Kharkiv Theater Institute

Kharkiv Theater Institute [Харківський державний театральний інститут; Kharkivskyi derzhavnyi teatralnyi instytut]. An institution of higher learning set up in Kharkiv in 1939 for training stage actors and directors. It was formed out of the Kharkiv Theater School, which had arisen in 1934 out of the Kharkiv Music and Drama Institute (est 1923 as a result of the reorganization of the Kharkiv Conservatory). Until 1934 Les Kurbas’s system of training was used, while Kurbas himself and some of his students (Vasyl Vasylko, Hnat Ihnatovych, Borys Tiahno, Mykhailo Verkhatsky, and Liubov Hakkebush) served on the faculty. The longest-serving members on the institute’s faculty were Ivan Marianenko (1925–34, 1934–41, and 1944–61) and Marian Krushelnytsky (1946–52). During the Second World War the Kharkiv Theater Institute operated in Saratov as the Ukrainian department of the Moscow Institute of Theater Arts. Returning to Kharkiv in 1943, it resumed work as a branch of the Kyiv Institute of Theater Arts, and in 1945 became an independent institute. In 1963 the Kharkiv Theater Institute was abolished and was replaced by two faculties—acting and directing—in the new Kharkiv Institute of Arts.

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 2 (1988).]