A play in 4 acts by Mykola Kulish
Premiere: November 24, 1930 in Kharkiv
Director: Les (Leontii) Dubovyk
Artist: Vadym Meller
Composer: Yulii Meitus
Members of Director’s Lab: O. Ishchenko, K. Kovalenko
Serhii Smyk, Poor Man – Danylo Antonovych
Musii Kopystka, Poor Man – Les Serdiuk, Amvrosii Buchma
Paraska, His Wife – Nadiia Tytarenko, Hanna Babiivna
Ivan Stonozhka – Vasyl Stetsenko
Hanna, His Wife – Natalia Pylypenko, Antonina Smereka
Vasia, Their Son – Mykola Nazarchuk, Ivan Havryshko
Old Man Yukhym – Yosyp Hirniak, Serhii Khodkevych
Panko – Fedir Radchuk
Hodovanyi, Kurkul – Oleksandr Romanenko
Hyria Hnat – Marian Krushelnytskyi, Serhii Karpenko
Lyzia, Their Daughter – Olimpiia Dobrovolska
Old Man with a Stick – Dmytro Miliutenko
Angry Man – Mykola Savchenko
Someone – Andrii Shutenko
Laryvon, Hyryn’s Journeyman – Mytrofan Kononenko, Borys Drobinskyi
Oryna, Elder – Sofiia Fedortseva, Klavdiia Pilinska
Man – Mykhailo Zhadanivskyi, Hryhorii Kozachenko
Monastery Nuns:
First – Orysia Steshenko, N. Chorna
Second – Hanna Lor, Lesia Datsenko
Kurkuls: Pavlovskyi, Popenko, Farfel, Sokil, Tamara Zhevchenko, Kolomiitseva, Yuliia Fomina, Balabanova, O. Vereshchynska
Middle Peasants: Sydorenko, Sofiienko, Hriniov, Hladkov
Poor Peasants: Serhii Verkhatskyi, Vashchenko, Bondarenko, Pishvaniv, Kozyriova, Yaroslava Kosakivna
Mykola Kulish broke into Ukrainian literature with his first play. The tragedy 97 was inspired by the author’s winter 1921 and spring 1922 trips to the Kherson region while he was working as an education inspector. Kulish traveled from village to village trying to save public schools and boarding schools from collapse and children from starvation – often unsuccessfully… In a 1923 letter to Ivan Dniprovskyi he wrote: “I never thought that I would appear on the literary arena with a play. A newbie should have first written a short story or a novella. But it so happened that a play was hatched.”
The events of the terrible winter of 1921-1922 turned against the poorest – entire families perished, illustrating the class statistics of the famine. “There is no monumental action in the play,” writes Kulish. It is a row of gold-framed drawings of rural life -miserable, poor and destroyed by famine… There is no pathos, no brilliant battle slogans. The revolutionary every day struggle is small but sharp and relentless. The poor crumble at night to light the Red Flame. An enemy force – kurkuls and famine – oppresses them and drags them to their death.”
Berezil worked on this dramatic material twice.
The first version of the production appeared in Kyiv in summer 1925, but the show never opened. Young director Yanuarii Bortnyk proposed an “original interpretation.” Les Kurbas calls the adaptation of 97 propaganda. In a sense this is a “perfect, extraordinary play. It’d be good if we agreed that the less is written the greater the director’s achievement…”
The second version appears in Kharkiv in 1930.
The premiere of 97, which took place on November 24, 1930, was created by director Les Dubovyk and artist Vadym Meller. They used conventional means while maintaining the realism of acting. The author rewrote much of the play, consolidated the images and cleaned up the plot.
Theater critic Natalia Kuziakina wrote: “The new ending of 97 was defined by the playwright’s growth. Kulish was now able to achieve the proper dramatic effect without balancing on the edge of realism and naturalism. He no longer needed a bag of human bones thrown in the middle of the stage as visual evidence of cannibalism – the labored breath of the truth was there even without it.”
Mykola Kulish reflected on utopian ideas and their transformation into reality. The main conflict in 97 wasn’t between the kurkuls and the poor: the conflict was primarily between the goal and the means of reaching this goal.
Goal – communism, people’s happiness.
Ways – hunger, cannibalism, death.
Means – pillaging, blood, barracks, eliminating the individual, destroying ancestral roots and morals.
Ninety-seven dead was the price of utopia in one Ukrainian village. 97 was a monument to those victims, a requiem by the playwright. “Hunger and revolution shown in a theater don’t stop being hunger and revolution,” said Mykola Kulish, the author of the first play about the Holodomor in Ukraine.
Berezil actor Roman Cherkashyn recalled: “Indifference to the misfortune of others was growing. The new times demanded new songs – heroic, sublime, full of careless optimism. Berezil’s 97 did not breathe with such optimism.”
A few years later the terrible Holodomor of 1932-1933 engulfed Ukraine, taking the lives of millions – mostly in rural areas. The theater’s and playwright’s prophecy fell on deaf ears.