Kuziakina, Natalia

Kuziakina, Natalia [Кузякіна, Наталія; Kuzjakina, Natalja], b 5 September 1928 in Kyiv, 22 May 1994 in Saint Petersburg. Specialist on the history of Soviet Ukrainian theater. After completing graduate studies in Ukrainian literature at Kyiv University (1951), she taught Ukrainian literature at the Izmail Pedagogical Institute and Odesa University. In 1962 she became a senior scholarly associate in the theater department of the Institute of Fine Arts, Folklore, and Ethnography of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR. She also taught in the Kyiv Institute of Theater Arts in 1969–72. During th crackdown on the Ukrainian intelligentsia in 1972 she was dismissed of her positions and moved to Leningrad where she lectured at a theater institute. Her articles and reviews were first published in 1950. She wrote monographs about the playwright Mykola Kulish (1962) and his plays (1970), the playwright Ivan Kocherha (1968), and Ukrainian dramaturgy in the years 1917–60 (2 vols, 1958, 1963). She wrote screenplays to a series of documentary films devoted to Ukrainian cultural figures imprisoned in the GULAG concentration camp at the Solovets Islands, including Les Kurbas, Mykola Kulish, Mykola Zerov, and several women political prisoners. A Ukrainian translation (by Serhii Ivaniuk) of her expanded monograph on Mykola Kulish, entitled Traiektoriï doli (The Trajectories of Fate), was published posthumously in Kyiv in 2010.

Marko Robert Stech

[This article was updated in 2021.]