Bortnyk, Yanuarii

Bortnyk, Yanuarii, b 3 May 1897 in the village of Ozerna, Zboriv county, Galicia, d 16 January 1938 in Kyiv. (Theater director, one of the representatives of the Berezil theater directing school. In 1915 he began to appear on stage in the Ternopil Teatralni Vechory theater and in 1922 he joined the Berezil theater. In 1925–8 he was the director of one of its major studios and directed the following plays: Volodymyr M. Yaroshenko's Shpana (Riff-raff), Ivan Dniprovsky's Iablunevyi polon (Apple-Blossom Captivity), Ostap Vyshnia's Iarmarok (The Market), and Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller's Die Verschörung des Fiesko zu Genua. In 1927–30 he worked in the Kharkiv Veselyi Proletar theater of light drama, and then in the Kharkiv Theater of Musical Comedy, where he staged J. Offenbach's La Péridole. In 1933–6 he was director at the Dnipropetrovsk Ukrainian Music and Drama Theater, where he put on Oleksander Korniichuk's Platon Krechet. In 1936–7 he worked at the Kharkiv Theater of the Revolution, where he directed Ivan Mykytenko's Solo na fleiti (The Flute Solo). Bortnyk was arrested and executed during the Yezhov terror.

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 1 (1984).]