External and internal pressures Ukrainian art and culture - Essay Example

External and internal pressures Ukrainian art and culture Introduction Ukrainian art was said to have its beginning in the pre-Christian era but any progress and development that it had gained was squashed by centuries of turmoil during the Tartar barbarism. In the 17th century, however, a Cossack Ukraine hetman (the Ukrainian word for chief) took interest in the country’s culture and arts as a way of gaining the trust of the local Orthodox Church and population to create a strong power base. As a result, there was significant movement and progress in Ukraine’s arts and culture, but it was in the 18th century when the Khmel’nyts’kyi Revolution, the Period of Ruin and the last days of the Mazepa era, was brought to a close that they began to flourish. Whatever gains, however, that Ukrainian arts and culture had during that era soon became ineffective when Stalinization and “russification” was imposed on non-Russian cultures. This implied a suppression of non-Russian culture and the imposition of Russian culture as a guideline for all artistic and cultural activities. With the death of Stalin in 1953 and the subsequent de-Stalinization of Russian policies during the reign of Nikita Khrushchev in the late 1950s, Ukrainian art became free once again. A historical look at Ukrainian art reveals that despite the influences, forced or otherwise, there exists distinct Ukrainian elements that characterize and separate Ukrainian art from other foreign arts and culture. Ukrainian Architecture Ukrainian architecture began to take a distinctive shape in the pre-Christian era. Early Ukrainian structures were made of wood. In the 9th to 10th centuries churches, fortifications and even palaces were made of wood (see Fig. 1). Pieces of timber were horizontally placed on top of another to form structures and this tradition of construction was continued even up to the 20th century (My Ukraine). When Ukraine embraced Christianity in the 16th century, churches were built in Byzantine style but adopted the traditional and local Ukrainian methods which can be characterized by “large central nave with almost square plans and a high framework, windows were situated high above the ground, and the buildings were covered with a vault, hipped roof or cupola,” a roofing type in which is conical in shape and sloping and made of wood, brick or stone. These churches can also be characterized by the placement of the altar, which were located on the east with the door in the west or south. Ukrainian church architectures may be distinguished from churches of other countries by their hipped roofs, one or two towers on the eastern portion of Catholic churches and “cubic frameworks with massive roofs in several tiers” (Serageldin et al, p. 316). During the period of the Ukrainian history when Ukrainian arts and culture flourished most, called the golden era, in the 18th century, reconstruction boomed, and new buildings sported a distinctive Cossack or Ukrainian Baroque style, sometimes also called Mazepist (after Cossack hetman Ivan Mazepa) Baroque because although the style adopted the baroque influences, they also incorporated the local traditional style employed earlier in the second half of Mazepa’s reign and into the golden era. Ukrainian Baroque is characterized by long dome-shaped roofs, polygon rather than square elements and the division of walls into several planes. As earlier stated, Ivan Mazepa befriended the Orthodox Church to solidify his power base in Muscovy by gifting it with money, land and even villages (Magocsi pp. 286). Mazepa is best known for the flourish of the Ukrainian Cossack architectural baroque style in his time evident in ancient churches of Ukraine. This particular style resembled the Ukrainian wooden architecture except that the medium, or material, was brick. Between the two, however, it was the wooden architecture which revealed more distinctiveness and less influence from Western style. An example of this structure is the Saint Sophia Cathedral (see Fig. 2), which was originally built in the 11th century but was renovated in the 18th century in the Ukrainian baroque style (Buxton p. 55). The Baroque style is also characterized by “green helmet-shaped dome,” as exemplified by such structures as St. Andrews Church located in Kiev (p. 44). In the 20th century, architects endeavored to combine modern architecture from other European countries with Mazepian Baroque resulting in structures in a hybrid architectural style called Ukrainian neo-baroque, which is a cross or a combination of Ukrainian local style, especially the Mazepian baroque, and European modern art (My Ukraine). Ukrainian Music Generally, folk and traditional music is not a very well-developed field in Ukrainian art because they were lost or neglected in the course of the country’s history. Not many of the local composers were able to develop good musical technique that reflected original Ukrainian culture. The inability of Ukrainian music to take off was initially due to the fact that for so long national musicians were torn between basing their craft away from Russian music and developing it along traditional Russian music. Just as they were contemplating which course to take, the Soviet period interrupted the movement by imposing Russian art policies on Ukrainian composers and artists as part of its unification effort to “russify” the entire federation (Olhovsky p 244). Ukrainian folk music, however, can generally be distinguished by its strong minor-base traceable