Pioneering Shakespeare in Ukraine

Director Oleksandr “Les” Kurbas’s 1920 Macbeth was the first production of a Shakespeare play in Ukraine—and in 1996, it was one of the topics discussed at a conference on Shakespeare and the Worlds of Communism sponsored by the Folger, Penn State University, and the Russian Embassy in Washington, DC.

At the conference, Irena Makaryk spoke on Kurbas’s work and the role that Shakespeare and theater played in Ukrainian culture, the Russian Empire, and the early Soviet Union. In 2004, she published Shakespeare in the Undiscovered Bourn: Les Kurbas, Ukrainian Modernism, and Early Soviet Cultural Politics. Makaryk is a Distinguished University Professor in the English department at the University of Ottawa.

Following the start of the Russia-Ukraine War, the Folger’s Shakespeare Unlimited podcast caught up with Professor Markaryk for a conversation that included Kurbas’s story—including his tragic death in a Stalinist purge in 1937—and its broader context. The episode ranges across many topics, including how Shakespeare originally arrived in the Russian Empire (which included Ukraine), in terms of books to be read, rather than plays to be performed, and how several related figures over the years, from Catherine the Great to Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Karl Marx, thought about Shakespeare and his plays.

In these excerpts, she speaks about how the Russian czars and the early Soviet Union alternated some periods of freedom and creativity in Ukraine with onerous policies meant to suppress Ukrainian culture and theater, including Shakespeare—as well as her great concern about potential parallels today. The interview was published in May 2022.

BARBARA BOGAEV: I know your family is from Ukraine, and I just can’t imagine what it must be like to watch this brutal war from so far away. Are you in touch with people or family or friends or colleagues near the fighting?

IRENA MAKARYK: All of the above. I have lots of cousins, and they’re spending their nights in bomb shelters, but they don’t want to leave. I have colleagues, Shakespeare colleagues, who have given up teaching Shakespeare and are helping with the war effort. It’s been very hard to look at the destruction that has occurred and the way that civilians are being targeted. That’s the most difficult.

BOGAEV:  I really feel for you. I didn’t want to start the conversation without talking about what this means to you, because we’re going to go way back and give context to a conversation about Shakespeare in Ukraine and Shakespeare in the Russian Empire.

You write that one of the things the czars did was rupture the natural development of Ukrainian culture in the 19th century. So, how did they do that and what part did Shakespeare play in it?

MAKARYK: Shakespeare was a very important figure for Ukrainians. I can take us to the 19th century and the Ukrainian bard, Taras Shevchenko, who had been exiled by the czar into Kazakhstan and could only be allowed two books to read: the Bible and one other. He chose Shakespeare. Shakespeare was a source of solace for many readers and something they desired.

The 19th century czars, but particularly Alexander II, destroyed or tried to destroy Ukrainian culture through decrees and prohibitions, the two most famous being one of 1863 and one of 1876.

The 1863 circular stated that there is no separate Ukrainian language. It never existed. It does not exist, and it never could exist. In 1876 all theater performances in Ukrainian were banned. All books—Ukrainian books—print books were prohibited. All the books—Ukrainian books—in libraries were taken off the shelves. All translations, including Shakespeare and the Bible, were prohibited. Folk songs when publicly performed had to be sung in Russian or in French, but not in Ukrainian.

By the late 19th century, there is some relaxation, and we have some theater, but no stationary theater. Performing touring theater is actually what happened.

BOGAEV: In 1905, some of these restrictions started to come off, you write. How did the Ukrainians react?

MAKARYK: This was a watershed moment. There was a relaxation, a thaw. There was a huge excitement about what could happen. We have a lot of avant-garde works. Ukrainian as a language was finally declared an independent Slavic language by the recently created Russian Duma. Now, that happens as a brief moment of glory, so to speak.

For the Ukrainians, having that moment in 1905, an opening up of possibilities, included, very importantly, the creation of a stationary theater and then in 1917, a state theater.

BOGAEV: At this point in the story, we should talk about Oleksandr “Les” Kurbas.

MAKARYK: He was a charismatic figure. He was born in western Ukraine. He was educated in Vienna. He studied philology, Sanskrit, philosophy. He was multilingual. He spearheaded a theatrical movement away from Russia and created a young theater company.

He wanted to turn directly to Europe. He didn’t want to copy what Europe was doing, but rather to have a kind of dialog. He was interested in Japanese theater.

BOGAEV: He also had some really interesting training techniques.

MAKARYK: The idea was to create an intelligent actor, a really cultured actor, who could, with a simple gesture, embody a whole concept. So he had his actors go to museums, to art books and study individual artworks. Or music: Beethoven, Scriabin, a whole range of sources. And they had to prove that they could repeat that same gesture again perfectly.

BOGAEV: So modern. What interested him about staging Shakespeare? Because it sounds like he had an unusual approach to that as well.

MAKARYK: He staged the first Shakespeare in Ukraine. And for him, the first Shakespeare, which was Macbeth, was a revolutionary act. It was an assertion of the existence of Ukraine, of the Ukrainian language, of Ukrainian culture that was certainly up to embodying, representing, staging Shakespeare.

