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Original hand-painted poster for a theatre production performed in a Ukrainian Displaced Person’s Camp, two months before the troupe moved for good to the US.

Ivan Karpenko-Karyi’s (pseud. of Ivan Tobilevych) psychological drama The Fortuneless Maiden, written in the late 19th century, was here staged by Volodimir Blavatsky (1900-53), a notable Ukrainian actor and theatre director, and the first Ukrainian Hamlet (in a production staged in Lviv in 1943). In 1941-44, he was a co-founder and artistic director of the Lviv Opera Theatre. From 1945 to 1949, in Regensburg, he organised and headed what was apparently “the first Ukrainian professional theatre abroad”, “The Ensemble of Ukrainian Actors” (“AUA”), in charge of the present production (quote from Kolomyia Academic Regional Ukrainian Drama Theatre, our translation here and elsewhere). In 1949, the ensemble moved to the US and became the “Ukrainian Theatre in Philadelphia” (1950-55; in some sources 1957), also apparently “the first Ukrainian theatre in America” (ibid).

The production’s stage was designed by the theatre artist Vladislav Klekh (1922-2001), “a key figure in the period of formation of Ukrainian stage art” (Reznik). Born in Kyiv, he studied at the Konstantinovka Art School in the Donbass. During the war, he was mobilised into the Soviet army, taken prisoner in Germany, and escaped. In 1942-43, he worked as a stage designer at a theatre in Bila Tsirkva. After the war, he became a set designer and one of the organisers of the DP theatre “Rozvaga” [“Entertainment”] in New Ulm; in 1947-49, he joined the “Ensemble of Ukrainian Actors”. For most of his later career, he was in the US, for decades working at the Metropolitan Opera in New York; he also joined teams of film set designers for such blockbusters as Spartakus (1960) and West Side Story (1961), among others (cf. Revutskyi).

After 1945, more than 200,000 Ukrainian displaced persons remained in the western zones of Germany, where they lived in Ukrainian DP camps that became “particularly fertile for nation building” (Antons): during the camps’ brief existence, an active civic, cultural, and educational life developed there. “The cultural repertoire was fused to national heritage […] The task at hand was to preserve Ukrainian culture and values for the next generations and an independent state” (ibid). The present poster, advertising a play by one of the luminaries of Ukrainian theatre, is a meaningful testament to this experience.

If not Klekh, the artist responsible for the poster signed it illegibly in the lower right corner; to the left, the “PCIRO [Preparatory Commission of the International Refugee Organization] Camp Police” stamp can be faintly traced. The verso is inscribed by M. Markovskii, likely a participant of the production or a member of its audience, recording the year of the performance in Ukrainian.

Bibliography

Antons, Jan-Hinnerk. “The Nation in a Nutshell? Ukrainian Displaced Persons Camps in Postwar Germany.” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 37, nos. 1–2, 2020, pp. 177–211; Revutskyi, V. D. “Klekh Vladyslav.” Encyclopedia of Modern Ukraine, vol. 13. Institute of Encyclopedic Research, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, 2013; Reznik, Oksana. “Problemy stsenohrafii v rezhysuri Volodymyra Blavatskoho.” Narodoznavchi zoshyty, no. 4 (106), 2012, pp. 704–707; “Blavatskyi, Volodymyr Ivanovych (1900–1953).” Lehendy teatru. Kolomyiskyi akademichnyi oblasnyi ukrainskyi dramatychnyi teatr im. Ivana Ozarkevycha.