Ukrainian singer (bass), People's Artist of the Ukrainian SSR (since 1930). In 1913-1941 he was (with a break) one of the leading soloists of the Kyiv Opera and Ballet Theater. Killed in the torture chamber of the NKVD.
Biography
Childhood
He was born on January 11 (23), 1883 in a large working-class family. His father, Ivan Vasyliovych, came from the landless peasants of Vasylkov. Therefore, after military service in the sapper battalion stationed in Kyiv, he did not return to his native Vasylkov, but got a job as a draftsman's assistant at the local factory "Arsenal". Having married Orina Ivanivna, a Kyiv burgher, he settled in a ramshackle shack under the factory walls, because he did not have enough money to buy a more decent home. Despite the poverty, the couple gave birth to five daughters and two sons.
Material shortages forced the children of Dontsi to work from an early age. Sisters babysat small children, and brothers served for food from shopkeepers as "boys on the run".
As Mykhailo Donets later recalled, his love for music was instilled and developed in him by his mother, who knew the great power of Ukrainian folk songs. The fate of the gift of music and father did not escape. "Noticing my devotion to vocals," the singer recalled later, "he made and gave me a homemade violin with his own hands. That homemade musical leaven brought me under the benevolent wing of the seer in search of future talents, the composer-pedagogue Grinchenko."
Singing in a children's choir
Once the Kyiv musician and regent Oleksiy Grinchenko heard eight-year-old Mykhailo singing. Since then, the boy began to sing in the church choir, even with a salary of 50 kopecks a month.
Having entered into an agreement with the Kyiv Opera Company, Oleksiy Grinchenko provided the children's choir with the relevant performances. In this way, Myshko Donets found himself in the role of a small artist on the opera stage. A magical and unexplored world of high art opens before him. He was lucky enough to hear the singing of the best maestros of that time, to meet Pyotr Tchaikovsky himself face to face, who conducted the children's choir in the performance of his own opera The Queen of Spades. It seemed that the stage would forever become his vocation and life.
When Mikhail turned eleven, his mother died of tuberculosis. And three years later, his father also died. At the request of the Arsenal workers, the minor chorister M. Donets, as a round orphan, was enrolled in the military school of medical paramedics.
Drama Theater
While studying at the Donets military school, he played in cadet performances.
In one of the performances, he was noticed by the then popular actor and director, founder of the Russian Drama Theater in Kyiv, Mykola Solovtsov. From that time, the spiritual revival of the young man began, who spent all his free hours either in the Solovtsov drama studio or in the gallery of the Ukrainian National Theater, watching the performance of the luminaries of the stage - Maria Zankovetska, Mark Kropyvnytskyi, Mykola Sadovskyi, Panas Saksaganskyi.
After completing his military service, Mykhailo Donets took vocal lessons from the most outstanding Kyiv teachers - E. Messini, M. Bocharova, O. Samtagano-Gorbakova. At the same time, he gained stage practice in the popular Boroday drama troupe in "roles with singing".
After the death of M. M. Solovtsov in November 1903, the professional stage activity of Mykhailo Donets began. He made his debut in O. Ostrovsky's play "The Snow Maiden", playing the role of a fiddler. While working in the theater, the novice actor did not stop mastering the art of vocals at the elite Tutkovsky music school.
Work in the opera
In 1905, M. Donets was enrolled in the Kyiv Opera. The following year, the singer was invited to Moscow to work at the private Opera Theater of Serhiy Ivanovich Zimin. "The service in Zimin's opera," Mykhailo Donets recalled later, "laid the musical theater of my entire stage activity." In the atmosphere of this theater, I first began to realize the true vocation of art. Here I developed an artistic taste, a strict artistic discipline was strengthened."
In Moscow, Mykhailo Donets made a name for himself by becoming a stage partner of such famous opera singers as Fyodor Shalyapin, Leonid Sobinov, Ivan Alchevsky, and others.
In 1913, having won fame as a first-class opera singer, Mykhailo Ivanovich returned to Ukraine. According to eyewitnesses, his every appearance on the stage became an event in the cultural life of the city. The pages of the local press were full of reviews such as: "a model of divine inspiration of life's truth on stage."
During the First World War, he was mobilized to the Russian Imperial Army, served as a paramedic in a Kyiv hospital, only occasionally appearing on stage.
In the post-revolutionary years, Mykhailo Donets became one of the most active founders of the Ukrainian Opera Theater. He was the first among the republic's opera singers to be awarded the honorary title of Honored Artist, and in 1930 - People's Artist of Ukraine.
