Just for one minute – the time it took Ivanna Familiarska to recite the 14 lines of a William Shakespeare sonnet – the 13-year-old forgot the frightening sounds of air raid sirens and explosions.
War has disrupted her childhood in Khmelnytskyi, Western Ukraine. It has torn her father from her to fight in the army. “I worry about him very much,” Ivanna told i. “But the Shakespeare contest helps me to calm down, think positively and look at my life from another angle.”
Ivanna is one of 25 students aged 13 to 17 from schools across Ukraine who this Saturday are taking part in an online sonnet performing competition, marking the poet and playwright’s birthday on Sunday.
Organised by the Ukrainian Inter-University Shakespeare Research Centre, the event is one of several taking place during the country’s annual Shakespeare Days In Ukraine festival held in April and May.
Ivanna said she chose Sonnet 130 because war has taught her to value true emotions and natural beauty above dishonesty or artifice. The poem is about a mistress who the poet loves deeply, despite her unconventional appearance. “If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head,” Shakespeare writes, unflatteringly.
War is making Ukrainians think about Shakespeare more than ever, according to Professor Nataliya Torkut, founder and head of the Ukrainian Shakespeare Centre in Zaporizhzhia and festival organiser.
President Volodymyr Zelensky himself quoted Hamlet in a speech to the UK Parliament weeks after Russia’s full-scale invasion. “The question for us now is: To be or not to be?” he said.
“Shakespeare is a manifestation of our resistance to Russian colonial oppression,” said Professor Torkut. In 1863, when Ukraine was part of the Russian Empire, Russian leaders banned the translation and staging of Shakespeare in the Ukrainian language.
“Nevertheless, the first translations of Shakespeare appeared at this very time, and amateur companies performed Hamlet,” said Professor Torkut. “Since that time Shakespeare is considered to be the person who helps us demonstrate our disobedience to the imperial power of Moscow.”
Prof Torkut said Shakespeare’s quotations have played an important role for moral in Ukraine. “We decided ‘to be’, and we decided to fight,” she said.
Lines from Henry V have also inspired. In the play, King Henry’s St Crispin’s Day speech bolsters his small army, which is unexpectedly victorious against the more numerous French. “At the very beginning of the war, we felt like those soldiers – with no weapons, no support,” said Professor Torkut.
Torkut celebrated Shakespeare’s birthday at his Stratford-Upon-Avon birthplace this weekend. Professor Michael Dobson, director of the town’s Shakespeare Institute, told i it invited the Ukrainian scholar to propose a toast for the bard at an official luncheon held in his honour.
“Ukraine 2023 is where the values of Shakespearean drama – multiplicity of viewpoint, empathy, compassion, comic community – are fighting for survival as perhaps never before,” he said.
Ivanna also believes the words of her chosen sonnet can help Ukraine win the war. “Ukraine is famous for beautiful women and I believe their beauty will help Ukrainians to win,” she said.
“Ukrainian soldiers are constantly thinking about their beloved and their beauty inspires them to victory.”
