Mykola Kulisch

Mykola Kulisch (1920)

Mykola Kulish Hurowytsch ( Ukrainian Микола Гурович Куліш ; born December 6 ^{. Jul} / 18 December 1892 ^greg. In Chaplynka , Taurida Gubernia , Russian Empire ; † 3. November 1937 in Sandarmoch , Karelia , Soviet Union ) was a Ukrainian writer. He is considered one of the most important Ukrainian dramaturges in his country in the 20th century.

Life

Kulisch grew up in the village of Chaplynka in what is now the Ukrainian Oblast of Cherson ; After the early death of his mother, he grew up mostly in orphanages and attended a community school. Financial support from acquaintances made it possible to attend the eight-grade secondary school and grammar school in Oleschky , where the first satirical poems were written. The beginning of his studies was interrupted in 1914 by the outbreak of the First World War, in which he served three years and as an infantry officer in Galicia and Volhynia came into contact with members of the Ukrainian independence movement. Retired from the Russian army after being injured, from 1917 he took part in the struggle for independence and in efforts to establish an independent Ukrainian People's Republic , including as a partisan officer in southern Ukraine.

In the 1920s, after the transition of Ukraine to the Ukrainian Soviet Republic , Kulisch a. a. as a teacher, school inspector and newspaper editor; also wrote the first Ukrainian-language school reader Perwynka ( Первинка ). His dramas 97 and Komuna w stepach ( Комуна в степах , dt. About "steppe community") brought him first attention from the audience; In 1924 Kulisch became a member of the proletarian group of authors Hart . After moving to Kharkiv in 1925 , he made the acquaintance of numerous well-known writers and theater professionals of his time; He was clearly influenced by the director Les Kurbas , who brought some of his plays on stage. Kulisch became a member and later chairman of the new organization WAPLITE ( Вільна Академія Пролетарської Літератури , German Free Academy of Proletarian Literature ) and was instrumental in the contemporary discourse on the path of Ukrainian literature in the age of communism. He and his colleagues in WAPLITE advocated an independent Ukrainian literature raised from the provincial side - in contrast to a culture whose direction was dictated by Moscow and the Communist Party.

In 1928 the WAPLITE had to be dissolved, and Kulisch played a key role in the literary magazines Literaturnyj jarmarok (German: "Literature Fair") and Tschwerwonyj schljach (German: "Red Way"). A final attempt by the group of authors to organize itself was the founding of the Proletarian Front in 1929 , the “Proletarian Literary Front ”. It was forced to dissolve in 1931.

For Kulisch, the period of repression began in the early 1930s. He was not accepted into the official writers' association; his works were branded as "nationalist", "counter-revolutionary" and "dangerous" and their publication was banned. He was expelled from the Communist Party in June 1934 and arrested and imprisoned by the NKVD in December of the same year . He was sentenced to 10 years of solitary confinement in a prison camp on the Solovetsky Islands on charges of membership in an alleged “Ukrainian terrorist center” . There he was attending a mass execution just before the 20th anniversary of the October Revolution on Nov. 3, 1937 shot .

Works

Kulisch wrote a total of 14 dramas, six of which were performed during his lifetime, including three by Les Kurbas.

With his first drama 97 , with which he thematized the famine in the Crimea of ​​1921/22, Kulisch is regarded as the founder of modern Ukrainian drama; the play itself as the Soviet Union's first relevant stage play. However, its performance was already subject to censorship: the tragic end on stage in the original was rewritten as a positive one.

In his plays, Kulisch first dealt with the problems of the rural population in the south of the Ukraine, for example in Komuna w stepach (1925) and in Proschtschaj, selo ( Прощай, село , German for goodbye, village ). Kulisch later caricatured both bourgeois pre-revolutionary society and the Soviet bureaucracy. As part of his collaboration with Les Kurbas, there are also expressionist elements in his work, which were often combined with elements of Ukrainian puppet theater or theater forms of the 17th or 18th centuries. One of the pieces of this phase is Narodni Malachi ( Народний Малахій , dt. About folk Malachias ).

Of the few performances that Kulisch's plays received, those in the Beresil Theater ( Березіль , Eng . "March") under the direction of Les Kurbas were the most important. Some of the pieces were only allowed to be performed a few times before they were forcibly canceled. On the other hand, the drama Patetychna Sonata , which was banned in Ukraine, was translated into Russian and performed in Moscow and Leningrad. A censored version was published in Berlin in 1932.

Many of Kulisch's manuscripts were confiscated and destroyed while he was in camp; some pieces are believed to have been completely lost, others are only preserved in translations.

Web links

Commons : Mykola Kulish  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Mykola H. Kulis̆ in the catalog of the German National Library
• Article on Mykola Kulisch in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine . Authors: Valerian Revutsky, Roman Senkus, Marko Robert Stech, 2006. Accessed August 2008
• Biography on ukrlib.com.ua Author: Yuri Lavrinenko