The museum opens a cycle of eight lectures on the Executed Renaissance — the large-scale cultural genocide of the Ukrainian intelligentsia of the 1930s that destroyed a generation of writers, directors, and artists.
In February 2026 the Museum of Theatre, Music and Cinema Arts of Ukraine opens a new lecture cycle 'The Executed Renaissance — Cultural Genocide of the 1930s'. Eight lectures, held every Tuesday during February-March, illuminate not simply 'Stalinist repressions' but precisely the phenomenon of cultural genocide — the targeted destruction of a generation of Ukrainian writers, directors, artists, researchers who shaped national cultural identity at the beginning of the 20th century.
The cycle includes separate portrait lectures of central figures of the Executed Renaissance: Mykola Khvylovy (1893-1933, central figure of the Ukrainian literary Renaissance of the 1920s, committed suicide before arrest); Les Kurbas (1887-1937, Berezil director, executed on Solovki); Mykola Kulish (1892-1937, playwright whose plays Kurbas staged, executed on Solovki on the same day as Kurbas); Myroslav Irchan (1897-1937, prose writer, executed); Mike Yohansen (1895-1937, experimental poet, executed). Programme lecturers — literary scholars of the Shevchenko Institute of Literature of NAS of Ukraine, historians of the Institute of Ukrainian History, researchers of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. Lectures emphasise: this was NOT chaotic terror but a strategic blow against the Ukrainian national renaissance.
