About ten years ago I asked my students at the Theatrical Institute to stage a makeshift poll on Khreshchatyk. We wanted to find out if a man in the street knew prominent — by our standards — Ukrainian actors, stage directors, and designers.
The returns confirmed our expectations. The theater turned out to be very far away from the people. Passers-by listened to the list of "popular names" read to them with baffled faces. Some were embarrassed and tried to guess who was who and were happy to hear the names of Ada Rohovtseva and Bohdan Stupka (among almost fifty others). Several respondents recognized the name of Les Taniuk, but only as a People's Deputy.
He phoned me the other day. My son answered and he identified himself as a People's Deputy. The boy thought it was a very good joke. I thought it was a tribute to a horrifying reality when a noted creative personality becomes engrossed in and fully identifies with politics. Now Les Taniuk is firmly rooted in parliamentary schemes and party confrontations. They are part of his daily life. I am sure that if we conducted another poll now his name would be instantly recognized and responses would be very active, ranging from praise to curses. Alas, politics makes one more popular than the theater.
Actually, I am not sure how to picture him now. A public figure? I would be hard put to list all his public titles and posts. And his duties! They are mind-boggling, and yet I am sure that he can tackle them all and that he puts his heart into whatever he does. He is not a workaholic, it is just that he does whatever he considers important with fanatical dedication. I have never seen him let the grass grow under his feet. He is busy even when in company, at a party, in small talk, even in a bohemian hot air session. He may be talking about nothing, but his brain is busy working over situations, analyzing things, comparing facts, calculating moves. He is a like a chess player engrossed in an endless game. Probably an excellent trait in a politician, as well as in a stage director, which Taniuk remains, far removed from the theater as he is now.
Sometimes I find myself thinking that he is too intelligent and disciplined for a creative man. His theatrical experience is legendary — an impression he must have fostered as an excellent expert on the theater, being only too well aware that in this domain plausible fantasies are always superior to flat daily realities. It is generally known that as a young man his productions were ruthlessly censored and banned. His ill-wishers intimate that it was all his doing, because he consciously irritated all those cultural watchdogs with acid remarks, directly challenging them with phrases like "One has to fear not the Minister of Culture, but the culture of that Minister" (there is no denying his sharp tongue and that a target of his verbal attack is a sorry sight afterward). And so his enemies – of whom he has made enough and to spare – are fond of repeating that such censorship and being banned actually made him his name. The fact remains, however, that his productions were all innovative. That nobody can deny. Hence the legendary coloration which is so characteristic of the theater.
Another thing is Taniuk's return to Kyiv from immigration to Moscow in the late 1980s. He arrived wearing a dissident's and nonconformist's halo. Something unheard-of, unthinkable for the local downtrodden theatrical habitat. Followed his clashes with party bosses, he gave them devastatingly accurate characteristics and never bothered to keep them to himself or his close friends. He was always ready to argue his point and staged "blasphemous" soirees at the Youth Theater, rallying round him the most disobedient, undisciplined, unruly individuals – meaning those who had managed to stay true to themselves, free from the ideological yoke. It was the intellectual cream of the capital. And then suddenly two downright Soviet productions based on Mikhail Shatrov's works.
I know for a fact that many have not forgiven Taniuk to this day. People hate to be disappointed in persons they come to idolize. So they start branding and tramping on fallen idols, avenging their unjustified illusions and hopes. Far from heroic themselves, they are happy to see others as heroes and are incensed when they do not live up to the image made for them. Meanwhile Taniuk has always abided by his own logic. He is very good at multistage maneuvering. He is a born strategist and this is something which, in my opinion, his political opponents do not fully comprehend. Even at the Youth Theater he played a subtle game and did it according to his own rules. Every move he made he considered realistic and it proved the only correct one under the circumstances. He used Shatrov as a battering ram to breach the wall of censorship for himself and for Mykola Kulish, the repressed playwright of the 1920s still very much under suspicion at the time, whose plays he wanted to stage more than anything else. He never did because there was no time left for the theater.
Do not get me wrong. This is not an eulogy commemorating the man's birthday, and nor did I intend a literary portrait of Les Taniuk. I would not even know how to go about introducing this man to the reading public. His Herculean labor and skills (actor, poet, translator, theatrical historian – in my opinion, the best in Ukraine – and command of five languages, along with unbelievable erudition) are hard if at all possible to describe. I am perplexed to realize that most of my fellow countrymen associate his name primarily with a captivating political orator, parliamentary rebel, party functionary, or public celebrity. I am aggrieved to know that even in the theatrical world he is mentioned at times as a smart politico, master of intrigue, and gambler. This is unfair, because I am convinced that he regards politics as a big theater. He has done so much to rehabilitate Les Kurbas's name (his first name is actually Leonid, but he made it Les in his honor) and, most importantly, his ideas, so he cannot think differently than that only true Ukrainian theatrical genius whose life was cut short in the Solovetski Islands concentration camp. Kurbas believed that the theater could reform the whole world, changing it for the better. Ideas for which one is prepared to sacrifice one's life are always worth something, Taniuk's other idol, Mykola Kulish, used to say.
Pathos is a boring thing. I think that Taniuk finds it all as offensive as I do. He knows that something well said can have a very strong effect and he is an expert polemicist. But for him this skill is just another tactical stratagem. His goals are always quite specific, even if not at first visible. Personally, I am aggrieved to know that politics stole him from the theater. I am angry to watch this man, hardened by years of struggle against the Soviet bureaucracy, use its dogmatic tricks to achieve planned results. Well, to each his own – or should I say that everyone bears his own cross?
Photo by Viktor Marushchenko, The Day:
Les Taniuk is an ambitious man and accepts the mace with joy







