Peredvizhniki and their role in Ukrainian culture.

Shevchenko's followers, accumulating experience of truthful rendering of folk life, paved the way for the next stage in the development of national art associated with a new generation of artists – the Peredvizhniki (members of the Society of Mobile Art Exhibitions), whose role in the advance of realistic painting is determinant. Organized in 1870 as an association of kindred spirits, the Society soon began to represent an integral art trend. Conveying progressive views of the epoch, the Peredvizhniki declared realism, folk spirit, and national roots as their program. The ordinary life of plain people or common nature was for them the highest criterion of beauty. The Society mounted its exhibitions in remote provincial towns introducing their residents both to cultural attainments and acute social problems of the time. The Peredvizhniki aspired to be the rulers of people's thoughts, awakening in them civic consciousness and cultivating love for their country, for their people. Reducing a topical idea to the artistic dominant of a work, they, in fact, put the painting problems to the background. Ascetic dun tones suited the content and mood of their canvases.

The Peredvizhniki movement appeared as an antithesis to Academicism that was far from real life, from problems of the development of progressive art. In Kyiv of those times, the academic trend was supported by O. Rokachevsky, whose skilfully made portraits enjoyed great demand. They bear all the essential signs of the style in which the formal authenticity in the image treatment prevails over the state of mind of a person. The canvas Desolate Park by H. Kondratenko, a landscapist given to excessive romanticizing of nature, is also an example of academic painting. The creativity of the famous artist Volodymyr Orlovsky, who greatly contributed to the evolution of realistic principles in landscape painting, visually demonstrates how new, progressive views intrude into academic art and won a victory over the traditional. And if the compositional structure of his canvases still have a propensity for certain conventionality, then their idea content is close to the Peredvizhniki's works, so deep in them is the theme of the Homeland and people. V. Orlovsky was one of the first Ukrainian landscapists to take up intentional mastering of the principles of plein-air painting, drawing on the experience of the French Barbizon artists, who in the 1830s – 1860s turned to the direct observations of nature and realistic rendering of atmospheric effects. Though V. Orlovsky could not abandon completely the rigid representation of forms he, nevertheless, in his small study-like landscapes reproduced "without any conventionalities and theories" (by the artist's words) the bright sunshine and rich original colour correlations that show national expressiveness of nature images created by him.

The notion of national peculiarity acquires a special semantic pithiness in the works by Mykola Pymonenko. The characters of his pictures, residents of a small village of Maliutynka near Kyiv (there the artist made himself a summer studio), are very racy. They are shown as carriers of genetic memory of the people, in which the past and the contemporaneity, peculiarities of national character and manner of life had condensed. "True and lovely as Ukraine itself" (as I. Repin said), Pymonenko's genre paintings acquire lyrical colouring, bearing in themselves the poetry of folk vision. The festive mood inherent in them becomes a peculiar form of manifestation of man's cherished hopes for a happy and joyous life.

In his early work A Reaper the image of a slim brown-eyed peasant girl against the background of a golden wheat field and the high blu.

59. UKRAINIAN CIVIL PRESS OF THE 2^ND HALF OF THE 19^TH CENTURY

Kievlianin (The Kyivan). An almanac published and edited by Mykhailo Maksymovych. Only three volumes appeared: the first in 1840, the next in 1841 (both in Kyiv), and the last in 1850 (in Moscow). They contained many articles on the history of Kyiv (some of them by Maksymovych himself), Pereiaslav, Volhynia, and Transcarpathia. In his articles on literature, Maksymovych stressed the distinctiveness of the Ukrainian language and its great literary potential, and strongly condemned the attacks of the Russian chauvinist press on Ukrainian. The almanac published historical documents and charters, and the literary works of Yevhen Hrebinka, Hryhorii Kvitka-Osnovianenko, Panteleimon Kulish, and some Russian poets.

Pravda, journal (Truth). A literary, scholarly, and political journal published in Lviv three times a month in 1867, four times a month in 1868–70, semimonthly in 1872–8 (in 1878 it also issued a miscellany in 2 vols), monthly in 1879, as a miscellany in 1880 (1 vol) and 1884 (1 vol, ed Volodymyr Barvinsky and Ivan Franko), and again as a monthly in 1888–93 and a semimonthly in 1894–6. It was initiated by intellectuals in Lviv and elsewhere in Galicia, but was funded by the writers Panteleimon Kulish and Oleksander Konysky from Russian-ruled Ukraine. Until the establishment of the newspaper Dilo in 1880, Pravda was the main organ of the Galician populists and the most important journal of the time. Its contributors included many writers and scholars in both Austrian- and Russian-ruled Ukraine, among them Omelian Ohonovsky, Ivan Franko, Omelian Partytsky, Ivan Verkhratsky, Oleksander Barvinsky and Volodymyr Barvinsky, Yurii Fedkovych, Oleksander Konysky, Pantaleimon Kulish, Marko Vovchok Mykhailo Starytsky, Ivan Karpenko-Kary, Ivan Nechui-Levytsky, Stepan Rudansky, and Oleksa Storozhenko. Beginning in the early 1870s it was openly criticized by Mykhailo Drahomanov, a regular contributor, who in 1873 submitted an open letter on behalf of 76 noted Ukrainians in the Russian Empire complaining about the conservative orientation of the journal. An index to the first volumes appeared in the 1884 issue. After a four-year interruption Pravda resumed publication in 1888 on the initiative of Volodymyr Antonovych and Oleksander Konysky.

