The Bard as Modernist Revolutionary

Les Kurbas

The story of theatre director Les Kurbas has “soon to be a major motion picture” written all over it. Any Hollywood star would kill for the role. Les Kurbas was a dashing, passionate, charismatic genius of the stage, “one of the great Soviet Stage directors of the early twentieth century, on a par with Meyerhold and Tairov, but almost no one in the West seems to know this.” Kurbas is notable not just for his stellar achievements, but also for the abysmal conditions that were his stomping grounds. Famine, war, revolution, rehearsals at gunpoint—rotten reviews were the least of his problems. Or so it seemed—until Kurbas was literally wiped out by Joseph Stalin, both in body and in memory.

Despite its forbidding title, Irena R. Makaryk’s Shakespeare in the Undiscovered Bourn: Les Kurbas, Ukrainian Modernism and Early Soviet Cultural Politics makes for a thrilling read. The...