Saksahansky, Panas

Saksahansky, Panas [Саксаганський, Панас; Saksahans’kyj] (pseud of Panas Tobilevych), b 15 May 1859 in Kamiano-Kostuvate, Yelysavethrad county, Kherson gubernia, d 17 September 1940 in Kyiv. (Photo: Panas Saksahansky.) Theater director and actor; brother of Mykola Sadovsky, Ivan Karpenko-Kary, and Mariia Sadovska-Barilotti. After completing his education in Yelysavethrad (1880) he worked in Mykhailo Starytsky's (from 1883), Marko Kropyvnytsky's (1885), and Sadovsky's (1888) troupes; led his own Saksahansky's Troupe (1890–1909); worked in Trokhym Kolesnychenko's troupe (1910–15) and in the Society of Ukrainian Actors (1915–16); directed the People's Theater (1918–22); worked in the Zankovetska Theater (intermittently in 1922–6); and, from 1927, led a touring troupe with Sadovsky.

Saksahansky was an actor of the realistic-psychological school, gifted in gesture and mimicry, whose most famous roles were in satirical comedies, such as Ivan Kotliarevsky's Natalka from Poltava, Ivan Karpenko-Kary's Sto tysiach (One Hundred Thousand), Martyn Borulia, and Palyvoda XVIII st. (A Rogue of the 18th Century), and Mykhailo Starytsky's Za dvoma zaitsiamy (After Two Hares). His best heroic-moralist role was Ivan in Karpenko-Kary's Suieta (Vanity). In Ukrainian translation he staged Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller's Die Räuber, Karl Gutzkow's Uriel Acosta (both in 1918), and William Shakespeare's Othello (1926). He is the author of two plays, Lytsemiry (Hypocrites, 1908) and Shantrapa (Rabble, 1914), and two books of memoirs, Po shliakhu zhyttia (On the Path of Life, 1935) and Iz proshlogo ukrainskogo teatra (From the Past of the Ukrainian Theater, 1938). Biographies of him have been written by Vsevolod Chahovets (1951), B. Tobilevych (1957), L. Melnychuk-Luchko (1958), and L. Stetsenko (1959), and collections of memoirs about him were published in 1939 and 1984.

Valeriian Revutsky

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 4 (1993).]