“We really need you, Banderа’s scum...”: The space of “heroes” and meanings in the play by "Glory to the Heroes" by Pavlo Arie

Abstract

The article analyses Pavel Arie’s play “Glory to the Heroes” in the context of its theatrical versions and analytical and critical reception from the standpoint of the “war of memories” and “social wounds.” The perception of the characters and the ‘personal truths’ they represent in this dramatic text has been significantly transformed since it was written and the time it is viewed against the backdrop of almost three years of full-scale Russian war in Ukraine and more than a decade of Russian aggression. The  deliberate caution of both the playwright himself and his theatrical interpreters (Stas Zhirkov, Oleksa Kravchuk, Viacheslav Zhyla, Anatoliy Levchenko, Alla Sokolenko) in working with the semantic field of Ukrainian civic identity is indicative, the desire to voice the existence of different historical memories in contemporary Ukraine, but at the same time demonstrate the absence of a  search for  their convergence, which is camouflaged under the intention to go beyond “politics” and pay special attention to the “humanity” of the characters, regardless of which political camp each of them belongs to. As a result, there is not a single “exemplary human” figure in the play, and the unresolved problems of the confrontation between the elderly “political” antagonists are inherited by their children and grandchildren and cement new transgenerational personal and social traumas. In  the  ending, it  seems that physical death seems to reconcile the irreconcilable enemies in life, as they walk side by side in the postmortem without weapons. At the same time, the death of both characters leaves all the questions raised in the play open, the transgenerational wounds unhealed, and the fighters for Ukrainian independence, who were stigmatized by the Soviet regime, unrehabilitated.