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Beau Monde on Empire's Edge: State and Stage in Soviet Ukraine. By Mayhill C. Fowler. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017. xvi, 282 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Photographs. $75.00, hard bound.
The early history of Soviet theater and stage is often told from a Russocentric viewpoint, with Moscow and Mikhail Bulgakov figuring prominently in the narrative. Mayhill Fowler refocuses the outlines of Soviet theater history by telling the story of Kharkiv and of a theater that aimed to be both Soviet and Ukrainian. She describes the 1920s as a period of enormous creativity, in which individual inspiration and government plans jostled in the newly-minted capital of Soviet Ukraine. The playwright Mykol Kulish, the stage director Les Kurbas, the writer Ostap Vyshnia, and the set designer Vadym Meller were among a host of talents that produced a theater of genius. Most of this cohort were housed in the Slovo Building, which was conceived as a creative laboratory for the new culture (a project analogous the Moscow's House on the Embankment that Yuri Slezkine has recently described). By the thirties the Slovo Building had become a...