more to its cultural links with central Europe rather than with its East-Slavic ties (Ritzarev p. 30). Ukrainian folk music originally originated from wandering minstrels, the kobzary, who traveled around the countryside to spread news by singing them. Folk music of Ukraine was, therefore, first employed as a form of storytelling by minstrels called kobzary who were often blind and played their songs to the accompaniment of a musical instrument called kobza. The kobza was later substituted by a larger lute-like instrument called bandura in the 18th century. The bandura eventually became a national symbol. During the Stalin era, the kobzaries were ordered killed to suppress the spread of news and information about famine and repression. In the 19th century, Mykola Lysenko, dubbed the father of Ukrainian music, applied the essence of Ukrainian folk music to classical music using the piano as his chief instrument (Ritzarev p. 44). Surprisingly, the fledgling traditional Ukrainian folk music survived all these hindrances and interruptions to its development to be revived subsequently after Stalin’s death. One of the few reasons why Ukrainian folk music was able somehow to survive was that Ukrainians who migrated to North America during the repression era brought their folk music with them, like the troista muzyka (a trio of instruments) tradition, and continued to appreciate and play it in their new homeland. Another distinctive Ukrainian music, the hutsul (an ethnic tribe in Ukraine) melodies, survived in the Carpathians, the largest mountain range in Europe crossing Central and Eastern Europe, patronized by a group of mountain people who fiercely clung to their traditional Ukrainian music. Hutsul melodies chiefly employ musical instruments like fiddles, tsymbaly and flutes, the last a testament to the rustic background of the hutsul tribe. A horn instrument called trembita was originally used to communicate and signal from one mountaintop to the next, producing a repertoire of sounds and rhythms (Broughton p. 308). Aside from folk music played through various native instruments, Ukrainian music is made popular by vocal performances like choirs. Pre-Christian seasonal ritual songs in the forests and swamps of Kiev, choral singing in unison in western Ukraine, folk polyphony performed usually by women in eastern and central Ukraine – have all survived to this day (Broughton p. 309). Ukrainian contemporary music distinguishes itself from other musical forms by combining the elements of the modern and the Ukrainian traditional folkloric roots, like using traditional Ukraine musical instruments alongside a rock rhythm section. Revival music is also in vogue in Ukraine in an attempt to find a link from the past to the present by filling in on the Soviet period when Ukraine traditional music was repressed by socialist policies especially during the Stalin era. This particularly refers to the epic singing tradition performed by solo performers in the kobzary style (Broughton pp. 310-311). Ukrainian Literature A thousand years ago, Ukrainian literature had already sown its first seed with such literary epics as Chronicle of Nestor and Epic of Igor and although Ukrainian language was largely built on the fundamentals of the Church Slavonic dialect, these writings had nevertheless developed its own distinct characteristics, which departed from the Russian literary works of the north. This positive beginning, however, was put to a halt with the Tartar barbarism which lasted for five centuries. In the 18th century during the golden era of Ukrainian culture, Ukrainian literature reemerged with the introduction of pure popular speech taking the place of Old-Slavic-Macaronic, the language previously used in Ukraine. In the 19th century, gifted Ukrainian writers and poets, like Shevchenko, Vovchok, Fedkovych, among others, became popular. That the true Ukrainian language and literary works were able to survive and prove itself as a true language even after Soviet repression beginning 1876, which forbid publication of any literary Ukrainian piece, is a miracle and a testament to the literature’s significance and importance (Hartmann & Rudnitsky, pp. 17-18). The contemporary Ukrainian literature began with the burlesque style called kotliarevshchyna named after Ivan Kotliarevs’kyi, known as the father of modern Ukrainian literature. This literary style refers formally to the narrative style popularized by Kotliarevs’kyi as illustrated in his work Eneiida, a parody of Virgil’s Aeneid which first appeared in St. Petersburg in 1798. The kotliarevshchyna plays a dual role in the Ukrainian literary history: it separates the Ukrainian from the Russian, and; it separates the modern from earlier forms of baroque literary Ukrainian works. The kotliarevshchyna, as first exemplified by Eneiida, was written in the Ukrainian language, which to a certain extent made such literary works out of reach of the Russians. At the same time and using the same linguistic code, the kotliarevshchyna distinguished the modern from the earlier baroque literature although it retained some of the baroque elements like the burlesque. This literary form plays a significant role in Ukrainian literature as a whole because it set the tone for future Ukrainian literary works in the 18th and 19th centuries like the works of famed Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko (Cormis-Pope & Neubauer pp. 401-404). In the wake of the loosening of restrictions on non-Russian cultural and artistic movements in the 1960s and the subsequent