Artistic interpretation of the image of Kastuś Kalinoŭski in Belarusian Drama of the 20th–21st centuries

Abstract

The person of Kastuś Kalinoŭski is of major importance for Belarusian culture: the image of the legendary insurgent is found in many literary works, adorns artists’ canvases, and periodically appears on the stage of Belarusian theatres. On the wave of the renaissance movement and policy of Belarusification in the 1920s the dramatist and producer Jeuścihniey Mirovič wrote and brought to the stage of BDT-1 a historical drama Kastuś Kalinoŭski (1923). In the 1930s the image of Kalinoŭski became dangerous for the Communist government, and the next time the public were able to see the rebel on stage was only in 1947 in an opera by Dźmitry Lukas, Kastuś Kalinoŭski, with a libretto by Michaś Klimkovič. A vivid example of romantic drama was the production by Valery Mazynski at the Jakub Kolas Belarusian Academic Theatre, based on the play of the same name by Uladzimir Karatkievič. Karatkievič’s idealization of the main hero exactly suited the metaphoric and symbolic style of the director. Staged in 1978 – fifteen years after the play was written – Mazynski’s production became a model representation of the image of Kalinoŭski in the second half of the 20th century. Great possibilities for an excellent theatrical embodiment were given by the dramatic poem by Arkadź Kuliašoŭ, Chamucius (1975), in which he painted a deep psychological portrait of the hero. It is symptomatic that contemporary Belarusian theatres do not feel the need for Aleś Pietraškievič’s play Rytsar svabody, written in 2003.