Turning the pages back... February 4, 1880 (01/31/99)

Turning the pages back...

February 4, 1880

Without a doubt, far more people have heard of Klyment Kvitka's spouse, writer Lesia Ukrainka, than have heard of him.

Born on February 4, 1880, in Khmeliv, about 40 miles south of Konotop (then in the Poltava gubernia), Kvitka studied law at Kyiv University in 1897-1902, practicing in Tiflis (the Georgian capital), Kyiv and elsewhere in Ukraine. In 1906, through a printing house in the Russian imperial capital, he published a two-volume study on electoral rights. He married Larysa Kosach (known as Lesia Ukrainka, her nom de plume) the following year.

Among the many members of the intelligentsia of the turn of the century who busied themselves with ethnography, Kvitka collected, transcribed and published countless songs and music during the course of his travels around Ukraine. In fact, he founded the sociological approach in the study of Ukrainian music.

In September 1917, he became a member of the Music Division of the Arts Administration that functioned under the aegis of the Ukrainian National Republic's Secretariat of Education. The following year he was appointed professor at the Lysenko Music and Drama Institute in Kyiv.

When the Soviets took power in 1920 he became deputy head of the Ethnographic Section at the Ukrainian Academy of Arts Science (VUAN), founded VUAN's Cabinet of Musical Ethnography in 1922 and served as the latter's director until 1933. In 1924, he established a pioneering program for studying the way of life of Ukraine's professional folk bards and musicians.

In the "Ukrainization" period prior to 1930 he published an important collection of 743 Ukrainian folk melodies - 685 of which he collected and transcribed himself - and over 40 ethnomusicological studies. He also annotated the seven-volume edition of his wife's works that was published in 1923-1924.

In 1933, as Stalin's terror raged in Ukraine, Kvitka managed to elude the dire fate that met many of his compatriots, but was first forced to move to Moscow and then was exiled to Karaganda and Alma-Ata (today's Almaty) in Kazakstan. In 1936 he was permitted to return to Moscow. In 1937 he founded the Cabinet for the Study of Musical Creativity at the Moscow Conservatory (also serving as its director). In 1940 he became a member of the conservatory's Chair of Musical Folklore, but his work was severely curtailed.

Kvitka managed to outlive Stalin, dying in Moscow on September 19, 1953. He left behind an archive of almost 6,000 transcribed folk songs and 74 scholarly works. Some are housed in Moscow, at the cabinet he founded, the rest at the Institute of Fine Art, Folklore and Ethnography in Kyiv.

Source: "Kvitka, Klyment," Encyclopedia of Ukraine, Vol. 2 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993).

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