Singing Against the Grain: How Ivan Kavaleridze Navigated Socialist Realism in His Film Opera Natalka Poltavka (1936)

The article discusses the first attempts of Soviet culture to produce a hybrid genre of film opera in the mid-1930s. It traces the artistic background of Ukrainian sculptor and filmmaker Ivan Kavaleridze who was chosen to pioneer the new genre, as well as the complex national dynamic between Russian and non-Russian Soviet republics amidst the stabilization of Socialist Realist conventions and the launch of the anti-formalist campaign in the ussr . Finally, it addresses the issues of russification, exoticization and alienation of Ukrainian film culture of the time.