de-Stalinization of Ukrainian culture, Ukrainian literature produced its young crop of writers and poets who shunned “socialist realism as the guiding ideology of literary production” and embraced the principle that literature is the expression of individual artistic gifts. This group of young writers worked to revive traditional Ukrainian literature and the Ukrainian language, and re-establish works of Ukrainian authors which were displaced and suppressed by Stalinization and russification during the period of Soviet Russia. The climax of this movement resulted in the publication of Sobor (The Cathedral), a novel written by Oles’ Onchar in 1968. This novel totally rejected socialist realism and clearly renounced russification and the destruction of the historical monuments of Ukraine. It also exalted traditional Ukrainian literature (Magocsi p. 654-655). Ukrainian Paintings/Pictorial Art Like other Ukrainian arts, paintings also burgeoned in the 18th century. Not surprisingly the post-Renaissance naturalism style, the movement, which depicted natural objects in natural settings following the Renaissance period in the 16th century, dominated and influenced the art of painting during this period. Murals with religious themes and other secular portraiture became the fashion. Unfortunately, however, the quantity of the paintings made during this period did not compensate for their quality as most of them were unpolished, awkward and crude in style (Magocsi p. 287). Petrikivka, the most traditional form of Ukrainian painting, is executed by brushstrokes that are bright and multi-colored and with repetitive flowers as the usual motif painted on black lacquered dishes or in doorways or windows in houses. Another form of painting is the icon painting where images or icons of religious figures are the subject of the painting and done on wood (Evans p. 39). The art historian Pavlo Zholtovsky claims that Cossack Pokrova icon paintings found in Ukrainian churches in the early periods was a testament to the unification of Russian and Ukraine culture, implying that the emergence of the Ukrainian art in the late 17th century was not a cultural or artistic phenomenon but a political one. This contention was opposed by other art scholars particularly those Ukrainian immigrants to the west (Plokhy pp. 73-74). Figure 3 below is a reproduction of the painting The Virgin Eleusa, a late 15th to early 16th century Ukrainian icon painting, with egg tempera as its medium done on lime wood. It was originally taken from the Church of At. Luke located in a village called Dorosyni in the Volhynia region of Ukraine. The depiction of the mother and child is characteristic of Eleusa paintings where the child presses his cheek to and embraces the mother. The Virgin Eleusa and similarly-themed paintings were inspired in Rus’-Ukraine by a supposedly miracle-working Eleusa icon that was brought into Ukraine by Constantinople in the early 12th century (Christus Rex). Conclusion Although Ukrainian art and culture has long been subjected to external and internal pressures, they have surprisingly survived through the years with their distinctive Ukrainian features and characteristics. The several centuries of turmoil during the Tartar barbarism, the uncertain directions earlier artists wanted to take and the long years of suppression under Russian rule did not effect to deprive Ukraine of its rich cultural heritage. These surviving works of art distinctly reveal intrinsic Ukrainian elements distinguishable from that of Russia or some other neighboring cultures. This is despite influences of popular movement styles of different periods like the Renaissance, the Byzantine and the Baroque, because the Ukraine people had managed to incorporate their own local ethnic and cultural elements. The wooden architecture, for example, which characterized ancient Ukraine structures were not a style unique to Ukraine alone but nevertheless, is distinguishable from other wooden architecture styles because of certain structural features native to Ukraine. Similarly, the Ukraine baroque architecture although adopted from the baroque period incorporated traditional local elements giving it distinctive Ukraine look. This Ukrainian distinctiveness is more apparent in the field of music. The use of certain types of instruments that were part of the cultural life of ancient Ukrainians to contemporary music gives Ukrainian music a sound that is modern yet distinctively traditional and ethnic. Ukrainian literature, on the other hand, which had its distinctive beginnings early in the 11th century, which was stunted and foiled by wars and Soviet repression managed to preserve not only Ukrainian culture but also the language which is distinct and diverse from the Russian language. Lastly, in the field of visual arts, Ukrainian painting has distinguished itself through iconic painting, which can be differentiated from other painting styles not only by its subject but also because of certain traditional Ukrainian techniques. 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Ritzarev, Marina. Eighteenth-century Russian Music. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2006. Rudnitsky, Stepan & Wittmer Hartmann, Jacob. The Ukraine and the Ukrainians. BiblioBazaar, LLC, 2009. Serageldin, Ismail & Shluger, Ephim & Martin-Brown, Joan. Historic Cities and Sacred Sites: Cultural Roots for Urban Futures. World Bank Publications, 2001. The Virgin Eleusa. Room 4, Icon Gallery, Main Hall. Christus Rex. http://www.christusrex.org/www1/lviv/Gallery/Room4.html Read More