1893–1972

Vasyl Vasylko

Director, colleague of Les Kurbas

Actor

He acted and directed under Kurbas, then spent thirty years at the head of Ukrainian theaters in Odesa, Kharkiv, Donetsk, Lviv and Chernivtsi. Vasyl Vasylko helped found the theater museum in Kyiv, and today Odesa’s Ukrainian Music and Drama Theater bears his name.

Key accomplishments

  • Actor, director and teacher at Les Kurbas’s Berezil (1922–1926)
  • Directing debut: After Two Hares, after Mykhailo Starytskyi (1925)
  • Co-founder of the theater museum in Kyiv (1923), now the Museum of Theater, Music and Cinema Arts of Ukraine
  • More than thirty productions at the Odesa Ukrainian theater that now bears his name
  • The productions The Land, after Olha Kobylianska (1947), Haidamaky, after Taras Shevchenko (1961), and Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, after Mykhailo Kotsiubynskyi (1969)
  • Foreword to the memoir collection Les Kurbas (1969)
  • People’s Artist of the USSR (1944)

Did you know an actor helped found Kyiv’s theater museum?

In 1923 a young actor, Vasyl Vasylko, became one of the founders of a theater museum in Kyiv. Today it is the Museum of Theater, Music and Cinema Arts of Ukraine. Vasylko was then acting in Les Kurbas’s Berezil, with almost half a century in the theater still ahead of him.

From Sadovskyi to Kurbas

Vasyl Myliaiev (Vasylko was his stage name) was born in 1893 in the village of Burty in the Cherkasy region. He studied at Kyiv University, and in 1912 he first went on stage in Mykola Sadovskyi’s theater. Later he acted in a Ukrainian troupe that included Panas Saksahanskyi and Mariia Zankovetska.

The meeting that mattered most was with Les Kurbas. Vasylko acted in Kurbas’s Molodyi Teatr, then in the Kyidramte, and in 1922–1926 he was an actor, director and teacher at the Berezil. There, in Kurbas’s directors’ workshop, he made his directing debut in 1925 with the comedy After Two Hares, after Mykhailo Starytskyi.

Thirty years at the head of theaters

In 1926 Vasylko took charge of the Ukrainian drama theater in Odesa, and he came back to lead it twice more, until the mid-1950s. In between he ran theaters in Kharkiv, Donetsk (then Stalino), Lviv and Chernivtsi, and in Kharkiv he also taught. In Odesa he staged more than thirty productions. Among his productions were The Land, after Olha Kobylianska (1947), Haidamaky, after Taras Shevchenko (1961), and Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, after Mykhailo Kotsiubynskyi (1969). As an actor he played character parts, from Shelmenko to Banquo in Macbeth. In 1969 he wrote the foreword to the memoir collection Les Kurbas, the first overview of what the Berezil had achieved. He died in Odesa in 1972.

Why it matters today

Vasylko grew up in Kurbas’s Berezil and carried its school far beyond Kyiv and Kharkiv: to Odesa, Donetsk and Chernivtsi. He staged the Ukrainian classics, Shevchenko, Kobylianska and Kotsiubynskyi, and trained students in the theaters he ran. With his foreword to the memoirs of Kurbas he helped tell what the Berezil had achieved. Anyone who builds strong Ukrainian theater outside the capital carries on his work, and the Odesa theater that bears his name still does.