Kharkov! Kharkov!

Musical performance “Kharkov! Kharkov!” is the premiere performance of Serhii Zhadan's play, translated by Adam Pomorski. The text was commissioned by the Polish Theatre in Warsaw.

The performance in musical form tells a story inspired by the fate of the avant-garde theater Berezil and its creator — director-reformer Lesia Kurbas, who worked in Kharkov from 1925 to 1933. It tells the story of conflicts between the city and the theater, the director and the director, the director and the spectators, the director and the actors... The fate of Kurbas becomes It is a metaphor for the fate of every creator — or perhaps every one of us — of “Everyman” fighting for ideals.

In Ukrainian, the word “berezil” means March. Kurbas chose this name for his theatre, inspired by a poem by Norwegian writer and Nobel Prize winner Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, beginning with the words: “I choose March because it is the rebellion from which summer will be born.” The Berezil Theater was born out of rebellion.

Kharkiv is a city with a rich history and culture. The cradle of the Ukrainian avant-garde. In the 1920s, prominent artists lived and worked there — not only writers, but also painters, sculptors, filmmakers — called the “Shot Rebirth” or “The Shot Generation”. Most of them lost their lives during the Stalinist purge in the 1930s, and their illegitimate, in the opinion of the Soviet authorities, creativity was erased from the official history of Ukrainian culture for decades to come.

Oleksandr Zenon Kurbas was a Ukrainian actor and director. In 1922 he founded the philosophical and political theater Berezil — seeking new forms of expression for Ukrainian drama. In 1933 he was arrested. A year later, in a fictitious trial, he was sentenced to five years in the camp for his participation in an alleged Ukrainian terrorist organization. In November 1937, Lys Kurbas was killed in a mass execution, along with dozens of other Ukrainian artists and social activists, in the Sandarmoch forests of Karelia. Along with the mass graves lie the victims of the “great terror” of 1937-1938. There may be as many as 10,000 of them.

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