The Opera “Chornobyldorf” Channels Ukrainian Rage and Sorrow

Vladimir Putin’s attempted annihilation of Ukraine is premised on the genocidal idea that the nation has no legitimate identity of its own. The richness of Ukrainian musical history, which goes back many centuries, is alone sufficient to disprove that claim. At the same time, the question of identity is complex. Periods of Russian, Polish, and Austrian dominion over Ukrainian territories left a multihued cultural legacy. The Jewish population was once so vast that Yiddish became an official language of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, the short-lived state that followed the fall of the tsarist empire.