BOGAEV: This was 1919, and you write that just to imagine a serious discussion and staging of Shakespeare during 1919, 1920 is mind-boggling.

MAKARYK: This is in the middle of total destruction. Regions cut off from each other. We have anarchist peasants roaming. We have nine to eleven changes of government. The historian Edward Acton suggested that this was close to—in terms of the economic collapse—close to what it would have been after the Black Death in Europe in the Middle Ages.

Yet in the middle of all of this, there was still this excitement about possibilities that art could be a way of moving things forward. Kurbas was creating a production of Macbeth and said to his actors, “You know, if you don’t eat, that’s okay. You should think about this and what we’re doing for Ukrainian culture. This is our great moment.”

Les Kurbas’s production of Macbeth

BOGAEV: He apparently had hand gestures to people from backstage?

MAKARYK: That’s right. He had worked this out with one of the commanders of the Bolshevik forces, and he knew when he had to quickly or immediately end the play because they were going to be shot at.

BOGAEV: And there was great famine. His Lady Macbeth was fainting in the wings.

MAKARYK: They called a doctor, who said, “There’s nothing wrong with her that a good beef steak wouldn’t fix. She’s starving.”

BOGAEV:  There are all these incursions on art and theater from the party. What did artists have to do to keep up with all of these changes in the law?

MAKARYK: So the Soviet Union is founded in 1922. Between 1922 and 1926, because Lenin understood that nationalism is an important way of encouraging people to agree to the Bolshevik agenda, there’s a period of Ukrainianization. Lots of translations, lots of theatrical experimental productions.

But by 1926, the doors are closing. What happens then is the first sort of volley, something called the “theatrical theses.” They essentially said that directors had to be responsible to the state, not to the audience. They started to create review committees, and these consisted of people who knew little, or had no knowledge, of the theater. Kate and Petruchio’s relationship becomes a struggle with the vestiges of the feudal past and their attempt to create a new and a better socialist life. This is a gradual process that starts in ‘26. It escalates in ‘28, ‘29. By 1934 there’s no more experimentation.

The worst year is the year of 1937, the Great Purges, when, according to historian Alan Bullock, there were 30,000 executions, when the whole Ukrainian government was wiped out. When all of the cultural workers, the whole intelligentsia, was essentially executed or shipped to the far north—and also to Siberia.

Among those victims was Les Kurbas, who was executed on the specific orders of Stalin himself and in celebration of the 20th anniversary of the Soviet Union. This was a way of getting the teachers, the professors, the scientists, the theater directors, the actors, and to destroy them.

BOGAEV: Was the purge of Les Kurbas all about attacking Ukrainian culture or was it truly an argument about art?

MAKARYK: No, it was definitely about attacking Ukrainian culture and destroying the morale of people. The Soviet nation was afraid that the Ukrainians were going to again declare independence as they tried in 1917, ‘18.

But the idea about Kurbas and formalism and art is, I think, completely false. Kurbas did many things, including detailed surveys that he gave to his audience. In the audience, there were all kinds of people, peasants, villagers, people with little education. They loved his works and they found them completely comprehensible.

BOGAEV: Bringing this up to the present day: In recent years, before this conflict in Ukraine, has there been an inheritor to Kurbas?

MAKARYK: In the present time, we have Nataliya Torkut, a professor at Zaporizhzhia, where the nuclear reactor is, and she created a Shakespeare center. There are scholars there. There are students, they do theatricals, they have an annual competition. There have been tons of productions of Hamlet. There has been a lot of translation.

One of the best known authors of the time, Yurii Andrukhovych, has translated Hamlet and his Hamlet translations have been performed throughout Ukraine. Most recently in a bomb shelter, even, in Ivano-Frankivsk.

BOGAEV: Do you see parallels to today’s situation in this story?

MAKARYK: Yeah. I see terrible, terrible parallels. In an editorial in one of the Kremlin media outlets, RIA Novosti, an author called Timofei Sergeitsev wrote a piece, “What Russia Should Do With Ukraine.” He suggests a total erasure of Ukrainian identity, and even the word “Ukraine” cannot be allowed to exist. Now this, to me, sounds like that decree I mentioned of 1863.

To have this production of Hamlet in a bomb shelter is an answer: To be. President Zelensky’s response to the European Union was that this is “a Shakespearean moment,” it’s an existential moment. Our answer, he says from his point of view, as Ukrainians, is “to be.”

About Irena Makaryk

Dr. Irena Makaryk is a Distinguished University Professor in the Department of English at the University of Ottawa. Her book Shakespeare in the Undiscovered Bourn: Les Kurbas, Ukrainian Modernism, and Early Soviet Cultural Politics was published by the University of Toronto Press in 2004.

You can read her paper “‘What’s Past is Prologue’: Shakespeare and Canon Formation in Early Soviet Ukraine” in Shakespeare in the Worlds of Communism and Socialism. The paperback edition was published by the University of Toronto Press in 2013.

Her most recent book, Shakespeare in Ukraine: Mirror, Prism, Microphone, was published by the University of Toronto Press in 2025.