Information about the author:
Oksana V. Golodniak
Oksana V. Golodniak, PhD in Philology, Senior Researcher, А.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of Russian Academy of Sciences, Povarskaya St., 25А, bld. 1, 121069 Moscow, Russia.
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0855-9848
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Abstract:
This article deals with the theatrical adaptations of Gogol’s story “Viy” on the Ukrainian stage from the end of the 19th to the first three decades of the 20th centuries. Before the Russian Revolution, productions were mostly based on the “fantastic comedy” by M. Kropivnitsky, while performances in the 1920s tended to follow the text o the “musical grotesque” by O. Vishnya. The latter testifies to the desire of new Ukrainian theatre to overcome the established traditions of old Ukrainian productions by giving realistic explanations of the mystical. The newspaper and magazine publications of those years give an idea of what these theatrical adaptations were like, as well as showing in detail how the proposed new readings of the classics were received by audiences.