Eternal Wisdom, a School Play from Kiev
The school drama is a theatrical form that developed in Ukraine in the 17th and 18th centuries. Students would perform plays written by their teachers as a way of receiving religious instruction and studying the principles of drama. The genre was said to have developed from the dialogic verse of the Christmas and Easter cycles that were popular in Western Europe beginning in the 12th and 13th centuries and that spread to Ukraine in the late 16th–early 17th centuries. This book is a 1912 edition of a Jesuit school drama, Eternal Wisdom, dating from 1703. The first part of the book is a detailed critical analysis of the play by the scholar Volodymyr Ivanovych Ri͡ezanov (1867–1936). It includes a brief description of the plot, an analysis of the characters, a comparison with other Jesuit plays, and a discussion of the relationship of the play to other texts and sources, for example the Bible. Part two of the work contains the text.
Pyotr Barskii, Kiev
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Last updated: March 7, 2014