Chronicling a Crisis: Leonid Nedolia’s Sickness

• In Event: Ukrainian Identity Within and Against Official Soviet Culture

Abstract

In this paper I will read Ukrainian Futurist Leonid Nedolia’s play Sickness: an Everyday Chronicle of 1929 as a time capsule capturing a moment of crisis in Soviet Ukrainian nationalities policy, when efforts to derussify industrial centres coincided with the onset of terror against alleged Ukrainian nationalists. The plot revolves around one man's campaign to Ukrainianise his industrial trade union and the resulting conspiracy against him from a hostile party apparatus, and the play clearly touched a nerve, sparking a scandal in the press over its supposed deviations on the national question. I will suggest, however, that in Nedolia’s play the uncertainty around nationalities policy is in fact just one manifestation of a deeper existential crisis in the Soviet project, as it renegotiated the relationship between public and private, personal and political life.

Author

• William Ronald Debnam, Columbia U