Six landmark plays of Ukrainian émigré drama — a cohesive, teleological project to forge a modern Ukrainian ars dramatica, born in exile between the ruins of old Europe and the threat of Soviet totalitarianism.
Kosach's wartime and postwar dramaturgy is not incidental experimentation with historical material, but a coherent shift in the very function of drama — from representing the past to problematising, symbolically interpreting and historiosophically re-evaluating it.
To define the genre-stylistic and structural-compositional characteristics of six extant plays of the 1940s and their role in modernising émigré drama.
Historical-literary, comparative-typological and aesthetic-functional analysis, augmented by intertextual reading of Kosach's European and national sources.
Reading genre transformations together with stylistic reorientations — from realistic and conditionally-romantic models toward a Baroque-Expressionist synthesis.
A conscious bid to build a drama able to hold ideological collision, existential analysis and complex polyphonic composition.
The generic trajectory is conditioned by the author's stylistic reorientations, evident in the creation of syncretic forms:
Baroque emblematics interlock with Expressionist deformation — Play about Yuriy the Conqueror.
The musical principle of composition intertwines with phantasmagoric imagery — The Sorrowful Symphony.
Apocalyptic allegory fuses with the strictures of antique tragedy — The Fall of Tyra.
The folkloric epic is reinterpreted through existential hermeticism — Baida.
Working as intensely in poetry and prose, Kosach — especially during the era of MUR (the Artistic Ukrainian Movement) — gave special weight to the genre-stylistic renewal of national drama. He cast himself as both practitioner-innovator and theorist, seeing in drama a form able to catalyse the "national spirit" and shape a new kind of historical consciousness.
At a moment when the Ukrainian theatrum exsilii was stagnating between everyday-ethnographic realism and placard ideological agitation, Kosach proposed a whole aesthetic concept: a fusion of West-European modernist achievement — above all Expressionist and Existentialist drama — with the national, primarily Baroque, tradition.
A paradoxical strategy: overcoming the crisis of Ukrainian drama not by progress but by a return to the wellsprings of the European theatre — above all the Baroque, with its monumentalism, mystical pathos and visionary art.
Kosach laid the theoretical ground of his dramaturgy in a cycle of programmatic essays of the late 1930s–1940s, in which he formulated a strategy for overcoming the crisis of Ukrainian drama through the paradoxical mechanism of modernization by way of archaization. He proposed abandoning positivist mimeticism in favour of a return to the sources of European theatre.
This retrospective utopia resonated with contemporary West-European tendencies — from the Catholic modernism of Paul Claudel to the existentialist drama of Sartre, Camus and Anouilh. Yet open questions remained, which the author himself posed: was this intellectual construction a realistic strategy or an abstract project? Did the very idea of reviving modern drama through pre-modern forms harbour an inner contradiction? And did the search for a "grand style" risk turning into stylisation legible only to a narrow circle of initiates?
The dramatic output of this period is distinguished by conceptual density and genre-stylistic variety; by its artistic level it stands among the summits of "mature" Ukrainian modernism. A holistic scholarly reception, however, remains problematic owing to objective source difficulties — a large part of Kosach's plays, of both the Lviv period and the DP (Displaced Persons) era, was irretrievably lost in the maelstrom of the Second World War and the author's chaotic émigré relocations.
Reflections on the Theatre (1939); The Demon of the Theatre, For a New Style of the Ukrainian Theatre (both 1943); The Theatre of Mystery (1946); Horizons of the New Drama (1947); The Contemporary Theatre of the West and Us (1948).
An exile theatre suspended between the inertia of everyday-ethnographic realism and the dictate of placard ideological agitation — the impasse Kosach set out to break.
Many plays were lost (Offensive 1942; Anna Regina, Harald and Yaroslavna 1946; The Order 1947) or survive only in fragments or private archives — hence the focus on six fully published texts.
Under these conditions the corpus of six fully published works acquires special weight, allowing reconstruction of the principal parameters of Kosach's dramatic poetics: the dramatic chronicle The March of the Chernihiv Regiment (1943), the mystery Play about Yuriy the Conqueror (1947), the phantasmagoric tragedy The Sorrowful Symphony (1946), the dramatic poems The Siege (1940; 1943) and The Fall of Tyra (1947), and the dramatic étude Baida (1948).
These are best read as a conventional hexalogy, united not so much by formal genre identity as by shared structural-poetic dominants — the use of mythological and archetypal models, the contrapuntal layering of temporal planes, the consistent dominance of conditionally-symbolic over realistic images — and by ideational-semantic leitmotifs: historical catastrophe, existential choice, and the spiritual trial of the personality.
