What do we know about theatre — the most ephemeral of the arts — in Ukraine? What role did Ukrainian theatre play in Soviet times? How is the heritage of the Executed Renaissance generation still alive today? And why are women in theatre so important — and yet so often ignored?

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The Explaining Ukraine podcast is produced by UkraineWorld, an English-language media project about Ukraine run by Internews Ukraine.

Host: Tetyana Ogarkova, a Ukrainian literary scholar at Kyiv Mohyla Academy and journalist at Ukraine Crisis Media Centre. She also runs a French-language podcast, “L’Ukraine face à la guerre”.

Guest: Mayhill C. Fowler, historian and associate professor in the Department of History at Stetson University. Her first book, “Beau Monde on Empire’s Edge: State and Stage in Soviet Ukraine” (Toronto, 2017), tells the story of how theatre in Soviet Ukraine was formed, through a collective biography of young artists and officials in the 1920s and 1930s.

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This episode is produced in partnership with the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy and the project Heritage Ukraine, supported by the European Union’s Erasmus programme.

Special thanks to the Ukrainian History Global Initiative for helping organize this conversation.

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