A play in Odesa recounted the story of Sviatoslav Karavansky and Nina Strokata

PHOTO: Intent

The theatrical performance "Secrets," dedicated to Sviatoslav Karavansky and Nina Strokata, took place at the Odessa Film Studio.

An Intent correspondent attended the performance.

The performance was part of the ODREAM History. Culture. Democracy – HCD project, organized in collaboration with actors and musicians from the V. Vasylko Odessa Academic Ukrainian Music and Drama Theater.

Sviatoslav Karavansky was a Ukrainian linguist, poet, translator, journalist, and samizdat author. He was a long-term prisoner in Soviet camps from 1944 to 1960 and from 1965 to 1979. He was a member of the OUN. He lived in exile beginning in 1979. He was born on December 24, 1920, in Odesa to a family of engineers. In total, Sviatoslav Karavansky spent 30 years in Soviet camps. He is the author of a 1,000-page dictionary of Ukrainian rhymes. Before Karavansky, no such publication existed in Ukraine. The dictionary contains about 60,000 rhyming pairs, all of which the author composed himself rather than taking them from the works of poets.

In Odesa, the former Bunin Street (previously named after Rosa Luxemburg, General Kondratenko, and the Police) is now named after Nina Strokata. And the former Zhukovsky Street is now named after Sviatoslav Karavansky.

“The idea came up to tell the story of our Odessa figures—a story that even Odessans themselves don’t know. In fact, although I’ve always been interested in Ukrainian culture and literature, I only learned about them very late. And when the opportunity arose to tell this story, we got together with the actors and decided we needed to perform with live musicians. We specifically chose Ukrainian music from that era,” said bandura player and Ukrainian theater actress Olga Leonenko.

Nina Karavanska (née Strokata) is a Ukrainian dissident, Soviet microbiologist, and immunologist. She was a participant in the dissident movement in the USSR, a co-founder of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, and one of Odessa’s leading human rights activists during the Soviet era. She authored approximately 23 scientific papers in the fields of clinical microbiology and immunology. She spoke Ukrainian, English, German, Polish, and Romanian. She was the wife of Sviatoslav Karavansky. She was born in Odesa. In 1976, Nina Karavanska became one of the founding members of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, a group of Soviet dissidents dedicated to promoting the Helsinki Accords. She played an active role in the movement; in particular, she helped draft all of the group’s documents and appeals and signed them. In addition, she maintained contact with the Moscow Helsinki Group. Only then—that is, 10 years after her husband’s arrest—was Nina Karavanska allowed a one-day visit with him. After he was released in 1979, the couple tried to obtain permission to return to Ukraine but were denied. The authorities allowed the Karavanskys to use only one of their visas to travel to the United States.

According to the performance’s creators, the musical accompaniment was intended to convey the story’s sense of longing most powerfully, as Sviatoslav Karavansky spent a long time in Soviet camps and the couple was denied visits. Nina Strokata herself also spent four years in a camp.

Furthermore, the music—which was contemporary to the story—was meant to remind the audience that Ukrainian culture was woven into the history of Odesa much more deeply than was taught in schools.

“We have much to be proud of; our Ukrainian cultural heritage is now just waiting to be picked up and revived, because everything was either taken away or destroyed. Now we’re trying to bring these treasures back to life,” noted the bandura player.

Actress Iryna Shelyag noted that the Ukrainian part of Odesa’s history had been thoroughly erased, and when the issue of renaming streets arose and it became clear that there were many figures in Odesa after whom streets could be named, much of it came as a surprise to her.

“When I came to Kyiv as a freshman, I saw that many streets were named after hetmans and cultural figures. And I thought that since there was nothing like that in Odesa, surely there had been no such people there. But when the street renaming began and the organizers of the ODREAM project started looking for figures associated with Odesa, it turned out that Odesa had many cultural figures who supported Ukraine, and many people spoke Ukrainian,” the actress noted.

Кирило Бойко

Odesa Odesa Film Studio Sviatoslav Karavansky music theater variegated nina vistava