In the postwar emigration Kosach's drama drew no proper recognition, save for a few penetrating reflections from within the MUR milieu — critics who, despite ideological divergences, glimpsed in his works an attempt to modernise the national theatre.
The factual foundation — biographical and culturological aspects, plot and content, and the links to the author's historiosophical views (Stekh; Radyshevskyi).
A turn to the inner mechanisms of the texts through specialised methodologies — psychoanalytic (Reutova), existentialist (Antonovych), narratological (Atamanchuk) and metadramatic (Visych).
Despite the breadth of this work, no study yet examines the genre, stylistic and structural characteristics of Kosach's plays not in isolation but as components of a single, mutually conditioned system — and thus able to explain why the problems the author raised demanded precisely this, and no other, artistic realisation.
A composite framework treats each play as an autonomous artistic entity while mapping its dialogic ties to European and national sources.
Reconstructing the artistic process and outlining its cultural-historical milieu.
Identifying generic and stylistic regularities and consonances with other texts.
Examining the plays as self-contained, autonomous artistic wholes.
Tracing the dialogic connections of Kosach's texts with their literary sources.
The nature of dramatic conflict and the modelling of character.
Time-space organisation and compositional architecture.
The transformed functional status of the authorial remarque — a key vehicle of modernisation.
From the descriptive-realistic chronicle and the Baroque-romantic uchronia to the newest forms of mystery, symphony, dramatic poem and étude. Choose an act below.
Synthesis of realistic-romantic and conditionally-symbolic factors in modelling the historical narrative.
Formally the work inclines to the model of the chronicle — topographic precision, a ramified system of real historical figures, documentarised dialogue. Yet Kosach uses chronicle form only as an outer frame for an existential collision: the clash of the political idealism of the Ukrainian autonomist milieu with an imperial inertia that pervades the Russian revolutionary movement and many of its Ukrainian participants alike.
The play carries a double novelty. Thematic: the motif of Ukrainian participation in the Decembrist movement (through the "Society of United Slavs") was hitherto terra incognita in the national-artistic space. Interpretive: Kosach decentralises the imperial narrative, shifting the optic to the marginalised province he casts as the core of the anti-tsarist movement, and recodes the uprising — showing the Ukrainian officer corps not as a provincial offshoot of a Russian revolt but as an organic part of the all-European revolutionary movement of the first quarter of the 19th century, kin to the Italian Carbonari, Spanish constitutionalists and Greek Hetairists.
The authorial stage direction is radically re-statused. No longer a mere auxiliary, the remarque becomes polyfunctional — characterological, intonational and suggestive — and introduces the principles of cinematic thinking: sweeping transitions from panoramic long shots (the snow-bound forest, the Regiment's ranks) to charged micro-details (the gleam of bayonets, a trembling hand, the image of the sorrowing mother), set to an acoustic montage of drums, weapons, cannonade, choral song and shared prayer.
The motif of the Marseillaise undergoes a complex semantic evolution — first sounding as the "ill-boding Marseillaise," then swelling in crescendo through Drahomaniv's pathetic oration, and finally woven, in the finale, into a soldier's song of Siberian penal exile and the blizzard. The play's structuring device is the recurrent topos of the road, organised across three planes — historical-realistic (the march on Kyiv), biographical-social (the road to exile as sacrificial ascent) and metaphysical (national palingenesis). Its culminating node is the prophetic dream of Yakiv Andreyevych, where a republican "new law" is unmasked as a fresh form of bondage — "in place of evil tsars, a dictator" — a supra-textual prophecy that any collaboration with the Russian imperial project, even under the banner of freedom, ends in a "noose" for the Ukrainian movement.
Romantic-Baroque modifications on the field of uchronia.
Taking the 1653 siege of Suceava as its plot basis, Kosach polemicises with historical determinism: he abandons reconstructive logic and offers a counterfactual interpretation of the past — a uchronia. The aim is to reactivate history as a space of poly-variant possibility, projecting the crisis of the mid-17th-century Ukrainian state project onto the statelessness of the mid-1940s and seeking a point of bifurcation where a hero's will might have changed the vector of national being.
Stylistically the play inclines to a romantic model with an optimistic-affirmative pathos, but structurally it is a modern drama with a vivid actualisation of Baroque poetics — the topos of theatrum mundi, aphoristic dialogue, the playful device of the mask, and a contrapuntal alternation of symbolic-allegorical and conditionally-realistic episodes.
