Dovha Scena (The Long Stage: From Berezil to the Revolution of Dignity)

Oleksii Salnykov, Sasha Bychenko — Design and Layout Valeria Landar, Sasha Bychenko — Photographers Les Tanyuk — Translator Tetyana Rudenko — Author of the Foreword Yulia Pidmogylna — Literary Editor Nataliya Puryaeva — Proofreader Nikola Klymchuk — Technical Editor Valentina Klymenko — Publication Editor

'Dovha Scena' connects two Ukrainian plays written 80 years apart— Mykola Kulish’s Maklena Grasa (1933), created for Les Kurbas’s avant-garde Berezil theatre, and its contemporary ‘remake’, Kvitka Budiak (2013) by Natalka Vorozhbyt, shaped by the social tentions on the eve of Euromaidan—with documentary photos of slogans, messages, and artifacts left by protesters during the Revolution of Dignity, taken by Sasha Bychenko. Conceived as paper scenography, the book uses typography, archival images, and parallel reading structures to stage a dialogue across time, politics, and perfomance. The challenge was to turn a complex historical subject into a book that holds theatre, political rupture, and cultural memory into a book without flattering them. The solution was to design it as a staged sequence: Kulish's play runs alongside a parallel archive images and historical text by the Chief Curator of the Museum of Theatre, transitions into Vorozhbyt's contemporary version, and concludes with the Maidan photos as 'after-scene'. Typography, pacing, and image treatment function as scenography on paper, allowing history to unfold as a perfomance that finds its reflection in real life. The project connects two defining ruptures in Ukrainian cultural and political history. 1. The Soviet destruction of the Berezil theathre and the execution of many Ukrainian modernist artists in the 1930s, when a bold project of Ukrainian cultural modernity was vanished by a regime that saw aestetic and national autonomy as a thrat. 2. The 2013–14 Revolution of Dignity, when Ukrainian society once again asserted its sovereign direction and once again encountered Russian violence. Read from the present, this continuum exteds though the full scale ongoing Russian invasion to Ukraine in 2022. In this light, the book becomes not only a historical reflection, but a response to the reccuring presure placed on Ukrainian culture by successive forms of imperial violence. Bringing together the destroyed avant-garde world of Berezil, Vorozhbyt's contemporary dramatic voice, and the inscriptions of Euromaidan, it shows design responding by giving form to rupture, testimony, and endurance. The book becomes a performative cultural object with an active relations between inner layers.