Almost 121 years ago in October 1882, the premiere of Natalka Poltavka staged by Marko Kropyvnytsky at Yelysavethrad’s Winter Theater, in which Mariya Zankovetska debuted, signaled the beginning of the Ukrainian professional theater of realism. Far from an easy destiny awaited the troupe and actors. There were thorns along with the applause. They went to St. Petersburg, when the imperial policy of chauvinism was in full swing, “...to show that the Ukrainian nation of 30 million is still alive.” They brought its disillusionment and humiliation. With sympathy and love they extolled that people’s immortal soul. Tsarist Colonel and later Red Army commander Muraviov, as he bathed Kyiv in blood in 1918, declared, “Marko Kropyvnytsky, Ivan Tobilevych, Mykola Sadovsky, Mariya Zankovetska, and Panas Saksahansky should have been hanged then and there. Then nobody would have heard of Ukraine.” The khutir (a farmstead where a few peasant families lived outside the traditional village in a separate community, usually to serve the landlord —Ed.) of Nadiya (Hope) is rightly considered the cradle of the Ukrainian theater that so offended the butcher Muraviov. It is here that the founders of the professional theater took their ideas, drew inspiration, and also found refuge and solace. In this village, 29 kilometers from Yelysavethrad, that Karpenko-Kary wrote ten dramas and comedies. The best known of them, A Hundred Thousand , was composed in the house built 131 years ago by his father Karpo Tobilevych.
The village got its present name after the death of Nadiya Tarkovska, Ivan Tobilevych’s first wife who came from a family with an illustrious ancestry. The museum marked the 150th anniversary of her birth with an exhibition. Also in this village was raised, from the age of eight, her younger brother Oleksandr, father of the prominent Russian poet Arseny Tarkovsky and grandfather of film director Andrei Tarkovsky who occupies a place of honor in the history of world cinema. After giving birth to seven children, Nadiya died at the tender young age of thirty. The marble tombstone with a touching inscription made by her husband disappeared and has never been found. As museum research associate Valentyna Tobilevych says, in 1932 the tombstone was torn away from the grave with oxen and used as threshold at the village council entrance. This building was later privatized, and the tombstone lies buried somewhere there. Twenty years ago Nadiya’s remains were reburied next to her husband’s grave at the Karliuzhynsk Cemetery, where four generations of the Tobilevyches found their last refuge (in April 2001, Nazar, Ivan Karpenko-Kary’s grandson and grandfather of stage director Andriy Zholdak, was buried here in accordance with his will).
The khutir of Nadiya owes its current appearance to Ivan Karpenko-Kary’s grandson Andriy. Among those who helped him surmount the bureaucratic red tape were Ivan Kozlovsky, Maksym Rylsky, and the above-mentioned Arseny Tarkovsky. This museum- cum-preserve, officially in existence for 46 years, was complemented with a literary museum in June 1969 in honor of the centenary of the marriage of Ivan and Nadiya. A monument to Karpenko-Kary was unveiled at the same time. It was not until 1982, the centennial of the Ukrainian theater, that the memorial museum was finally established.
Incidentally, Ivan Tobilevych had the second half of this house built during the final year of his life, leaving in his testament the wish that his grandchildren and great- grandchildren be born in there. His posterity observed his will: eight of his grandchildren, all his great-grandchildren and six great-great- grandchildren came into the world at the farmstead. Decades of persistent struggle for the restoration and preservation of exhibits... That this had to be done under difficult conditions is shown by the fact that Andriy Tobilevych was even sentenced to three years’ imprisonment for his uncompromising efforts. To be fair, he served only nine months. It all happened because he felt it was his duty to defend the oak-trees, which the zealous new owners chose to cut down (not unlike the contemporary song, “They paved paradise to put up a parking lot...”). He was accordingly sentenced for hooliganism and failed to save the oaks planted by Mykhailo Starytsky, Fotiy Krasytsky, and Liudmyla Lynytska. There still are 95 “personal” oaks around the village. Some were planted by Ivan Karpenko-Kary, Mykola Sadovsky, Panas Saksahansky, and other famous and respected visitors. The branches of Mykola Sadovsky’s strong oak seem to embrace one planted by Mariya Zankovetska whom he loved in life. There was also an oak struck by lightning that was planted by Mariya Sadovska-Barilotti, the Tobilevych sister who died young onstage. Many of the oak trees have been planted here in honor of various anniversaries and jubilees, including a sapling last year on the occasion of Nadiya Tarkovska’s sesquicentennial.
Incredibly, this pearl of the steppe, as it is often called, is just a branch of the Oblast Ethnographic Museum instead of being one of the nation’s spiritual capitals. The problem is the lack of researchers rather than the usual material hardships: funding has improved recently, the museum has had a mini-boiler room installed, the floor replaced, and the roof repaired. Yury Kompaniyets, chief of the oblast administration’s cultural department, calls museum curator Volodymyr Chorny a real manager. Valentyna Tobilevych, Andriy’s daughter-in-law, is the only research associate and guide there. Former curator Mykola Khomandiuk, who was not averse to scholarly pursuit, has changed job, while selfless research associate Viktor Bykov died an untimely death. Attempts to attract local schoolteachers to research have been unsuccessful. So the museum- cum-preserve, as Yury Kompaniyets admits, has ground to a halt.
This is unfortunate indeed, for there were great plans and opportunities: a project (drawn up by young architects under the supervision of Professor Volodymyr Savchenko) to build a modern, convenient, and esthetically-appealing summer theater with a small hotel for tourists. Then, in the early 1990s, the project cost as much as a building housing 100 apartments. The authorities decided it was too expensive. Instead, they built a small pavilion with a stage and a couple of dozens of rows of wooden benches.
Simultaneously the question was raised to transfer 200 hectares of land that once belonged to the Tobilevych family to the museum- cum-preserve. In Mr. Khomandiuk’s opinion, they could have set up a model farm with an apiary, orchard, fish pond, and melon field to make money to develop the museum’s research and cultural potential. To this end, the khutir of Nadiya was to be granted the status of a legal entity and national museum. But the exhibition proved too small by contemporary standards, and what hampered the matter still more was the indecision and far-from-businesslike mentality of the bureaucrats involved. Now the land has been shared out to farmers and can never be taken back. Those who have it do not share the idea of making Nadiya a major Ukrainian tourist attraction and establishing there a Ukrainian center of theater and drama research.
The Verkhovna Rada Commission for Culture and Spiritual Values has been asked to explore the possibility of returning to Ukraine the original texts of Ukrainian plays now stored in Saint Petersburg’s Lunacharsky Library. Nadiya could have been an excellent repository for them. There is a great number of these plays kept in St. Petersburg because every author was obliged to send the original to the Second Department of the Russian Empire’s Police Directorate for censorship, where they were kept under strict supervision. Revolutionary sailors wanted to burn down what they thought was an unnecessary heap of paper, but our compatriot Oleksandr Poliakov turned to Lunacharsky (People’s Commissar of Education in Lenin’s Soviet Russia — Ed.), and the manuscripts were rescued. The Ukrainian ones are still there. Of course, not all of them are of the same artistic value. But it is indisputable that many of them, held back by the tsarist censors, could be a major attraction on today’s stage. The Ministry of Culture and the Arts has formally requested that at least Ivan Karpenko-Kary’s plays be returned to the “ khutir of Nadiya...” But the matter has gone no further.
A true revival of Nadiya requires major funding beyond the capabilities of oblast or local budgets. But what is needed still more is understanding the role and importance of theater in the nation’s spiritual life and in ensuring its unity. The founders of the Ukrainian theater certainly understood this all too well. Do we?