Its protagonist, Tymish Khmelnytsky, is less a concrete historical figure than the embodiment of the cultural-civilisational possibilities of early-modern Ukraine — a political visionary who might have led the new Cossack state along a path alternative to Pereyaslav, toward westernisation. The type of the hero as bearer of unrealised historical potency draws the play into the orbit of German early-romantic historical drama, above all Heinrich von Kleist (The Prince of Homburg, 1810; The Battle of Hermann, 1808), with its shared device of the "double bottom" — war re-imagined as a theatrical stage where success depends on the ability to direct reality and stage roles.
Using the Baroque mask, Kosach gives it a romantic content: it reveals the tragic dichotomy between the imperative of duty (the hetman's son, the warrior) and the imperative of vocation (the artist, the builder, the humanist). Donning the mask of the Italian architect Dell'Acqua, the hero lives the life cut short in reality; in the final meeting with the real Dell'Acqua he removes the mask not because he is unmasked, but because he no longer needs it — having grasped his authentic essence. As Sherekh observed, "The Siege is a dramatic poem about the soul of the artist — not at all an epic of national patriotics, as some think."
The stage directions form a separate narrative-figurative system tending to Baroque excess; the central collision is visualised through space, opposing the architectural order of the city to the chaos of siege. The play also generated a sharp contemporary response — Vasyl Karkhut's parody Banquet (1943), whose travesty exposed the conventionality of Kosach's character system and warned against turning literature into a "handmaid of ideology." Its later auto-intertextual partner, the novella The Talisman (1950), marks Kosach's own critical revision: a transition from romantic myth-making and faith in the willed subject to existential analysis and the tragic dead end of the human before the irreversibility of history.
Expressionist stylistics and existential collisions in the dimension of the mystery genre.
Though tied to a concrete fact, the play is only conditionally historical: Kosach transforms events into a philosophical-metaphorical parable about the tragedy of the human in an epoch of civilisational rupture. Expressionist poetics universalise the biographical situation, activating the archetype of the "sinful messiah," the eschatological expectation of the world's end, and the tragedy of a hero unequal to his destiny.
Here Kosach builds an aesthetic antithesis to Mykola Kulish: where Kulish's expressionism (The People's Malakhiy, 1927; Sonata Pathétique, 1928) fed on social messianism and the clash of the "little man" with the moloch of revolution, Kosach moves expressionist aesthetics into the plane of metaphysical play and intellectual reflection. His Play… is not a drama of psychosocial types but a single expressionist vision — a mystical sight of sacred Kyiv and of the hero's inner struggle — in which persona-symbols are fragmented projections of his consciousness.
Genealogically the work reaches back to Ukrainian Baroque mystery drama: it revitalises the passion-play principle of building action on antithetical oppositions (sacred / profane, light / darkness, kingdom of the spirit / kingdom of Caesar), the miracle-play model of spiritual trial and kenosis, and the providentialism of religious-political allegory — letting the author read the era of the Ruin as a necessary stage of purgation before future resurrection. In his "Word from the Author," Kosach reframes the very nature of drama: conflict unfolds from the "nucleus of the fact" rather than its reconstruction; the work is bound by ideational, not plot, unity; the action moves into a "supra-real world"; and the play renounces the didactic function.
Yuriy must choose among three powers (the Ottoman Porte, the Commonwealth, Muscovy), yet the choice is illusory — each leads to catastrophe. The collision becomes a mystery-psychodrama played out with three women — Raina (the ascetic path), Halshka (political accommodation), and Judith (the biblical motif of retribution). The men function as the hero's doubles: the jester Teren as a Shakespearean seer, and Vasylii, the "man of God," who exposes Yuriy's chief flaw — the absence of love. The hero's crisis stems from a father-complex (the silent shadow of Bohdan Khmelnytsky — the Baroque device of the "absent centre") and a metaphysical God-forsakenness (Deus Absconditus) that radicalises into theomachy. His imaginary duel with Satan echoes the Gospel temptation in the wilderness; the moral triumph opens the possibility of spiritual resurrection — not as a military-political figure but as the archetype of a national passion-bearer.
Against the tradition of the Ukrainian vertep, Kosach modernises the intermedia: the second, an "intermedia of the intermedia," realises the Baroque "theatre within a theatre," staging a school-drama allegory of St George and the Dragon as a hagiographic projection onto Yuriy himself — while students' asides on theatre and censorship ("they give a beating for the theatre too") introduce ironic self-reflection. The epilogue dematerialises historical space, extrapolating the action into the transcendent and forming a semantic arch with the author's "Word."
Reconstruction of the artist's fate through Baroque-Expressionist aesthetics.
