Description
This book is the first extensive anthology of modern Ukrainian drama to be published in English. It is an insightful textbook and invaluable source of information for students of Ukrainian literature in English-speaking countries. Dr. Onyshkevych developed the idea for this collection while teaching Ukrainian literature at Rutgers University, New Jersey. In preparing a course on Ukrainian drama in translation, she discovered that only a few Ukrainian plays had ever been translated into English. Consequently Dr. Onyshkevych started planning and compiling an anthology of the translated plays of a number of modern Ukrainian authors for use as a university textbook.
The book contains ten dramas by nine prominent twentieth-century Ukrainian playwrights—Lesia Ukrainka, Volodymyr Vynnychenko, Mykola Kulish (two plays), Ivan Kocherha, Oleksii Kolomiiets, Valerii Shevchuk, and postwar émigré authors Eaghor G. Kostetzky (Ihor Kostetsky), Liudmyla Kovalenko, and Bohdan Boychuk. It represents an excellent introduction to the study of modern Ukrainian literature, as well as a useful reference for the general study of drama. Dr. Onyshkevych prefaces each translation with brief biobibliographical information about the playwright and an essay about the play itself. This publication is a parallel volume to her Ukrainian-language anthology Антологія модерної української драми, published by the CIUS Press in 1998.
The Anthology includes the following plays:
- Lesia Ukrainka, In the Wilderness (1897-1909)
- Mykola Kulish, The People’s Malachi (1928)
- Mykola Kulish, Sonata Pathétique (1930)
- Volodymyr Vynnychenko, The Prophet (1929)
- Ivan Kocherha, Masters of Time (1930)
- Liudmyla Kovalenko, The Heroine Dies in the First Act (1948)
- Eaghor G. Kostetzky, A Play about a Great Man (1948)
- Bohdan Boychuk, Hunger-1933 (1961)
- Oleksii Kolomiiets, Planet Speranta (1965)
- Valerii Shevchuk, Birds from an Invisible Island (1992)
Marko R. Stech –
Oksana Lutsyshyna’s review of the Anthology of Modern Ukrainian Drama was published in East/West Journal of Ukrainian Studies, Vol. V, No. 2 (2018), pp. 181-83. Here is the link: http://ewjus.com/index.php/ewjus/article/view/425/pdf
Marko R. Stech –
Professor Marko Pavlyshyn (Monash University) published a review of the Anthology of Modern Ukrainian Drama in the Australian Slavonic and East European Studies, vol. 36, 2022, pp. 163-66.