By Oleksandr KLEKOVKIN
140 years ago the wife of a poor Polish aristocrat Karl Tobilewicz living
in what is now Kherson oblast delivered a boy who was baptized under the
name Panas and who would go down
in theatrical history under his stage name Panas Saksahansky.
His older brothers would make spectacular careers, starting as a petty
clerk on to a senior office manager and then noted writer (e.g., Ivan Karpenko-Kary),
and as an army officer, eventually holder of the St. George Cross (Mykola
Sadovsky). An officer's career with its attractive paraphernalia - trousers
with stripes, epaulettes, sword, rifle, and champagne - was soon open for
Panas Tobilewicz (Saksahansky), promising boundless (like our current democracy)
horizons and sweet dreams.
Of all the stupid things a young man could have possibly conceived at
the time, the older brothers Tobilewicz chose the most insane, the theater.
Their father was crestfallen: "What a bunch of fools! Just look at yourselves:
an officer to the marrow, you could have made a general. But no, you want
the theater." And with a dreamy sigh, "And you could have made an archdeacon."
Marko Kropyvnytsky's grandmother (Marko was the brothers' good friend)
was of the same opinion: "Civil service is the ultimate ideal of every
real man, with an annual salary of 300 rubles. You serve and you get paid
and promoted." (Probably adding to herself that the salary was nothing
compared to bribes and favors - since bribery was almost as popular then
as now).
Indeed, more than a hundred years prior to the beginning of the
long-awaited epoch of the "rebirth of national culture" - the way we put
it these days - there was the Little Russian theater. Compared to the imperial
drama company, it presented a lamentable sight: itinerant market shows
(somewhat like our contemporary "shuttle merchants" - peddlrs traveling
abroad to buy cheap merchandise then trying to sell it at a profit at home),
exposed to the elements, bureaucrats, but mostly forced to exist on a semi-legal
basis, hiding in the shadows of official art.
Yet the young fools not only ruined their careers, but also lured the
youngest brother Panas into the trap with stories about stage and backstage
life and bohemian ventures. As was then traditional, each took a stage
name lest the rest of the family be scandalized.
It was thus that the Ukrainian Theater of Coryphae emerged in Yelysavethrad,
October 27, 1882, born of broken filial piety and behavior casting shame
on relatives. It was some time before Panas Tobilewicz joined the troupe.
At the time it was formed he was away on a military exercise with his unit.
He was still dreaming of epaulettes, striped hussar trousers, and toasting
beautiful ladies with champagne. This did not last long, however, and Melpomene
proved the strongest of temptresses. It was after he joined the troupe
that the history of the Ukrainian Coryphae Theater began.
At the beginning the young actors were not sure where the road they
had chosen would take them. They would quarrel. The troupe would fall apart,
then get together again, which was bad for their image, of course. Yet
the main thing was that they continued to perform and showed progress,
and their attainments were such that listing them would take all one's
fingers and even hair on one's head.
The most surprising of all their victories was the building of their
theater, one which, under the influence of the unfavorable circumstances
of life surrounding them ought to be bent like the Leaning Tower of Pisa,
yet it stood straight, as though it could not have been different.
And the structure itself was amazing because it emerged in spite of
everything - father's instructions and the laws of human nature, tsarist
edicts and instructions, restrictions, and superstitions, imperial chauvinism
and Little Russian provincialism, and in general contrary to the laws of
common sense.
No less amazing was the fact that in the nonexistent state of Ukraine,
the troupe, as the Little Russian Meiningen players were then called, or
khokhols, turned into a drama company with a clear orientation toward
a nation-state. This theater became not only an outstanding creative but
also a public event.
And if Schiller was right saying that only a formed nation can form
its theater, then with regard to the Coryphae Theater a mirror thesis is
true: the theater completed the formation of the nation.
The theater where Saksahansky was the first Ukrainian stage director
to write dialogues and scenarios.
It was a theater, which was marked by an unheard-of at the time ensemble,
which made it move ahead of the empire's theatrical art by at least 15
years.
A theater, which scored splendid success not only in Ukraine but also
in both Russian capitals.
A theater, which established the tradition of performing the Ukrainian
classical repertoire.
A theater, the actors and actresses of which received refined epithets
and were offered mind-boggling fees if they agreed to embellish the imperial
scene.
After becoming the first theater for the Ukrainian intelligentsia, but
without its own independent state behind its back or even a miserable state
subsidy, even moral support from some ministry of culture, working as a
private theatrical concern, this company, in addition to everything else,
was self-financing.
And the theater survived (although in a different form, after Sadovsky
returned from emigration) even in the 1920s.
Supporting the old coryphaeus morally rather than by concrete deeds,
the authorities of the period gave him the highest artistic ranks - People's
Artist of the Republic and USSR, and the Red Banner of Labor Order, and
in 1937 gave his name to a very long Kyiv street, former Zhandarmska (Gendarme)
Street (one could say that the father's dream finally came true; he had
made general).
True, it also took "new Ukrainians" of the time who in their publications
(for example, the journal Molodniak) wrote about the Coryphae Theater
invariably referring to the cast as a bunch of Little Russian charlatans.
Yet despite the ideology of those new Ukrainians, "Saksahansky's tours,"
as Les Kurbas wrote, "always gathered packed houses, people with long mustaches,
wearing embroidered shirts whom we had never before seen in the audience.
There were also Ukrainian intellectuals from the Academy of Sciences. Usually
we do not see them at our theater or very seldom at best... And the Russian
intelligentsia boycotts us."
True, the Coryphae Theater was most often referred to as the Philistine
(mishchansky) Theater, and philistine in the Communist sense of
the word at the time was a close synonym to intellectual, and the intelligentsia
had to be uprooted, of course.
With such awkward, nearly extinct audiences Saksahansky's performances
gradually became sporadic occurrences, mostly at clubs, of which Serhiy
Yefremov wrote in 1925: "Until then we knew that the Russian Governor General
Ignatiev used to allow Ukrainian troupes to appear with not more than three
performances, thus the Communist Governor General appears to be using the
same method..." (and now it transpires that not only the Communist Governor
General is using this method).
And still the theater survived, not only in Saksahansky's plays. But
also in traditions scattered in other troupes.
It survived perhaps just to embody the paradoxical confrontation of
the theatrical past and present: the upsurge of the national theater in
Little Russia and its misery in independent Ukraine (where official sources
maintain that the process of the rebirth of national culture is gaining
a fiery scope and where this culture is allegedly being integrated into
the "general European context").
Or maybe its unplanned development was provoked by the Valuyev circular,
Ems Ukase, Sergeant-Major Tsar with his Corporal Drenteln, and the exacting
censor?
Well we have a sergeant-major and a corporal, so what does our intelligentsia
theater lack?







