The early history of Soviet theater and stage is often told from a Russocentric viewpoint, with Moscow and Mikhail Bulgakov figuring prominently in the narrative. Mayhill Fowler refocuses the outlines of Soviet theater history by telling the story of Kharkiv and of a theater that aimed to be both Soviet and Ukrainian. She describes the 1920s as a period of enormous creativity, in which individual inspiration and government plans jostled in the newly-minted capital of Soviet Ukraine. The playwright Mykol Kulish, the stage director Les Kurbas, the writer Ostap Vyshnia, and the set designer Vadym Meller were among a host of talents that produced a theater of genius. Most of this cohort were housed in the Slovo Building, which was conceived as a creative laboratory for the new culture (a project analogous the Moscow's House on the Embankment that Yuri Slezkine has recently described). By the thirties the Slovo Building had become a prison house, in which neighbors informed on one another and arrests took place regularly.

In the twenties, however, Kharkiv produced brilliant theater. Why was this? First, both the adjectives “Soviet” and “Ukrainian” were taken seriously by creative talents, who wanted the new culture to serve both the proletariat and the nation. Second, Ukraine's cities were culturally diverse, with communities that were Jewish, Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian. The mix of languages and traditions among talented and ambitious creators led to a remarkable ferment. Third, this territory that prior to 1917 been known as the empire's “Southwestern Land” was being given a new identity as Soviet Ukraine. Multiple groups, who from the late nineteenth century had created extraordinary musical and theatrical entertainment in this part of the world now felt called upon to exert political and cultural influence upon this emerging identity.

Fowler introduces several new terms. “Beau monde” captures the relations between artists, state authorities and journalists, whose lives intersected and who worked together in the twenties as creators and sponsors of the new cultural scene. The collaboration was ripped apart in the early thirties, although, amazingly theatrical creativity continued even in the gulag, where Les Kurbas continued to stage plays. By the thirties, however, Soviet Ukrainian culture had been demoted by Moscow from “official” to “provincial” status; many artists were forced to move or were silenced; Yiddish and Polish theaters were closed; European influences, which before 1917 had been imbibed by the Ukrainian, Polish, and Jewish populations in the Austro-Hungarian empire, and which were evident in experimental art and theater of Ukraine in the 1920s, were forcibly expunged.

“Literary Fair” captures the sense of free-for-all that characterized the twenties. Fowler demonstrates the overlapping between creative talents and the GPU (secret police) personnel. These were connections established through friendship and romance, as well as through surveillance and persecution. The political elite and GPU officials attended theater performances. They witnessed and patronized the astoundingly successful plays and cabaret performances. As guardians of political orthodoxy, they commented on and interfered in productions. The last part of the book's story told is based on archival evidence from secret police files. It is a harrowing tale of betrayals, denunciations, interrogations, the creation of fake organizations and false testimony. This archival evidence indicates that pressure was being exerted to impose a rigid hierarchy in the political and cultural spheres. Moscow and Leningrad were to be recognized as the exclusive centers of cultural life, and the “provinces” were to accept their status as periphery. Hence, experimentation, European influences, and the complex multi-national identity of Ukraine's cultural scene had to be eliminated.

This story has been told before, but Fowler broadens the discussion's scope and reinvigorates it through the introduction of new concepts. The previous focus on national consolidation and nationalism tended to narrow the focus. Fowler reminds us that this was, after all, a generation that rejected both imperial Russia and the capitalist west, Moscow's imperial fantasies and its own village-centred, anti-modernist tendencies. Convincingly, the author suggests that the generation of the 1920s still remains largely misunderstood. Their story was a more complicated and intriguing one, and theater played a key role in shaping a discourse around their concern with culture, politics, and identity. This is an elegantly written and entertaining book, with a well-crafted argument, and a timely focus on Ukraine's cultural diversity and identity politics.