Beau Monde on the Edge of Empire: State and Stage in Soviet Ukraine. A Book Presentation
17.6.2025, 18:30
Ukrainian Shakespeare Festival, Ivano-Frankivsk
Theater has a long history in Ukraine. The Soviet period is a key element in this history and it poses a challenge for rethinking and studying the paradoxical phenomenon of Ukrainian Soviet culture, including theater, for researchers, practitioners, and society in general.
The book by historian Mayhill Fowler, first published in English (Toronto, 2017) and now translated into Ukrainian (Rodovid, 2025), tells the story of the Ukrainian avant-garde, which was created in the contexts and aftermaths of war, the collapse of empires, and the Soviet experiment. The First World War and the revolutions catalyzed artistic experiments, creating new relationships between the world of artists and visions of the postwar world.
During the presentation we will talk about the relationship between art and political power in the context of the new Soviet state through the formation of the artistic beau monde and establishment; about the ambitious project of creating a new culture that would be modern and urban and Ukrainian at the same time; about the emergence of Soviet cultural infrastructure and hierarchies; about the centrality and peripherality, de-centralization and de-peripheralization of cultural processes; about the construction of a system of state care and control and the specificity of the theater as a place of improvisation; about the multilingualism, multiculturalism, and plurality of milieus of cultural life in the 1920s and its gradual and radical homogenization culminating in the repressions of the 1930s. While the focus will be on the postwar 1920s and 1930s, the conversation will also include the longer chronology of the "Soviet century" and its still-long shadows and lingering legacies. But ultimately, this book is a story about the postwar period and the artists who emerged from a devastating war to create.
The presentation will be held as part of the Ukrainian Shakespeare Festival program.
Mayhill Fowler
Historian and associate professor in the Department of History at Stetson University, an associate professor at the Department of Culture and Arts at the Ivan Franko National University of Lviv and affiliated researcher at the Center for Urban History. She currently works on two new book projects: War Stories: Theater on the Frontlines of Socialism and Comrade Actress: Soviet Ukrainian Women on the Stage and Behind the Scenes. Her research interests include theater history, cultural history, cultural infrastructures, Jewish history and culture, gender history, borderlands, transnational teaching.
Iryna Chuzhynova
Theater researcher, holds PhD in Performing Arts, program director of the Ukrainian Shakespeare Festival in Ivano-Frankivsk, senior lecturer at the Department of Theater Studies at the Kharkiv National University of Arts named after I. P. Kotlyarevsky, deputy general director and artistic director of the Ivano-Frankivsk National Academic Drama Theater. Co-author of the analytical studies “Ukrainian Theater: The Way to Ourselves” (2018) and “Education for Cultural Managers. Current Situation and Prospects for Development“ (2021), co-author of the modular program for secondary schools ”Theater and Drama” (2020).
Partners of the event: Center for Urban History and "Rodovid" publishing house.