Фавст Лопатинський

Activity: Culture
Date of birth: May 29, 1899, Lviv
Date of death: October 31, 1937, Kyiv
Navigator: World Wars

Actor, screenwriter, and film director, master of stunts. A representative of the Executed Renaissance.

Faust Lopatynskyi was born into a theatrical family: his mother was an opera singer, and his father a playwright; both also performed at the “Ruska Besida” Society Theater. From childhood, he himself took part in amateur productions.
Lopatynskyi made his debut on the professional stage around 1915, when he joined the troupe “Ternopil Theater Evenings,” founded by Les Kurbas. This marked the beginning of a long and fruitful collaboration: for many years Lopatynskyi became Kurbas’s associate and eventually shared his tragic fate.
In 1916, still very young, Lopatynskyi moved to Kyiv. In 1918–1919, he worked at the “Young Theater,” which had grown out of Kurbas’s acting studio; later he performed at the Kyiv Drama Theater (“Kyidramte”) and the First State Shevchenko Drama Theater. His acting style leaned toward eccentricity and grotesque expression; he skillfully performed various circus stunts, though he was equally comfortable in lyrical roles.
Lopatynskyi, whom Kurbas considered his most talented and promising student, was one of the co-founders and leading inspirations behind the legendary “Berezil” Theater. From the very beginning he worked there as both actor and director, and later headed one of the Berezil studios.
In 1926, Lopatynskyi moved to the Odesa Film Factory of the All-Ukrainian Photo Cinema Administration (VUFKU). It was planned that his directorial debut would be the children’s comedy Vasia-Reformer (1926), but the film was handed over to screenwriter Oleksandr Dovzhenko and cinematographer Danylo Demutskyi. Lopatynskyi’s actual first independent directorial work became The Blue Packet (1926), about a Bolshevik uprising against the “Haidamaky” and the “Polish nobility.”
Lopatynskyi’s next work was the film Vasylyna (1928), based on a novella by Ivan Nechuy-Levytskyi, in which the leading role was played by his wife and colleague Zinaida Pihulovych. Later, the film became grounds for accusing the director of “nationalist deviations.” Even harsher criticism followed the film Karmeliuk (1931), about the leader of the peasant movement, the “Ukrainian Robin Hood” Ustym Karmeliuk. After that, Lopatynskyi made only two more films before he was banned from directing altogether.
In 1932, Lopatynskyi wrote the screenplay for the film Ukraine, which included grain procurement scenes containing transparent references to the Holodomor. The text caused a scandal that resulted in Lopatynskyi’s first arrest, as well as the arrest of his colleague Danylo Demutskyi, who had hidden the screenplay. After his release, the film industry was closed to him, so Lopatynskyi moved to Kharkiv and found work as an actor at the Workers’ Youth Theater.
In 1937, the Soviet press published a scathing article titled “How Nationalists Sabotaged Ukrainian Cinema,” in which Lopatynskyi was labeled an “enemy of the people.” In June of the same year, he was arrested as a “bourgeois nationalist” and “counterrevolutionary” and sentenced to death by firing squad. The sentence was carried out in Kyiv; the exact burial place of one of the brightest figures in Ukrainian theater and cinema remains unknown.

Author: Olga Herasymenko