Khvostenko-Khvostov, Oleksander

Khvostenko-Khvostov, Oleksander [Хвостенко-Хвостов, Олександер; Xvostenko-Xvostov; real surname: Khvostenko], b 17 April 1895 in Borysivka, Hraivoron county, Kursk gubernia, d 16 February 1968 in Kyiv. Stage designer and graphic artist, a founder of Ukrainian stage design. A graduate of the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture (1917), he worked in book and newspaper graphics in Moscow and then in Ukraine. From the early 1920s he designed stage sets in Kharkiv. From 1925 he was the chief set designer of the Kharkiv Theater of Opera and Ballet, preparing the sets for Charles Gounod’s Faust (1924), Giacomo Rossini’s Barber of Seville (1926), Georges Bizet’s Carmen (1934), Richard Wagner’s Lohengrin (1934), and Ivan Kotliarevsky’s Natalka from Poltava (1934). At the Kyiv Theater of Opera and Ballet he designed the sets for Reinhold Glière’s Red Poppy (1928), Borys Liatoshynsky’s The Golden Ring (1930), Semen Hulak-Artemovsky’s Zaporozhian Cossack beyond the Danube (1935), Liatoshynsky’s Shchors (1937), Mykhailo Verykivsky’s Servant Girl (1943), M. Skorulsky’s The Forest Song (1946), and Mykola Lysenko’s The Drowned Maiden (1950). At the same time he drew satirical cartoons for a number of Kharkiv newspapers and taught at the Kharkiv Art Institute. A monograph on Khvostenko-Khvostov by A. Drak was published in 1962. Dmytro Horbachov edited the album Oleksandr Khvostenko-Khvostov in 1987.

Sofiia Yaniv

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 2 (1988).]