The Price of Compromise: Memories of Volodymyr Hzhytskyi about Les Kurbas

The purpose of the work is to reveal the potential of the memoirs of the writer Volodymyr Hzhytskyi (1895–1973) in the scientifi c study of the fi gure of actor and director Les Kurbas (1887–1937) and to study the peculiarities of the memoirs of the literary and artistic intelligentsia, written under the conditions of political control of the Soviet totalitarian regime. The methodological basis of the research is the traditional general principles of objectivity, systemic analysis, historicism, as well as the special-historical method of prosopography. The source analysis of the ego-documents of V. Hzhytskyi and the biographical method are applied to study the text of the writer's memoirs. The academic novelty is that previously unpublished short memoirs about Les Kurbas and those published after the writer's death are analyzed as a single core. The prospects for further studies lie in the fact that the study of the memoirs of V. Hzhytskyi will reveal the life of the literary and artistic environment of Soviet Ukraine in the 1920s and 1930s. Conclusions. The famous writer V. Hzhytskyi, who after participating in the struggle for Ukrainian statehood in Western Ukraine, had moved to Soviet Ukraine, and left valuable memories of the literary and artistic environment of 1910–1930s. He was illegally repressed and returned to Ukraine after twenty-one years abroad. These circumstances have had a signifi cant impact on the texts of his ego-documents. Brief memories of Les Kurbas and a part of his memoirs «Memories of the Past», which highlight his relationship with the outstanding director and which were published in full almost forty years after his death, are kept in the personal fond of the writer in the Central State Archives of the Museum of Literature and Arts of Ukraine. They were aff ected by the self-censorship of the author, who was forced to avoid compromising facts and events, since he had been writing them for publication in the climate of Soviet political censorship.