Marianenko, Ivan

Marianenko, Ivan [Mar'janenko] (real surname: Petlishenko), b 9 June 1878 at Sochevaniv khutir, near Marianivka, Yelysavethrad county, Kherson gubernia, d 4 November 1962 in Kharkiv. (Photo: Ivan Marianenko.) Actor of heroic roles, director, and teacher. After completing district school in Kupiansk (1895) he worked in the troupe of his uncle, Marko Kropyvnytsky, as a stage manager and actor, in Onysym Suslov's troupe (1899–1906), and in F. Volyk's troupe (1903–4). He was an actor and director in Sadovsky's Theater in Kyiv (1906–14). He led the Society of Ukrainian Actors (1915–16) and the Ukrainian National Theater in Kyiv (1917–18). In 1918 he joined the State Drama Theater (from 1919 the Shevchenko First Theater of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic). He worked in Berezil (1922–34) and in the Kharkiv Ukrainian Drama Theater (1934–58). Marianenko appeared in nearly 200 roles in a variety of plays ranging from Ukrainian populist-ethnographic plays to world classics. An established actor of the populist-ethnographic theater, he made the transition to Berezil's formally innovative acting style. In 1933, when Les Kurbas was attacked, Marianenko spoke in his defense. Marianenko's best roles were Gonta in Haidamaky (based on Taras Shevchenko), Davidson in Sadie (based on S. Maugham's Rain), Verryna in Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller's Die Verschwörung des Fiesko zu Genua, Felix Grandet in Eugénie Grandet (based on Honoré de Balzac), and the title roles in William Shakespeare's Macbeth, Oleksander Korniichuk's Bohdan Kmel’nyts’kyi, and Ivan Kocherha's Iaroslav Mudryi (Yaroslav the Wise). He also acted in films: The Downpour, 1929), Fata morgana (1931), Koliïvshchyna (1933), and Prometheus (1936). He taught at the Lysenko Music and Drama School in Kyiv (1917–18) and at the Kharkiv Theater Institute (1944–61). Marianenko is the author of Mynule ukraïns’koho teatru (The Past of the Ukrainian Theater, 1953). Biographies of him were published in Kyiv in 1964 and 1968.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Terniuk, P. I. Ivan Marianenko (Kyiv 1968)

Valerian Revutsky

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 3 (1993).]