A Ukrainian Woman in Remote Karelia
A great many people know of the drama company, Berezil, and its founder, Les Kurbas. Yet, information concerning many of Ukraine’s creative personalities, such as those involved in Berezil, remains in the form of letters and archival documents. Some are stored at the Kyiv Museum of Dramatic, Musical, and Cinematographic Art of Ukraine. This includes the archives of Olha Datsenko, who stayed with Berezil for 13 years. January 12, 2003, marked the centennial of her birth.
Olha Datsenko shared a dressing room with Valentyna Chystiakova, the woman Les Kurbas fell in love with, for which the company’s “secret council” imposed upon her a “death sentence.” The actors were afraid that the affair could make Kurbas quit. Fortunately, no bloodshed followed. Kurbas and Chystiakova were married and she became one of the company’s leading performers. Olha Datsenko spent many years with her-as well as with prima donna, Natalia Uzhviy, and Nadiya Tytarenko (she was less well known) — applying and lifting makeup, sharing news, changing, and eating lunch.
Olha’s mother, a modest rural schoolteacher, could not have dreamed of her daughter leading such a life. Datsenko recalls the turning point in her biography: “She [her mother] kept their home ticking, there were no men in the family. Can you imagine what happened after I told them I was going to study to become an actress? I left the village in 1922.” Les Kurbas saw her as a 19-year-old entrant at the Lysenko Institute of Music and Dramatic Art. He taught drama according to his own system. He said, “Lesia is a typical Ukrainian woman.” After a month at the institute, Datsenko and four other lucky students were enrolled in the Berezil group.
At Kurbas’ company, Datsenko did not play many roles, but every role was very interesting and enlightening: Olia in “People’s Malakhiy,” Ulia in “Mina Mazailo,” Kateryna and Ling Dzing in “The Death of Lady Gray,” to mention but a few, but even this represents a variety of characters, styles, and genres. With time came a number of funny incidents of which the Kurbas’ company was rich. “What I remember in ‘Lady Gray’ is Chystiakova asking the Chinese if they had read anything by Kipling,” she would write years later. Working for other drama companies, Datsenko would often complain about stage directors ruthlessly exploiting a lonely actress, who had no strings to pull, while the company administration had a government-appointed plan to carry out. Of course, the situation would have been different if the Kurbas had not been arrested in 1934.
Berezil had an impact on Datsenko’s professional and private life. Her first husband, stage director Borys Tiahnotezh, also worked for the company. They spent 8 years together. In the last three years he worked for Odesa’s “filmmaking factory” and Olha did not want to leave Berezil. It was the main reason for their separation. Her second husband was Borys Drobinsky, also an actor and stage director at Berezil. She bore no children in the first marriage, but in 1936 Datsenko and Drobinsky had a daughter, Maryanka.
Their family was no exception to Berezil’s tragic lot. Drobinsky was soon arrested and it was some time before his wife learned the bad news. She was waiting for him in Shyshaky where they lived temporarily, before receiving a flat in Kyiv. Drobinsky rented a room in the city and Olha found out about his arrest from their friends. In his absence, NKVD men entered his room and searched it. The man was outraged and went to the NKVD to complain. He was locked in a cell and spent a year there without being interrogated. “Your man is a Pole,” Olha was told by the investigating officer. Drobinsky received 14 years and “no right to correspondence” [official euphemism in the Soviet Union under Stalin, meaning execution by firing squad]. “Now we know what it means,” she wrote several decades later.
After that she could not find a job, not even at the Ivan Franko company, largely consisting at the time of Berezil actors. At long last she joined the Zhytomyr itinerant company. Later, she would join and quit drama companies in Mariupol, Poltava, and Kamianets- Podilsky, looking for a place where she would feel comfortable. Datsenko said of one such company something that described them all: “I had no future there.” Once she received an offer through the “Moscow Actor Exchange” from the newly established Second Russian Drama Theater of the Karelo-Finnish Republic. Few opted for the privilege. Datsenko was one of those that did. She soon found herself in Karelia. “The cast was small as the company operated in a backwater province. No one in Karelia had ever heard of Berezil or of the Kurbas. Some of the actors had heard about Uzhviy.”
Predictably, her life there was anything but easy, although she was popular with the audiences and critics. She made her name for a second time. She was said to have dramatic culture and a good school. Hardships notwithstanding, Olha Datsenko always recalled Les Kurbas as a Teacher in the upper case.