Osnova ( Saint Petersburg) (Foundation). A Ukrainian journal published in Saint Petersburg from January 1861 to October 1862 (a total of 22 issues) by Vasyl Bilozersky. It had a major influence on the development of Ukrainian national consciousness and Ukrainian literature in the 1860s. Bilozersky, his brother-in-law, Panteleimon Kulish, and Mykola Kostomarov were the editors; Oleksander Kistiakovsky was the assistant editor and secretary; and Danylo Kamenetsky (the director of P. Kulish's printery, which printed Osnova) and M. Shcherbak were the managers. Osnova united Ukrainophile writers and scholars in the common goal of substantiating the Ukrainians' right to develop fully and independently as a people. It published prose, poetry, folklore, and ethnographic studies in Ukrainian and historical, literary, polemical, economic, pedagogical, and musicological articles, memoirs, diaries, correspondence, news, bibliographies, and reviews mostly in Russian. Panteleimon Kulish wrote most of the literary criticism and critically evaluated the Cossack era in an essay that was planned as the preface to a book on the history of Ukraine. He also wrote articles on the hetmancies of Bohdan Khmelnytsky and Ivan Vyhovsky, and in five ‘Letters from the Khutir’ he condemned the culture of Ukraine's Russified towns and idealized the Ukrainian peasants' ways of life. In a historical essay on the traits of the ‘South Russian’ people, Mykola Kostomarov elaborated a new approach to Ukrainian historiography and a methodology for studying the history of the Ukrainian people. In essays entitled ‘The Federative Principle in Ancient Rus'’ and ‘Two Rus' Peoples’ he delineated the Ukrainians' independent historical and cultural development vis-à-vis that of the Russians and Poles. The Russian press (except for Otechestvennye zapiski and Sovremennik) reacted antagonistically to Osnova, particularly to Panteleimon Kulish's and Mykola Kostomarov's claim that the Ukrainians have a distinct language and should have their own literature. Plagued by disagreements, denunciations for fomenting separatism, police harassment, censorship, a drop in subscriptions, and financial difficulties, the editors were forced to cease publication.

60. AMATEUR THEATER IN UKRAINE OF THE 19^TH CENTURY: GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS

Ukrainian secular theater became popular during the 19th century, beginning with the staging of the first Ukrainian-language plays of Ivan Kotliarevsky and Hryhorii Kvitka-Osnovianenko by the Poltava Free Theater in 1819. From the end of the 18th century, Ukrainian landlords organized serf theaters at their estates, where Ukrainian plays were sporadically performed. Ukrainian performances were also staged by Russian-Polish troupes. The pioneering Ukrainian actors were Karpo Solenyk, Mikhail Shchepkin, and Liubov Mlotkovska.

In Russian-ruled Ukraine many amateur theatre groups and touring theaters were active by the end of the 1850s. In Kyiv the leader in setting up amateur troupes was Mykhailo Starytsky, and in rural areas, Ivan Karpenko-Kary. Although the 1863 tsarist government circular prohibited the use of the Ukrainian language on stage, the development of Ukrainian amateur theater continued. It reached its apex in the performance in 1873 of Mykola Lysenko's opera Rizdviana nich (Christmas Eve Night, based on Nikolai Gogol's story), directed by Starytsky in a populist-ethnographic style. The many amateur theatre groups and touring theaters, active in Russian-ruled Ukraine by the end of the 1850s, played an important role in the Ukrainian national revival. In Kyiv the leader in setting up amateur troupes was Mykhailo Starytsky, and in rural areas of southern Ukraine, Ivan Karpenko-Kary. Although the 1863 tsarist government circular issued by Petr Valuev limited the use of the Ukrainian language on stage, the development of Ukrainian amateur theater continued until 1876, when the Ems Ukase completely prohibited Ukrainian performances in Russian-ruled Ukraine. In 1881, in spite of heavy censorship, the first touring theater in eastern Ukraine was founded, under Marko Kropyvnytsky. Censorship did not permit performances of plays with historical and social themes and completely prohibited the staging of plays translated from other languages. Each performance had to include at least one Russian play and the troupe was required to secure a local governor's permission for each staging of a Ukrainian-language play. After the failed Revolution of 1905 censorship eased, and Mykola Sadovsky was able to organize the first resident Ukrainian theater in Kyiv in 1907. He successfully produced Ukrainian operas as well as melodramas and comedies of manners in translation. In the 1910s, the populist-ethnographic theater gave way to the realistic-psychological style of acting.