Literature and Art

Nowadays, you can watch almost anything at home through a streaming service. Amazon Prime, Netflix, Hulu, and other services are flooded with movies, but Ukrainian content is largely missing from these platforms. If you are willing to leave the convenience of your home, we have two great recommendations for you, the documentary "Ukrainian Mothers and the Children of War" and the Ukrainian big-budget release historical drama "Dovbush." Olena Tumanska's poignant documentary "Ukrainian Mothers and the Children of War" follows the stories of six women and their children who have sought refuge in Canada in the aftermath of Russia's war in Ukraine. They have seen rockets fly over various cities and had their apartments destroyed, and...

This rocking chair sits empty rocking back and forth, where no echo should be all I see are ghosts: those yet to be, those who will not be, and those who no longer are...

The Ukrainian Oscar Committee announced it had decided to submit the picture for the Best International Feature Film category on September 24, 2020. “We are incredibly happy that the Ukrainian Oscar Committee has chosen our film among the worthy contenders,” the team behind “Atlantis” wrote on Facebook. The academy members will consider the Ukrainian nominee among other feature-length contenders produced outside of the United States. The academy will announce the short list on March 15 ahead of the April 25 ceremony, the latest Oscars date since 1953. The date was picked to match the delayed film premieres amid the COVID-19 pandemic...

Ukrainian classical music star Oksana Lyniv will make history at next year’s Bayreuth Festival in Germany when she becomes the world renowned opera festival’s first ever female conductor. Lyniv is set to open the 2021 Bayreuth Festival, which was founded in the nineteenth century by Richard Wagner and is dedicated to his works. She will conduct a performance of Wagner’s “The Flying Dutchman” as the festival curtain-raiser. This will not be the first time Lyniv has challenged tradition and broken down gender barriers in the famously conservative male-dominated world of classical music. In 2017, she entered the record books by becoming the first female chief conductor of the Graz Opera and the Graz Philharmonic Orchestra. She concluded her tenure in Graz at the end of the 2019-2020 season...

A group of men and women in traditional embroidered dress took the stage at Carnegie Hall on Oct. 5, 1922, for a performance that the New York Tribune dubbed “a marvel of technical skill.” The New York Times called the music they made “simply spontaneous in origin and artistically harmonized.” The New York Herald described the costume-clad singers as expressing “a profound unanimity of feeling that aroused genuine emotion among the listeners.” The audience that cheered for encores and threw flowers on the stage didn’t know it at the time, but they had just heard what would eventually become one of the world’s most beloved and recognized Christmas songs: “Carol of the Bells.” Onstage was the Ukrainian National Chorus conducted by Alexander Koshetz. At the end of Part 1 of the program at Carnegie Hall, they performed composer Mykola Leontovych’s arrangement of a traditional Ukrainian song the...

The Ukrainian Art Song Project (UASP) has announced that the Ukrainian Art Song Summer Institute 2018 will be held August 13-19 in Toronto at the historic Royal Conservatory of Music, Temerty Theatre. Eight North American emerging artists will develop their knowledge of Ukrainian art songs during a week of master classes, collaboration and intensive coaching by a professional faculty. The Institute will end with the Artists in Performance concert on August 19 at the Conservatory’s Temerty Theatre. These rising stars will interpret the works of Ukrainian composers Ostap and Nestor Nyzhankivsky, Myroslav Volynsky and Jaroslav Lopatynsky, with...

Ms. Shore is an associate professor of history at Yale University. THE UKRAINIAN NIGHT is a historically relatively accurate philosophical account of events in Ukraine in 2013-14 which certainly changed Ukraine and may have affected the world. Where the author lacks personal experience or knowledge she relies upon interviews and vivid recollections of colorful eye witnesses who were often actors in the events. The portion of the book that presents the history of the “Revolution of Dignity” particularly in Kyiv from November 2013 to February 2014 is replete with factual information and personal experience...

The following article was prepared by Orpheus soprano, Sylvia Hunter: I meet Toronto composer Larysa Kuzmenko on a grey and cloudy afternoon in late January, in the studio of her west-end home—a cheerful and welcoming space filled with books, plants, LPs and CDs, cat figurines, and not one but two grand pianos, with huge windows overlooking winter-bare trees. Together with an Orpheus Choir colleague and his recording equipment, I’m here to talk about her oratorio Золоті Жнива / Golden Harvest / La Moisson dorée, whose Ontario premiere we’ll be presenting in May 2017...

The French painter Edgar Degas once said, “Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.”OlhaBosak embodies this spirit in her art exhibit “Live Free!”, recently on display in New York, Ottawa, and Toronto. Inspired by the Ukrainian Revolution of Dignity and ensuing war with Russia, Bosak strives, through her artwork,to promote Ukraine among UN member states and spread the word about both current developments in Ukraine and the Ukrainian struggle for values that make Europe meaningful. “The inspiration for this collection of artworks came from Ukraine’s struggle over the [past] three years to shed the country’s Soviet past and return to Ukraine’s European roots,” she told the Ukrainian Echo while in Toronto...

From May 31 to June 4 a unique, “Orwellian” human rights art exhibit was featured in downtown Toronto’s Metro Hall. The display showcased art in honor of the Holodomor and the ongoing crisis in Ukraine today, made by students from five different high school classes throughout Toronto. The exhibit is the product of a program titled Orwell Art, a unit of study developed by Toronto high school teacher and community leader Nadia Guerrera to teach about the fragility of democracy and the role of civic engagement in safeguarding it around the world. Orwell Art aims to raise awareness of the Holodomor, the 1932-1933 man-made famine genocide in Ukraine, by bringing the headlines of the current crisis in Ukraine...