Мина Мазайло; Патетична соната

by Mykola Kulish, Микола Куліш (Аuthor)

До пропонованої збірки увійшли п’єси Миколи Куліша (1892—1937), що стали новим словом у модерній українській драматургії та європейській куль­турі в цілому. У комедії “Мина Мазайло” письменник у легкій пародійній формі на тлі чвар однієї родини зумів показати всі підводні камені тогочасної українізації, змусивши глядача сміятися і замислюватися водночас. Не менш серйозну загальнолюдську тему протистояння почуттів та обов’язку порушено і в ліричній драмі “Патетична соната”, герой якої опиняється по інший бік барикад від своєї коханої й ми­моволі стає слухняною зброєю в руках очільниці таємної організації. У цьому творі вдало поєднано рух, слово і музику, а ритм йому задає однойменна соната великого Бетховена.

207 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 2018

About the author

Микола Куліш - the most famous Ukrainian playwright of the twentieth century. After his mother’s early death, Kulish spent most of his childhood in orphanages and charity homes. He finished his early education thanks to the financial support of distant acquaintances. He began writing satirical poems and plays as a gymnasium student in Oleshky. After graduating from the gymnasium in Poti (now in Georgia) in 1914, he studied history and philology at Odesa University. Kulish’s university education was interrupted by the outbreak of the First World War. He was conscripted into the Russian Army, took part in military campaigns as an infantry officer in Galicia, Volhynia, and Belarus, and thus came into contact with the Ukrainian national movement. In 1917 Kulish was wounded at the front and discharged. Later that year he served as head of the town council in Oleshky. He participated in the Ukrainian Struggle for Independence (1917–20), organizing a guerrilla regiment to fight the Russian Volunteer Army in Southern Ukraine and distinguishing himself as its commanding officer.

Kulish wrote fourteen plays. Six of them were published during his lifetime. He became famous after the stage success in 1924 of his first play, 97, which is generally considered the beginning of Soviet Ukrainian drama and the first major play written in the USSR as a whole. It was, however, not staged as Kulish had written it, but was censored by first production’s director, Hnat Yura, who changed Kulish’s tragic finale to an ideologically correct, optimistic one. Kulish’s subsequent plays shared similar fates and were heavily censored or banned outright by the Soviet authorities. As a dramatist, Kulish initially devoted his efforts to portraying the postrevolutionary struggle among the peasantry of Southern Ukraine. Besides 97, the plays on that subject included Komuna v stepakh (A Commune in the Steppes, 1925) and, several years later, the final work in his ‘village trilogy’—Proshchai, selo (Farewell, Village, 1933). The Soviet censors forced him not only to revise the latter, but even to rename it Povorot Marka (Marko's Return, 1934), deeming the original title an allusion to the destruction of the traditional Ukrainian village by Soviet collectivization and the Famine-Genocide of 1932–3.

During the second phase of his dramaturgy, Kulish turned to writing comedy and satire. In Otak zahynuv Huska (That’s How Huska Perished, 1925) and Khulii Khuryna (1926), which harked back to Nikolai Gogol’s themes and motifs, he ridiculed the attitudes and prejudices of both prerevolutionary Russian imperial society and of the new Soviet bureaucracy. The culmination of his of demythologization of the Bolshevik revolution was his melodrama Zona (Ergot, 1926), which Kulish later reworked and renamed Zakut (Dead End, 1929). He also wrote a ‘linguistic comedy,’ Myna Mazailo (1929), where, in a manner akin to Molière, he satirized the political and social impact of the Soviet policy of Ukrainization.

During his most productive and creative period as a playwright and close collaborator of Les Kurbas and the Berezil theater, Kulish abandoned the style and tools of traditional, realist dramaturgy. Instead, he experimented with expressionist and avant-garde writing, often combining it with elements of the Ukrainian puppet theater (vertep) and school dramas popular of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. His most important trilogy of that period—Narodnii Malakhii (The People's Malakhii, 1927), Patetychna sonata (Sonata pathétique, 1930), and Vichnyi bunt (Eternal Rebellion, 1932)—addresses the stark contradictions between Ukrainian national aspirations and Soviet reality and deals with the inherent conflict between an individual’s aspirations and a society’s principles.

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Reviews

[Mykhailo Shumylo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Класику треба перечитувати. Школа школою, але зараз окремі літтвори варті повторного прочитання, осмислення та проведення паралелей. З одного боку, це занурення в атмосферу кінця 20-х ХХ століття, з іншого, це чудова комедія, таке собі українське взорування на Мольєра. Хто не читав чи забув, рекомендую прочитати, хто читав давно, рекомендую перечитати. Особливо раджу прочитати харківʼянам, як не як події відбуваються в Харкові.

[Yeva Smelianska · Rating 5 out of 5]

Мене так вразив цей твір, дуже відгукнулось! Навіть не віриться, що автор жив 100 років тому й аналізував події минулого, а не теперішню ситуацію. Прочитала не відриваючись!