Dovzhenko, Aleksandr

Dovzhenko, Aleksandr (1894-1956), Ukrainian film director. Born into a peasant family, Dovzhenko was a schoolteacher before becoming a Bolshevik activist during the extended Ukrainian civil war of 1917-1920. After a diplomatic posting to Berlin in 1922, he worked as a cartoonist then joined the Odesa film studio in 1926.

Dovzhenko's first major film, the startlingly original Zvenigora (1928), interwove Ukrainian folklore and recent politics. Despite criticism for obscurity, his Arsenal (1929) continued in the same vein, mixing the mythic with episodes from the civil war. Accepted now as one of the Soviet “big five” directors, he next tackled the collectivization of agriculture. But the lyricism of Earth (1930) proved out of step with Stalinist stridency, and Ivan (1932) was attacked for dwelling on the human cost of industrialization. Aerograd (1935) fared better because its theme of developing and defending the Soviet Far East was approved. Shchors (1939) attracted Stalin's close interest in its biography of a Ukrainian civil war hero and finally emerged as a stirring, if romanticized, history.

After making documentaries during World War II, Dovzhenko was reduced to despair by interference in a biography of the horticulturist Michurin (1948) and died, tragically, on the eve of shooting a long-planned final hymn to the Ukrainian land, Poem of an Inland Sea, which was, however, completed by his widow, the former actress Iulia Solntseva.