Two epigraphs set the tone — a line on Bortniansky's unfinished symphony (the unrealised vocation) and a Shevchenko autograph on the composer's sacred concert (the paradigm of Christian ethics, repentance, the "sorrow of the soul"). Against the mimetic poetics of the novellas Bortniansky's Easter (1942) and A Fragment of a Symphony (1943), the play shifts radically toward mythopoeic interpretation. Its most plausible pretext is Lesya Ukrainka's dramatic poem The Orgy (1912) — kindred in its "drama of ideas," its declarative monologue-manifestos, and the central dilemma of the artist's choice between the freedom of the spirit and compromise with empire.
Composition rests on a multi-planar chronotope: linear time is deliberately broken; present (St Petersburg, early 19th c.) and past (Italy, later 18th c.), seasons and ages of life alternate in musical polyphony, several thematic lines mirroring the hero's inner state. The opening stage direction even renders an architectural sketch of Bortniansky's apartment — a rare authorial gesture turning the set into a structured map of the inner world: a "labyrinth of the soul" whose "long-unwashed windows" face a "blind church wall." The Baroque chiaroscuro and the motif of Vanitas meet expressionist space as a projection of deformed consciousness; the closing remark fixes the final rupture between harmony (music) and chaos (night).
The figures fall into three groups: bearers of national resentment and intuitive truth (the servant Luka, the doctor Amodyk, the serf-musician Sanka); the composer's family, embodying imperial values and pragmatism; and the most complex — the "persons in twilight," existing on the edge of reality and the protagonist's hallucination. Princess Daragan — a Baroque oxymoron and femme fatale whose creed is "Power!" — embodies the "myth of Pontida," binding the play to The March of the Chernihiv Regiment, the novella Invitation to Cythera (1946) and the novel The Lady of Pontida (1987). The Lady in Black — heir to Kosach's early story The Black Lady (1929) — voices a "Russian myth" of imperial grandeur, a Faustian bargain whose verdict is "Russia awaits you." The Man in the Burka, a phantom of the hero's diseased consciousness, charges the composer with "renegacy," only for the play to assert the priority of the "revolt of the spirit" over the "revolt of arms" — music as an imperishable, uncensorable record of tyranny.
Sanka breaks open this closed triangle: a Rousseauian "natural human," yet an enserfed musician beaten and branded — the realistic counterpoint to allegory. She brings a new emotional register, the ethos of vengeance ("from your sorrow strike out wrath"), becoming the living embodiment of the symphony's missing note of freedom. Their joint flight in the finale reads on two planes — physical return to Ukraine and the act of transcendence — completing the artist's opus magnum not on paper but by deed. Kosach offers not a faithful reconstruction but an alternative, "supra-real" history, spiritually rehabilitating the composer and returning him, cleansed of imperial accretions, to Ukrainian culture as its "prodigal son."
Philosophical-symbolic reflection of eschatological catastrophism.
Kosach scales the conflict to civilisational eschatology — not apocalyptic rhetoric as such, but the awareness of the end of a historical form of being: the antique-Christian model that long defined European identity. Although set amid the fall of Constantinople and the Ottoman expansion into the Northern Black Sea, history is only a pretext for the problems that troubled the author: the crisis of European humanism, the defencelessness of creativity before military might, the tragedy of exile. The decline of the Byzantine-Christian world reads as a metaphor for the ruin of a whole European order — projected, unmistakably, onto the geopolitical catastrophe of Europe after the Second World War.
The genre of the dramatic poem dictates the dominance of lyrical-philosophical reflection over external event. The closed, claustrophobic workshop becomes a locus probationis where, under the eschatological foreboding of catastrophe, the ethical maxims of the characters are verified. The stylistic dominant rests on typological reduction: the figures, stripped of everyday naturalism and individualised motivation, function as abstract ideas subordinate to the dynamics of existential conflict.
Falcone embodies the stoicism of the artist — an aesthetic form of resistance, the conviction that perfect form is the one durable reality able to withstand decay. His circle stages alternative responses: the youthful Pupil (vital activism and the romantic myth of a tabula rasa of history, fleeing to Sarmatia); the Monk (religious-ascetic radicalism, who poisons the carver as a tragic act of "mercy"); the merchant Federigo (the philistine ethic of self-preservation, his obsequious bow to the Janissaries closing the work). The semantic node is the unfinished sculpture of the Deisis, in which Falcone embodies God not as a stern Judge but as eternal Creator — the act of creation itself as the one authentic mode of being amid total annihilation. In the wider perspective, "Tyra" is Ukrainian culture, pressed between the ruins of old Europe and the threat of Soviet totalitarianism.
