The Ukrainian president’s namesake is a clueless housekeeper in a comedy by playwright Ivan Karpenko-Karyi from 1900
A character in a classic play who shares his surname with Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky has been renamed in a production by a popular Kiev theater, local media have reported.
Zelensky is among the personages of ‘The Master’, one of the most famous works by Ukrainian playwright Ivan Karpenko-Karyi.
The author himself described his 1900 comedy as “angry satire,” denouncing the greed of the bourgeois class in the Ukrainian lands of the Russian Empire.
However, the list of characters in the new production of the play by the Teatr na Podole doesn’t appear to include the name ‘Zelensky’, Instead, it was changed to ‘Zalusky.’
The editor-in-chief of Ukrainian outlet Glavkom Nikolay Podvezyany was first to point out the modification made to the classic work.
“In ‘The Master’, Karpenko-Kary has a not-the-most-skilled housekeeper named Zelensky. As you remember, in the play he complains about his subordinates, ‘the kholops,’ who according to him ‘have the power,’ and is scared that they’ll ‘say something inappropriate,’” Podvezyany recalled in a post on Facebook on Monday.
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