Fedir Stryhun

In autumn 2026 Stryhun underwent major surgery in Lviv. His son Nazar wrote that the doctors had done their work brilliantly but that the costs of the operation and the long recovery ahead were more than the family could cover, and the National Union of Theatre Workers of Ukraine joined an appeal for donations. The family did not disclose the reason for the operation.

He died in Lviv on 23 October 2026, aged 86, after what Mayor Andriy Sadovyi described as a long and serious illness. Nazar Stryhun announced the death on Facebook: "His great heart has stopped. The last keeper of Ukrainian theatre traditions has passed into eternity. A coryphaeus has died." The specific cause of death has not been made public. Tributes came from Sadovyi, Lviv regional head Maksym Kozytskyi and theatre colleagues. As of 23 October 2026 the family said funeral arrangements would be announced later; his wife Taisiya Lytvynenko lies in the family tomb at Lychakiv Cemetery.

Fedir Mykolayovych Stryhun was born on 1 November 1939 in Tomashivka, a village in the Uman district of what was then Kyiv region of the Ukrainian SSR and is now Cherkasy region. His father, Mykola Oleksiyovych (1902-1982), and mother, Maryna Larionivna (1914-1998), worked on the collective farm. His father was a bandmaster who ran the village club, and Stryhun recalled that as a young man his father had played with his orchestra at the funeral of the composer Mykola Leontovych. His mother, who learned to read only in a literacy class, was the one he said he took after: she sang constantly while spinning cloth for the children's clothes. There were five children, one of whom died in infancy; his elder brother Sashko played Stetsko in village productions of Matchmaking at Honcharivka.

He remembered neighbouring girls hiding on the family stove during the war so they would not be taken for forced labour in Germany, and reading Shevchenko's Kobzar aloud and weeping. By the end of first grade he could not yet read letters but knew the whole Kobzar by heart from listening to his sister. At 13 he recited Shevchenko from the club stage and the hall wept; he read it three times in a row. His first role was a violin-playing boy in a club production, and soon he was writing and staging plays and leading a choir himself.

After school Stryhun travelled to Kyiv to enter the theatre institute but, by his own account, had prepared nothing and was turned away as too small and told to grow up. He returned home and worked as a collective farm carter, a postman and, before he turned 16, as head of the village club, attending a course for club managers in Cherkasy where he watched eight plays in ten days at the Cherkasy drama theatre.

The following May he returned with three monologues, a humorous piece and a fable, and was admitted to the Ivan Karpenko-Karyi Kyiv Institute of Theatre Arts (now Kyiv National I. K. Karpenko-Karyi University of Theatre, Cinema and Television). He trained in the studio of Volodymyr Nelli, who taught his students to analyse a character's inner life and who, when Stryhun was offered a place at Kyiv's Russian-language Lesya Ukrainka Theatre in his fourth year, urged him not to go to the Russian stage. He graduated in 1961. He later returned to the institute to study directing, and Nelli told him life would make him a director whether he wanted it or not.

From 1961 to 1965 Stryhun was an actor at the Zaporizhzhia Ukrainian Music and Drama Theatre, where he played ten roles in his first season. In 1965 he and Taisiya Lytvynenko moved to the Maria Zankovetska Ukrainian Drama Theatre in Lviv after she wrote to the theatre's People's Artist Demian Kozachkovskyi. He described arriving in Lviv as like coming home to his village, astonished to hear tram stops announced in Ukrainian.

At the Zankovetska Theatre he played more than a hundred roles. Among them were Gurman and later Mykhailo in Ivan Franko's Stolen Happiness, Rostoskuiev in Mykola Zarudnyi's Tyl, Bohdan Khmelnytskyi, Sviatoslav in Franko's The Dream of Prince Sviatoslav, Barylchenko in Ivan Karpenko-Karyi's The Sea of Life, Othello, Richard III, Edgar in King Lear, Mozart in Mozart and Salieri, Don Juan in Lesya Ukrainka's The Stone Host, Mykola Sadovskyi in Maria Zankovetska, Gonta and Yarema in The Haidamaky, Tevye in a Sholem Aleichem play, Ill in Durrenmatt's The Visit and Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky in Andrei.

