PERSPECTIVES: Opening tonight: Lesia Ukrainka (05/30/04)

PERSPECTIVES

by Andrew Fedynsky

Opening tonight: Lesia Ukrainka

Over the past 40 years, I must have driven past the Lesia Ukrainka statue in Cleveland's Cultural Gardens a thousand times. I also come across her name on the letterhead of Branch 33 of the Ukrainian National Women's League of America and my wife's Plast scouting sorority, Lisovi Mavky, inspired by Lesia's "Forest Song" (Lisova Pisnia). Now with Cleveland Public Theater staging a production of Forest Song in the second weekend of June, I figure it's time I write a column.

To be honest, I knew little about Lesia Ukrainka besides the fact that she was a great poet who suffered from tuberculosis. From the Ridna Shkola Saturday school, I remember reading "Contra Spem Spero" (Hoping Against Hope), in which Lesia vows to struggle regardless of the odds. There's also "Konvalii" (Lilies of the Valley) and volumes of other sensitive poems about nature, creating an image of a syrupy optimist confined to a wicker chair in the garden observing flowers, butterflies and spider webs.

After reading about Lesia Ukrainka in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine and rifling through the 12 volumes of her complete works, I now see someone far more complex. She was an invalid bravely fighting tuberculosis, to be sure, but her enormous literary output and the broad range of her subjects and themes suggest an enormously erudite person of great resolution, toughness and imagination.

She was born in 1871 in the Russian Empire, not long after the Valuiev Ukaz of 1863 had declared "a Little Russian language has not, does not and cannot exist." The language was deemed "dangerous and harmful" and the police, Ministry of Education, Interior and Orthodox Church were all instructed to stop people from using it.

The ukaz, however, had no validity in the Austrian Empire, where a quarter of Ukrainians lived. The kaiser was not as autocratic as the Tsar, nor as hostile to Ukrainian culture. Given space, geniuses like Mykhailo Hrushevsky and Ivan Franko, along with thousands of other dedicated artists, scholars and teachers in Galicia, helped to develop their long-suppressed heritage. These idealists were fascinated by Ukrainian culture and motivated by an aching sense of injustice over the brutal way it was being stifled. All of them shared the conviction that the denial of basic rights stymied the development of each person's potential. The right to free expression in your own language and idiom was basic; achieving that right involved struggle, one which Lesia joined at an early age.

She was born into a well-to-do, land-owning family in Volyn. Unlike many Ukrainian gentry, the Kosach family resisted the overwhelming pressures to assimilate into Russian culture. They spoke Ukrainian and cultivated their daughter Larysa's talent for literature: to say she was precocious would be an understatement. She was 12 when her first poetry appeared in a literary journal published in Hapsburg-controlled Halychyna. Since it was dangerous for the family to be seen as openly circumventing the ban on Ukrainian publication, Larysa chose a penname: Lesia Ukrainka.

At 14, she published translations of Nikolai Gogol (Mykola Hohol), a Ukrainian who wrote exclusively in Russian. (In her career, she also translated works of Polish, Russian, French, German, Greek, Latin and other masters.) At 19, she wrote a 250-page textbook on the "Ancient History of the Eastern Peoples."

In her mid-20s, Lesia began a series of poetic dramas, nearly a dozen of which are set in biblical and/or classical times. She often compares Ukrainians in the Russian Empire to Babylonian prisoners, Christians in the catacombs or Greeks struggling to assert their culture in the face of a Roman Imperial juggernaut. She wrote one play set in colonial America, another in the French Revolution and a number that take place in Ukraine and Russia. At each turn, she implicitly refers to her Ukrainian countrymen, exhorting them to shake off their inertia and apathy, and to struggle for their liberation. Although her works are special for Ukrainians, her themes of revolution, individual rights, the conflict between conformity and freedom, responsibility and license are universal.

Her most famous play is "Forest Song." Literally written in a fever over four days, this three-act fairytale explores the relationship between man and nature, domesticity and freedom. Tapping into Slavic mythology, the play depicts elves, goblins, wood-sprites and water nymphs interacting with humans much as they do in Shakespeare's "Mid-Summer Night's Dream." It tells the tragic love story of the forest nymph, Mavka, who tries to please the peasant Lukash and his mother by becoming something she's not: a hard-working peasant girl. As she ceases to be a fantastical creature, Lukash's love for her dies and Mavka ends up losing both herself and the boy she loves.

Lending itself to music, dance and visual effects, "Forest Song" has become a standard of the Ukrainian theater. In the mid-1990s, the Ukrainian Stage Ensemble directed by Lydia Krushelnytska and the Yara Arts Group led by Virlana Tkacz, staged separate Ukrainian and English-language productions in New York.

In my hometown of Cleveland, Nadia Tarnawsky and Michael Flohr have taken on the mission to popularize Ukrainian culture in their corner of the planet. Two years ago they staged Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky's "Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors." Four years ago, it was "Ancestral Voices," an original musical production based on the poetry of Taras Shevchenko, Lesia Ukrainka, Oleksander Oles and Mykhailo Drai-Khmara.

Nadia and her husband, Mike, are adamant about staging their productions in English in a professional theater using professional actors and musicians, all aimed at an American audience. They've won grants from the Ohio Arts Council and enjoyed enthusiastic reviews from the Cleveland Plain Dealer and other mainstream media. "Forest Song" in June will feature music in Ukrainian and text in Nadia's own English translation. Pittsburgh's Kyiv Ukrainian Dance Company will perform the wedding scene.

Lesia Ukrainka, who died in 1913 at the early age of 41, worked arduously, along with others, to lift Ukrainian culture to a world-class level. In my view, they succeeded. Theater folks like Lydia and Virlana in New York and Mike and Nadia in Cleveland have discovered those works and are giving them life. The last piece of the puzzle is the audience. And that's where we come in, entering the scene from the back of the theater.

Andrew Fedynsky's e-mail address is: fedynsky@stratos.net.

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