During his creative life Mykhailo Donets perfectly mastered 134 parts of the bass repertoire. His voice was distinguished by a beautiful timbre, a wide range, equal in all registers. He created the images of Ivan Karasy ("Zaporozhets za Danube" by Hulak-Artemovskyi), Taras Bulba ("Taras Bulба"), Vyborny ("Natalka Poltavka") in Lysenko's operas; Zakhar Berkut ("The Golden Hoop" by Lyatoshynskyi). Among the other parties: Batko ("Kateryna" by Arkas), Artem ("Karmelyuk" by Kostenko), Satan ("The Apple Capture" by Chyshka), Kalinchuk ("Perekop" by Meitus, Rybalchenko, Titsa, the first performance), Sokalskyi ("Schors" by Lyatoshinsky , first performance), Melnyk ("The Mermaid" by Dargomyzhskyi), Susanin ("Ivan Susanin" by Hlinka), Dodon, Saltan ("The Golden Rooster", "The Tale of Tsar Saltan" by Rimsky-Korsakov), Kochubey ("Mazepa" by Tchaikovsky), Pogner, Heinrich (Nuremberg Meistersingers, Wagner's Lohengrin), Mephistopheles (Gounod's Faust), etc.
Mykhailo Donets toured a lot. In the 1930s, he made extensive concert tours of the Soviet Union, including the Urals, Siberia, and the Far East. He toured with great success in the opera theaters of Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Lviv, and Leningrad.
In 1936, he participated in the first Decade of Ukrainian Art in Moscow. He recorded a number of Ukrainian folk songs and arias from operas by Ukrainian composers on gramophone records.
Repression and death
Since the end of the 1920s, when the offensive against "national evasion" began, all republican and regional DPUs received a secret order from Moscow to start training for the selection of national cadres of the intelligentsia. The name of Mykhailo Donets was added to the list of potential enemies of the Stalinist regime. A "formular case" was opened against him.
With the beginning of the Second World War, there was a need to immediately carry out a total selection of the previously identified anti-Soviet element in order to secure the rear of the Red Army.
On July 2, 1941, the head of Department 1 of the II Department of the III Directorate of the NKVD of the Ukrainian SSR, State Security Lieutenant Penkin, based on the study of the collected operational materials, found that the presence at large of the artist of the Donets Opera Theater M. I. could pose a danger to the Soviet authorities and issued a warrant for his arrest and torture according to part 47.
NKVD telegram requesting the execution of Studinsky, Franko and Donets
In the investigation case No. 982516, as irrefutable grounds for accusing Donets of counter-revolutionary-nationalist activities and suspicion of espionage, sewn copies of the protocols of interrogations of those convicted at different times of the execution of the Kyiv economist Kaliukh D.V., the composer-conductor Verkhovynts-Kostiv V.M ., director of the Kyiv Opera and Ballet Theater Yanovsky I. I.
Donets was interrogated three times during his imprisonment, and never once did he plead guilty. One of the protocols recorded the statement of Mykhailo Donets: "I have never engaged in any counter-revolutionary work and I have never been a nationalist. I loved and still love Ukrainian folk song and Ukrainian music, and I have no more nationalistic passions."
The investigators also did not prove the criminal activity of M. Donets. However, after July 6, 1941, traces of Mykhailo Donets were lost.
The grave of Mykhailo Donets at the Zvirynetsky cemetery in Kyiv
On September 10, 1941, in Kyiv prisons, by order of the People's Commissar of State Security, Merkulov, all prisoners were summarily shot without a court verdict. There are reports that his life ended on this very day.
After Stalin's death, the singer's wife, Maria Eduardivna Donets-Tesseir, received a brief note on a personal appeal to Nikita Khrushchev: "with the sanction of the enemy of the people, Merkulov, Donets was shot in Kyiv without a court decision." However, this forced confession was made in a whisper. No printed body in the Ukrainian SSR published this information.
Since 1955, Mykhailo Donets was no longer called an "enemy of the people" in the USSR, but the attitude of Communist Party ideologues towards him remained unfriendly. The official conclusion of the KGB, based on the review of the investigative case of Mykhailo Donets: Russian. "his involvement in the "anti-Soviet nationalist organization and its anti-Soviet work" cannot be considered established. However, no printed body in the Ukrainian SSR published this conclusion.
Mykhailo Donets was rehabilitated in 1989.
Perpetuation of memory
Since 1992, a street in Kyiv's "Vidradny" residential area has been named after Mykhailo Donets (before that, it was Zatonskyi Street). The writer Mykola Kagarlytskyi is a long-term researcher of the work of Mykhailo Donets. He organized a collection of letters and memories about Mykhailo Donets, and also wrote the novel "The Greatness and Tragedy of Donets" (in manuscript form). Due to a lack of funds, the publication of the book is delayed.
