Materialy iz archiva Zhorzha Shapovalenko

Materials from Georges de Chapowalenko’s Archive - In 1989, Baron Georges de Chapowalenko (Odessa 1908-Munich 1999), ballet historian and critic, decided to donate his archive to the City’s Theatre Museum C. Schmidl of Trieste. The archive includes a wide range of documents, notably the transcripts of eighteen radio programmes on dance presented in Russian (in one case in German) by Chapowalenko (pseudonym G.E. Assedo) and broadcast by Munich’s Radio Svoboda between 1966 and 1975. The main topics discussed encompassed the history of the Russian Ballet, the Moscow’s Bol’shoj Theatre tours in Europe, portraits of celebrities and the most renowned personalities of the Russian Ballet, such as Sergej Djagilev, Rudolf Nureev and Serge Lifar. The transcripts of the programmes are particularly interesting in the light of their being a sort of cultural evidence, as they contribute to recreating the atmosphere of the relevant period in Soviet history, when it was hard to deal with cultural events objectively, without being influenced by preconceived ideas.