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The Chair of Ukrainian Studies, in
cooperation with the Ukrainian Canadian
Professional and Business Association of
Ottawa and the University of Toronto Press,
launched an exciting new lecture series, the John
Ramon Hnatyshyn Lecture on 7 May 2004, in memory
of the Chair’s late Patron. Mrs. Gerda
Hnatyshyn, who was in attendance, spoke about her
late husband’s longstanding interest in and
support of the arts. When in office,
Mr. Hnatyshyn initiated the Governor
General’s Performing Arts Awards and,
subsequently, created the Hnatyshyn
Foundation.
It was thus fitting that Professor Makaryk whose lecture, based on her
latest book, Shakespeare in the
Undiscovered Bourn: Les Kurbas, Ukrainian
Modernism, and Early Soviet Cultural
Politics (University of Toronto Press,
2004), was chosen to initiate this new lecture
series.
Introducing Professor Makaryk was Mr.
Bill Harnum, Vice-President, Scholarly Publishing
of the University of Toronto Press, who spoke
about her project and her previous publications
with the Press. He was followed by comments from
Professor Dominique Arel.
In her lecture, “Theatre, Nation,
Identity: Les’ Kurbas and Modernist
Shakespeare,” Professor Makaryk focussed on
the work of avant-garde stage and film director
Les Kurbas (1885-1937), who laid the foundations
for the Ukrainian theatre and cinema in the 20th
century. Kurbas created extraordinary, innovative
productions which preceded by over a decade the
techniques of Western directors such as Bertolt
Brecht. His achievements were also measured by
the context in which he found himself: a theatre
which, until 1906, had been subject to severe
tsarist censorship and, which was, as a
consequence, provincial and inward-looking.
Focussing on his productions of
Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Professor
Makaryk showed how Kurbas responded both to
burning political issues of the day, as well as
to a range of aesthetic debates, including the
broadest one, on the nature of representation
itself. Executed in the far north of Russia in
1937, Kurbas was a forbidden word for nearly two
decades, and was only fully
“rehabilitated” after the creation of
a independent Ukraine.
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