER.
Will they perhaps meet again in the little park near their beloved workplace?
Valentyna Zabolotna is a theater expert
