MEITUS–KURBAS–POLISHCHUK – CREATIVE INSPIRATION AND THE COLLAPSE OF ILLUSIONS

Abstract

The article examines the creative collaboration of Ukrainian artistic figures of the first third of the twentieth century–composer Yulii Meitus, theatre director Les Kurbas, and poet and publicist Valerian Polishchuk–within the context of the cultural and socio-political trends of the period. Representatives of all artistic professions, including composers, were involved with the theatre in various ways, remaining within the sphere of its innovations and experimental ideas and assimilating a new theatrical aesthetic. Yulii Meitus collaborated closely with the Berezil Theatre and its founder Les Kurbas, composing music for a number of the theatre’s productions and creatively absorbing its innovative ideas. His artistic cooperation also brought Meitus together with the poet and literary theorist Valerian Polishchuk, who proclaimed a programme of constructive dynamism, implementing its principles in his own poetic work. Fog on the Railway (Tuman na zaliznytsi), a melodeclamation for voice and piano–originally designated as artistic reading for voice with piano accompaniment–based on Polishchuk’s poetry, was composed by Meitus in 1923. This is the only surviving work set to the poet’s texts, as Polishchuk was soon accused of anti-Soviet activity, like Les Kurbas, and executed in the Sandarmokh tract in 1937. Meitus’s acquaintance with Polishchuk inspired his turn toward new poetic forms that embodied symbolically charged images of the era and avant-garde principles of their realization. His collaboration with Kurbas, in turn, deepened his attention to the “musicalized” word and to the synthesis of verbal and musical rhythm and their interaction, manifested, among other things, in his engagement with the genre of melodramatic recitation. The fate of Meitus, like that of many other artists who survived, was marked by forced coexistence with new realities and by the renunciation of his creative pursuits in favor of the principles of Socialist Realism, imposed from above as the only ideologically acceptable method.