Symbolic-existential re-reading of a folkloric plot.
Kosach undertakes a modernist re-interpretation of the canonical folk-song image of Dmytro Vyshnevetsky, transforming the epic hero of the duma ("In Tsarhorod, at the market square…") into a subject of European "drama of ideas." The authorial label — "dramatic étude" — is programmatic: it abandons epic breadth, concentrating the action on a single existentially charged moment. Folkloric material undergoes semantic reduction and functional reorientation, the conventionally-historical plot becoming the ground for a universal conflict between will and fate, and between two civilisational models — the ascetic chivalric West and the hedonistic Ottoman East.
Conflict is condensed to one point of space (the prison) and time (the last hour). The architectonics follow a principle of threefold trial with a clear ascending gradation, echoing the Gospel temptations and archaic initiation: temptation by eros and oblivion (Hafiza); by compassion and compromise (the French chevalier Latour de Gasigny); and by power and earthly dominion (the Grand Vizier). The three figures are personified principles assailing the bodily, ethical and political levels of the hero's "I."
The system of "Own / Alien" is reconceived through the Baroque concept of Antemurale Christianitatis; the East is drawn ambivalently — exquisite beauty and historical stagnation, "sweet poison" and despotism — while the West, in Latour, both legitimises Vyshnevetsky as a "Sarmatian prince" and reveals what the author saw as the crisis of Western consciousness: a pragmatic humanism that bargains away the ethos of honour and will. The key is the radically transformed scene of the three arrows: each is aimed at a form of unfreedom — the Sultan (tyranny), the Vizier (the lure of power), Hafiza (the weakness of the flesh). Unlike the ancient tragic hero who merely accepts fate, Baida chooses death to realise his own freedom — bringing him closer to the protagonists of the existentialist dramas of the 1940s (Sartre's Orestes in The Flies, 1943; Camus's Caligula, 1944) than to the real 16th-century prince.
The visualizations below schematise the study's own qualitative characterisations — the trajectory of genres, the stylistic registers of each work, and the intertextual horizon. They illustrate the argument; they are not new empirical data.
The six published works across the 1940s, with first staging dates where recorded.
A schematic map of the modes the study identifies per play. Select a work.
Ordinal schematic: 3 dominant · 2 strong · 1 present · 0 absent — derived from the article's qualitative descriptions, not from quantitative measurement.
Named references in the study, grouped by tradition.
Counts of distinct works/figures the article names — e.g. Kosach's own œuvre (Sun in Chyhyryn, The Talisman, The Black Lady, The Lady of Pontida, Invitation to Cythera, two Bortniansky novellas); Kleist; Słowacki, Mickiewicz, Wyspiański, Matejko; Schiller, Rolland, Strindberg; Sartre, Camus; the Ukrainian Baroque corpus, The Tale of Igor's Campaign, Lesya Ukrainka, Kulish.
In the study's own words, the syncretic structures that define the later works.
Baroque emblematics + Expressionist deformation
Musical composition + Phantasmagoric layering
Apocalyptic allegory + Antique tragedy
Folkloric epic + Existential hermeticism
Six works bound less by genre identity than by shared structural-poetic and ideational dominants.
United by shared structural-poetic dominants — archetypal models, contrapuntal time-planes, the dominance of symbol over realism — and by leitmotifs of historical catastrophe, existential choice and spiritual trial.
The specificity of Kosach's search becomes clear beside his contemporaries. For each of them the orientation lay elsewhere; for Kosach the programmatic super-task was to renew national drama through forms uniting historiosophical problematics with modernist poetics.
The author's evolution in the post-MUR period marks not a continuation but a cardinal break — driven by disenchantment with the "great ideologies" and the absorption of new philosophical (existentialist) and aesthetic impulses (psychological drama, the theatre of the absurd, post-expressionist poetics). Where the 1940s built a utopian project of the "grand style" and a heroic vitalism, the 1950s plays give way to ironic detachment, scepticism and the carnivalesque re-thinking of canonised themes.
Though discussed within the literary-critical milieu of MUR, the impact of these explorations is best read as an "influence of deferred action." Owing to Soviet censorship and the circumstances of exile, the innovative plays survived as a cultural reservoir of complex genre-stylistic models — becoming a point of reference and an object of reflection only for the generation of artists and scholars of the era of Independence.
Kosach's transformative role lies in the renewal of Ukrainian drama through the expansion of its generic register, stylistic hybridisation, the Europeanisation of its problem-thematic horizon, and the intellectualisation of its content. — from the study's conclusions
The works cited in the study, as listed in its reference apparatus.