5. Culture of ukraine
Who are these people? Speak more about their life and creative work.
Work in groups of three ot four. Choose five Ukrainian writers (poets) who in your opinion represent Ukrainian literature best. Try to reach consensus with other groups. Explain your choice.
Read the following outline of the development of Ukrainian music and visual arts. Find answers to the questions:
What were the dominant forms in Ukrainian music of the past?
Which models was Ukrainian early church music patterned on?
What was Mykola Dyletsky's contribution in the development of church music?
When did Ukrainian choral music reach its peak?
Whose works made secular music prominent in the 19th century?
What was the role of Mykola Lysenko in Ukrainian classical music?
Which types of visual arts have been specific of Ukraine over the centuries?
How did Ukrainian visual arts develop after the introduction of Christianity?
How did Western European influences affect Ukrainian art in the 17th and the 18th centuries?
Who represents best the Classicism and the developing realism of the 19th century in Ukrainian visual art?
How are trends of modern art represented in Ukrainian painting?
Folk music in Ukraine retains great vitality to this day.
In the past ritual songs, ballads, and historical songs (dumy) were sung a cappella or accompanied by folk instruments, of which the bandura is the most popular. Church music was patterned on Byzantine and Bulgarian models with local variations evolving in Kyiv in the early period.
Polyphonic singing developed by the 16th century and was transmitted in the 17th century to Russia, where Ukrainian singers and musical culture soon won a dominant position.
The 17th-century composer Mykola Dyletsky introduced soprano singers to church choirs and emphasized emotional expression in his compositions. Ukrainian choral music reached its peak in the 18th and early 19th centuries in the works of Maksym Berezovsky, Dmytro Bortnyansky, and Artem Vedel.
The role of secular music rose in the 19th century. The opera Zaporozhets za Dunayem (1863; "A Cossack Beyond the Danube") by Semen Hulak-Artemovsky gained great popularity, as did Kateryna by Mykola Arkas and the compositions of Petro Nishchynsky and Mykhaylo Verbytsky.
At the turn of the century, Ukrainian musical life was dominated by Mykola Lysenko, whose output encompassed vocal and choral settings, piano compositions, and operas, including Natalka Poltavka (1889), Utoplena ("The Drowned Girl"), and Taras Bulba. Other major composers of the period were Kyrylo Stetsenko and Mykola Leontovych. Leontovych is particularly known for his polyphonic arrangements of ancient folk music.
In the early years of the Soviet period, several composers produced works of high artistic merit, particularly Lev Revutsky and Borys Lyatoshynsky. From the mid-1930s, however, political regimentation did not encourage individual expression and innovation in musical language. Typical among composers of the Soviet Ukraine are Kostyantyn Dankevych, Yuly Meytus, and the brothers Yury and Platon Mayboroda.
Ukraine has six opera theatres, numerous symphony orchestras, academic and folk choirs, and other performing ensembles.
Over the centuries the Ukrainian people have developed a varied folk art. Embroidery, wood carving, ceramics, and weaving are highly developed, with stylized ornamentation that represents many regional styles. Easter eggs (pysanky) have become popular in many countries that have Ukrainian immigrant populations.
With the introduction of Christianity in the 10th century, the various forms of Byzantine art (architecture, mosaics, frescoes, manuscript illumination, icon painting) spread rapidly and remained the dominant art forms through the 16th century. The beauty and supposed miraculous power of Ukrainian icons was recognized by the invading Poles and Russians, who removed two outstanding ones for veneration to Czestochowa and Vladimir, respectively. The mosaics and frescoes of the churches of Kyiv, notably the Cathedral of St. Sophia (11th-12th century), and the icons of the more distinctively Ukrainian school in Galicia (15th-16th century) are particularly noteworthy. Because such buildings evoked Ukrainian nationalist feelings, a number of outstanding churches, such as the Cathedral of St. Michael's Golden-Domed Monastery (early 12th century), were demolished by the Soviet authorities in 1934, and only international protests saved that of St. Sophia from the same fate.
Western European influences in the 17th and 18th centuries affected iconography and stimulated portrait painting, engraving, and sculpture. From Ukraine the Western trends penetrated into Russia, where many Ukrainian artists worked, especially after Ukraine lost its autonomy to Russia in the 18th century. During the late 18th and early 19th centuries the sculptor and rector of the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts, Ivan Martos, and the portraitists Dmytro Levytsky and Volodymyr Borovykovsky were among the leading figures of the St. Petersburg Classical school of painting.
The Classicism and the developing realism of the 19th century are best represented in the works of Taras Shevchenko.
New art movements are evident in the work of such 19th-century painters as the Impressionists Ivan Trush, Mykola Burachek, and Aleksander Murashko, the Postimpressionist Mykola Hlushchenko, and the Expressionists Oleksander Novakivsky, Alexis Gritchenko (Oleksa Hryshchenko), and Anatoly Petrytsky.
The brief renewal of Ukrainian independence in 1918 fostered further avant-garde trends that reflected Ukrainian national traditions. Two schools developed: in painting, the Monumentalism of Mykhaylo Boychuk, Ivan Padalka, and Vasyl Sedliar, consisting of a blend of Ukrainian Byzantine and Early Renaissance styles; and, in the graphic arts, the Neobaroque of Yurii Narbut. Modernist experimentation ended in Soviet Ukraine in the 1930s, however, when both these schools were suppressed and Socialist Realism became the only officially permitted style.
The Ukrainian avant-garde was brought back to life during Nikita Khrushchev's de-Stalinization campaigns of the late 1950s; it consisted mostly of Expressionists who wanted to illustrate Ukraine's tragic modern history. These artists, who included Alla Horska, Opanas Zalyvakha, and Feodosy Humenyuk, were again suppressed by the Soviet authorities in the 1970s and '80s.
A number of Ukrainian artists have won considerable renown in the West, among them Gritchenko, who began with Cubism and then turned to a dynamic form of Expressionism, and the painter and engraver Jacques Hnizdovsky, who developed a simplified style of realism. The sculptor Alexander Archipenko (Oleksander Arkhypenko), one of the pioneers of Cubism, who later experimented in Constructivism and Expressionism, was a major figure of 20th-century European art.