The Ukrainian Tango

One hundred years ago, the Argentine tango El Choclo by Angel Villoldo was published in Paris. It was the beginning of a cultural craze that swept across Europe in the years before WWI.

The tango entered the Russian Empire through St. Petersburg, Warsaw and Odesa. From there the tango spread across Ukraine. As early as 1912, Kyiv-born Oleksander Vertynsky (1889-1957) was presenting a theatrical satire on the tango in St. Petersburg. In 1914, Ukrainian futurist David Burliuk (1882-1967) illustrated a collection of concrete poetry entitled Танго с коровами (Tango with Cows). And Mykhailo Bonch-Tomashevsky (d.1921) wrote Книга о танго: искусство и сексуальность (The Book about the Tango: Art and Sexuality, 1914). Together with Les Kurbas (1887-1937), he was the artistic director of the Kyiv opera in 1919.

Meanwhile, Isa Kremer (1887-1956) was singing Le Dernier Tango by the Frenchman mile Doloire in Odesa. This inspired a film to be made in 1918 – Последнее танго (The Last Tango) starring Ukraine’s incomparable silent era movie star Vira Kholodna (1893-1919). When she died of the Spanish Flu a year later, Vertynsky dedicated a song to her, his tangoesque Ваши пальцы пахнут ладаном (Your fingers smell of incense, 1916).

But all this bourgeois culture came to an end when Joseph Stalin came to power. With the slogan Смерть Буржуазии (Death to the Bourgeoisie), the Communist Revolution continued to eradicate the middle-class with its urban culture – even the movies of Vira Kholodna were destroyed in 1924. Fortunately, a short clip, only a few minutes long, has survived to tantalize us today. On the basis of such fragmentary evid-ence, the early years of the Ukrainian tango have been reconstructed.

Musicologist Wasyl Sydorenko will share this remarkable story of the Ukrainian tango in a multimedia presentation as part of his Circle of Fifths lecture series at St. Vladimir Institute, 620 Spadina Avenue, Toronto on Friday, February 25 at 7:00 pm. Admission is pay what you can to cover the cost of the refreshments provided by the Institute.

The evening will include rare photographs, music scores, record-ings and movie clips. Despite Stalin, the Ukrainian tango survived, often outside the borders of Ukraine. If the tango went into decline after WWII, it has enjoyed a revival since Ukraine’s independence in 1991. Come and discover one aspect of Ukrainian culture that has been forgotten far too long. The story of the Ukrainian tango must be heard.

PHOTO

Vira Kholodna