Akexey Kolomiec Soviet Ukrainian playwright Date of Birth: 21.06.1919 Country: Ukraine

1. Biography of Alexei Kolomiets
2. The Emergence of a Playwright

Biography of Alexei Kolomiets

Alexei Fedotovich Kolomiets was a Soviet Ukrainian playwright. He was born into a peasant family in the village of Kharkovtsy (now in Lohvitsky district, Poltava region) on March 17th (according to other sources, June 21st) 1919. He was the sixth child in a family that had previously lost their father. After completing a seven-year school, Kolomiets studied at the Kharkov Institute of Soviet Trade and later, from 1938 to 1941, at Kharkov University, majoring in history.

During World War II, Kolomiets actively participated in the Great Patriotic War. In 1944, he joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). From 1950 to 1953, he worked as the chief editor of the newspaper "Molodyozh Ukraine" (Youth of Ukraine), and from 1953 to 1960, he served as the head of the department of the magazine "Izmenenie" (Change). In the 1950s, he began writing short stories that would later be included in the collection "Bila Krynitsya" (The White Well).

The Emergence of a Playwright

Kolomiets' name first appeared on theater posters in the early 1960s. His debut play, "Pharaohs," brought him success and was staged in several theaters. In 1978, the Ivan Franko Theater celebrated the five-hundredth performance of this play. The plot of the play leans towards Aristophanes' comedy "Lysistrata". Kolomiets' artistic independence and boldness were reflected in his decision to move the action of the play to a contemporary collective farm village, without resorting to the usual portrayal of good and bad characters.

Kolomiets' plays were staged in theaters in Moscow (the State Academic Theatre named after E. Vakhtangov, the Moscow Drama Theatre named after N. Gogol, the Maly Theatre), Kiev (the National Academic Drama Theatre named after Ivan Franko), Lviv (the National Academic Ukrainian Drama Theatre named after Maria Zankovetska), Vinnitsa (the Vinnitsa State Academic Music-Drama Theatre named after N. K. Sadovsky), Nezhin, Kherson, and other cities of the Soviet Union, as well as in Bulgaria, Poland, Canada, and Yugoslavia.

In 1977, Alexei Kolomiets was awarded the Taras Shevchenko Prize for his dramatic duology "Blue Deer" and "Kravtsov".