Zhovten Theater in Petrograd-Leningrad

Zhovten Theater in Petrograd-Leningrad. A theater established in Petrograd as the Petrograd Ukrainian Drama Theater in November 1917 on the initiative of the local Ukrainian Hromada. In 1919–24 the theater had the name Shevchenko Ukrainian Communist Theater. In 1924 it joined with the Petrograd Ukrainian Drama Theater (est 1923) to form the Unified Ukrainian Theater, and staged classical and contemporary Ukrainian dramas. In 1929 it ceased its activities, but later that year it was reconstituted as the Leningrad Zhovten Theater, under the auspices of the RSFSR People’s Commissariat of Education. Its repertoire consisted mostly of contemporary Ukrainian plays, as well as Les Kurbas’s adaptation of Taras Shevchenko’s poem Haidamaky and Ostap Vyshnia’s adaptation of Semen Hulak-Artemovsky’s opera Zaporozhian Cossack beyond the Danube. Leading members were Dmytro Rovynsky, Yevhen Kokhanenko, Fedir Levytsky, Yevheniia Sydorenko, D. Shostakivsky, and the musicians Yulii Meitus and Pylyp Kozytsky. The Zhovten Theater was active until 1932.

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 5 (1993).]