The team of the Lviv Franz Kafka Theatre has released a new poetry album! This is the fifth such release by the theatre.
Previously, the actors presented to the public the albums “Sad Poems”, “Poems about Love”, “Poems by Ivan Sokulsky” and “Poems by Mykhailo Semenko”. The main goal is to promote Ukrainian poetry on the Internet.
Listen to the album:
Here’s what project participant Oksana Sharovska has to say about the album:
“I believe that it is extremely important to read Olzhych today. His poetry is not just a literary heritage, it is a kind of guideline for each of us. In his poems, we find answers to the eternal questions of existence, feel the power of the national spirit, and learn to love our Motherland. And these are not general words. If we listen to the texts, read the poet’s biography, we will understand that Olzhych’s work is still relevant today, because it reminds us of important values without which the future is impossible.
Unfortunately, there are still not many audio recordings of Oleh Olzhych’s poems on the Internet. So let the voice of the poet sound even louder in the digital world, because his poetry is a treasure worth knowing, studying and preserving for posterity.
(1907-1944)
In his poetry (as well as in his personality), Oleh Olzhych constantly combines a historian, an archaeologist, and a revolutionary who subordinates his life to a single goal – serving his homeland and his people, and subordinates every act to this goal, despite the dangers.
Two aspects of Oleh Olzhych’s work can be emphasised. The first is, so to speak, overcoming the distance between the outside world and the world of the work of art, the way to “look into a fairy tale”. The author himself often shows the reader the window through which he looks from the world among us to the world in it.
Secondly, both contemporaries and later researchers of the poet’s work were struck by the parsimony of his poetic expression, which conceals a great charge of pent-up emotional and intellectual tension. As if an accidentally captured gesture, a moment of street flow, or a frozen picture of nature hide a hint of what lies behind those moments, states, and hints taken out of some broader context.
For more information about Oleh Olzhych’s biography and other works, please visit his website: https://md-eksperiment.org/