Oleksandr Dovzhenko - Ukrainian screenwriter, director: biography, creativity

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

Dovzhenko Alexander Petrovich had a huge impact on Soviet cinema. A film production studio is named after him. But he was not only a director and playwright. In his homeland, in Ukraine, he is also known as a writer, poet and publicist. Dovzhenko also tried his hand at fine arts. But he achieved his greatest success in the field of screenwriting. He wrote plays, short stories and novels in the style of socialist realism.

Alexander Dovzhenko had a difficult fate, which we will talk about in this article. Favored by the Soviet government, winner of two Stalin Prizes and People's Artist of the RSFSR, he had experience in the past of fighting on the other side of the barricades with the Red Guards. Few people knew about this fact. But the majority of educated people in the Ukrainian SSR read his "magnum opus" - "The Enchanted Desna". And his most epochal work in the field of cinema was the film "Earth".

Childhood

According to the entry in the register of birthsCathedral and Trinity Church in the town of Sosnitsa (now it is the regional center of the Chernihiv region, Ukraine), Alexander Dovzhenko was born on the farm of Vyunishche on August 29, 1894. According to the new style, this corresponds to September 10.

Father and mother were illiterate peasants. The father of the future director, Peter Semyonovich, was a descendant of the Poltava Chumaks, who settled in Sosnitsa around the middle of the eighteenth century. The genealogical roots of the Dovzhenko family can be traced back to the 1760s. It is known that the great-grandfather of the writer, Taras Grigorievich, was a great storyteller. Little Sashko also inherited this gift.

The family owned a large plot of land, but lived in poverty, because the soil was infertile. Of the fourteen children born, only three survived to working age: Sashko himself, his brother Trifon and sister Polina. Frequent deaths are etched into the memory of the director. “Funerals and weeping always reigned in our house,” he later wrote. And about the poetic soul of his mother, he said: “She was born for songs, but she cried all her life, seeing off the children forever.”

Training

At elementary school in Sosnitsa, Alexander Dovzhenko showed excellent results and a thirst for knowledge. Therefore, the father decided to continue the education of his son. He sold a seventh of his land so that Sashko could get an education at an elementary school, and then in 1911 enter a pedagogical institute in Glukhov. Young Dovzhenko chose this university not because he wanted to become a teacher, but because they gave a scholarship of one hundred and twenty rubles a year. At the institute, the future writergot acquainted with Ukrainian literature, which was banned in this Russified part of the empire. After graduation, Dovzhenko was sent to Zhytomyr to teach.

The writer and his time

The beginning of the First World War, Alexander Dovzhenko, whose brief biography is described in this article, was perceived as a jingoistic patriot. He enthusiastically threw flowers at the soldiers going to war, and only a few years later he began to look at those who returned from the front "with shame and longing." In the same period, Dovzhenko is moving closer to the Ukrainian national liberation movement.

The February Revolution of 1917 he also perceives very enthusiastically. Later, he describes his disappointment in it succinctly: “I entered the revolution through the wrong doors.” When the civil war broke out, Dovzhenko volunteered for the UNR army, and together with the Third Serdyutsky Regiment stormed the Kyiv "Arsenal". Eleven years later, the director will portray these events in the film, without saying that he himself took part in them on the part of the Black Gaidamaks. With the coming to power of Skoropadsky, Dovzhenko retreats to Zhytomyr. Returning to Kyiv, he becomes a student of the Ukrainian Academy of Arts.

"Red" biography period

Already in the twenties, Alexander Dovzhenko became disillusioned with the national-bourgeois ideas. Acquaintance with the writer Vasily Blakytny led him into the world of Marxism. At least, this is what the director himself wrote in his autobiography from 1939. He joined the ranks of the Borotbists. Members of this partythen they joined the CP (b) of Ukraine. This political affiliation allowed Dovzhenko to hold prominent positions: secretary of the Kyiv department of education, head of the department of arts. He worked at the Plenipotentiary Representation of the Ukrainian SSR in Poland (1921) and the Trade Representation of the Ukrainian Republic in Germany. The artist Dovzhenko used his stay in Berlin to take lessons from the expressionist Willy Haeckel. In Germany, the diplomat artist married Varvara Krylova. But, as it turned out, being a Borotbist was a black stigma for the new government. Dovzhenko is recalled to Ukraine and deprived of his party card.

Cinema world

Since 1923, Dovzhenko settled in Kharkov, the first capital of Soviet Ukraine. With the help of V. Blakytny, he gets a job as a cartoonist in the newspaper "Vesti VUTsVK", and also illustrates books (in particular, "The Blue Echelons" by Peter Panch). During this period, he closely converges with the Garth literary circle, which was focused on cinema.

Alexander Dovzhenko, whose films will find admirers much later, had neither education nor experience in directing. Nevertheless, he begins to work at a film factory in Odessa. One of his first works was the frank propaganda "Red Army" and the painting "Behind the Forest".

Dovzhenko also tries himself as a screenwriter. In this field, he creates a play for children called "Vasya the Reformer".

Dovzhenko met Danila Demutsky on the set of The Berries of Love, and this tandem of director and cameraman was established for many years to come. Together they create a lotinteresting tapes.

Dovzhenko: filmography

The first work that received recognition was "Zvenigora". In this picture of 1928, the master combined lyrics and satire with a revolutionary epic. The film Earth (1930) was withdrawn almost immediately after its release.

But the painting "Ivan" (1932) brought him closer to Stalin. They correspond, a little later the director receives an audience with the dictator. In 1939, Dovzhenko, on the direct orders of Stalin, shoots the "custom" film "Shchors". For this tape, the director immediately received the highest award.

Since 1934, Dovzhenko settled in Moscow and paid much attention to literary work. During the Second World War, he made several documentaries, wrote essays and articles.

Opala

Proximity to power (especially to Stalin) has a downside. In 1943, Dovzhenko wrote the script for the film Ukraine on Fire. However, quite unexpectedly, at a meeting of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, this work was subjected to defamation. The script received an extremely negative review and Stalin.

In 1944, director Alexander Dovzhenko conceived the lyrical film Life in Bloom. As if in mockery, the authorities demanded that he remake the picture to suit ideological requirements. Dovzhenko tried his best. As a result, a frankly weak film called "Michurin" was released on the screens, full of propaganda templates.

An even sadder fate befell the director's latest work. State order "Farewell, America!" was conceived based on the work of Annabella Bucard, a defector from the States to the USSR. When filming came to a closestage, an order came from the Kremlin to stop work on the painting.

Death in a foreign land

Alexander Dovzhenko received his first heart attack during the creation of Michurin. At the end of his life, he taught at VGIK. He dreamed of returning to Ukraine, but the authorities did not give him permission to do so.

Dovzhenko conceived a landmark work - to write the novel "Golden Gate". He also had creative plans to write the script for the painting "Poem of the Sea". On the first day of shooting this film, he died of a heart attack. He was buried at the Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow.