Valentyn Hryhorovych Kostenko (* 16 July 1895, Urazovo, Slobozhanshchyna - † 14 July 1960, Kharkiv) was a Ukrainian opera composer, musicologist, and music critic.
A victim of Stalin's terror.
He was born in 1895 in the village of Urazovo, Eastern Slobozhanshchyna (now Belgorod region, Russia). He came from a family of peasant bondsmen. He inherited his talent for music from his father, who was a regent in the village church. Kostenko was distinguished by his voice of exceptional beauty and therefore got into the St. Petersburg Court Singing Chapel, where he stayed until 1914. At the same time, he studied privately at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, graduating in 1915 with a diploma as a free artist of composition.
In 1922 Kostenko returned to Ukraine, to the then Bolshevik capital of Kharkiv. Here he taught at the Kharkiv Music and Drama Institute.
Creativity and fate
Author of the opera Karmeliuk, which was actively staged at the Kharkiv State Opera House in the 1930s. He also composed symphonic music, vocal works, and music for the movie "Kakhovka Foothold" (1933, in collaboration with I. Ovadis). However, already in 1934 the composer was accused of so-called "bourgeois nationalism". During the escape of the Stalinists from Kharkiv during World War II, the disgraced composer was forgotten and left to the discretion of the German authorities.
In 1950, the Bolshevik authorities decided to take revenge on the composer for not dying under the Germans. Kostenko was accused of collaborating with the German authorities in Kharkiv between 1941 and 1943. At the time, he was the head of the city government's arts department and supervised the activities of Kharkiv's arts institutions (music schools, conservatory, theaters, historical archive, museum, and other cultural institutions that the Stalinists failed to destroy before fleeing to the east). He was a member of the Prosvita organization, so he was also accused of propagandizing for the creation of an independent Ukrainian state (he orchestrated the anthem "Ukraine Has Not Yet Died").
The Stalinist tribunal sentenced Kostenko to 25 years in the camps (in 1956 the composer was released under an amnesty).
He died on July 14, 1960 in Kharkiv.
Fate after death
The name of Kostenko and his work were actually banned by the Stalinist occupation regime, and his activity was completely erased from the history of Ukrainian musical culture. The composer's archive was opened after Ukraine's liberation from the USSR in 1995, after Kostenko's posthumous rehabilitation (1993).
