Beau Monde on Empire’s Edge: State and Stage in Soviet Ukraine

The Ukrainian edition of an important monograph by historian and theatre scholar Mayhill Fowler (translated by Yaroslava Strikha), originally published by the University of Toronto Press in 2017.

In the Ukrainian edition, jointly prepared by the Rodovid publishing house and the Center for Urban History, the author explores the complex relationship between art and the state in Soviet Ukraine during the 1920s–1930s. She does so through a collective biography of artists and officials who shaped culture within the diverse environment of Kharkiv at the time.

The main figures of this book — Les Kurbas, Mykola Kulish, and Ostap Vyshnia — created a modern, innovative theatre that matched the best European standards. Yet their names remain relatively unknown and marginalized in European and global theatre studies.

Mayhill Fowler writes about the paradoxes of Soviet artistic culture and its transformation: from unique artistic centers on the periphery of the former empire to the centralization of culture in Moscow; from the joint development of a new Ukrainian culture by artists and bureaucrats to the “merging of the world of bureaucracy with the world of art,” in which “the divide between civil servants and artists dissolved, giving rise to the archetypes of official artists and art bureaucrats in Stalin’s 1930s.”

The book tells the story of the relationship between art and political power in the context of the Soviet state — through the formation of an artistic elite and establishment; through an ambitious project to create a new culture that would be both modern and urban while remaining distinctly Ukrainian; through the birth of the Soviet cultural infrastructure and hierarchies; through questions of centrality and peripherality, decentralization and de-peripheralization of cultural processes; through the building of a system of state patronage and control, and the theatre’s unique role as a space of improvisation; through the multilingual, multicultural, and multi-environmental cultural life of the 1920s, and its gradual yet radical homogenization culminating in the repressions of the 1930s.