In 1987 he became the theatre's artistic director and later its chief director. He staged more than 30 productions, including Karpenko-Karyi's The Master, Vanity, The Sea of Life, The Talentless Woman and Sava Chalyi; Shevchenko's The Haidamaky and Nazar Stodolia; Lina Kostenko's Marusia Churai; Mykola Kulish's Narodnyi Malakhii and Maklena Grasa; a three-part Mazepa after Bohdan Lepkyi; Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet; Halyna Telniuk's U.B.N.; Olha Kobylianska's On Sunday Morning She Gathered Herbs; and Kotliarevskyi's Natalka Poltavka. He was credited with rediscovering the composer Yaroslav Barnych and bringing his operettas Sharika and Hutsulka Ksenia back to the stage.

His film work began with an episode in Annychka (1968), shot near the Cheremosh river, where he met Ivan Mykolaichuk. Their partnership as the Cossacks Vasyl and Andriy in Borys Ivchenko's The Lost Letter (1972) made the film a classic of Ukrainian cinema. He also appeared in Babylon XX (1979), The Master (1979), Dudaryky (1980), Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka (1983), Echoes of Memory (1986, as Mykola Lysenko), A Zaporozhian Beyond the Danube (1986, as Ivan Karas), Stone Soul (1989), Vladyka Andrey (2008) and The Guide (2014). He directed Pavlo Polubotok (1991) and the four-part Jesus, Son of the Living God (1995).

As a teacher he trained two acting classes at the Lviv Conservatory between 1990 and 1998, and from 1999 he was a professor in the Faculty of Culture and Arts at Ivan Franko National University of Lviv, heading the department of directing from 2003 and of directing and choreography from 2010. He chaired the Lviv interregional branch of the National Union of Theatre Workers of Ukraine, served on the Shevchenko National Prize Committee from 1996 to 2001, led the Zankovetska charitable foundation and founded the Ukrainian national centre of the International Theatre Institute. He said he once turned down an offer to become minister of culture.

Stryhun's life was bound up with the actress Taisiya Lytvynenko (1935-2025), People's Artist of the Ukrainian SSR, famous as Khymka in Chasing Two Hares. He first saw her on screen as Halia in Nazar Stodolia while he was a schoolboy and told his friends she would be his wife; they laughed. She encouraged him at his entrance audition in Kyiv and later invited him to Zaporizhzhia to play Nazar opposite her. They were together from 1964 and worked side by side at the Zankovetska Theatre for more than half a century, appearing together on stage and in films with Ivan Mykolaichuk. Their story is told in Vasyl Hrabovskyi's documentary novel Zhyteiske more: Fedir Stryhun, Taisiya Lytvynenko (2015). Lytvynenko died in Lviv on 6 April 2025 and was buried in the family tomb on field 51 of Lychakiv Cemetery.

He spoke of having sons, and their son Nazar Stryhun (born 1972) is an actor, narrator and producer married to the singer Halyna Telniuk of the Telniuk Sisters. Nazar's brother Yuriy is mentioned in family sources. Ivan Mykolaichuk was his closest friend; Stryhun recalled nights spent reading Ecclesiastes together and called an ash tree outside his window Ivan's tree.

Stryhun believed that the union of feeling and reason was the most important thing in theatre, and he regretted seeing it fade. As a director he said he could not stand indifference and would shout at actors who did not care, yet he loved actors above all, dividing humanity into actors and everyone else. He was a firm advocate of Ukrainian-language theatre, recalling his dismay that in 1950s Kyiv the institute taught in Ukrainian while the city's theatres spoke Russian backstage. He was sceptical of power, repeating his father's advice to stay away from it, and argued that art cannot be managed: it either exists or it does not. He was a vocal critic of the contract system introduced in Ukrainian theatres, which he said left actors defenceless.

For more than three decades Stryhun shaped the repertoire and company of one of Ukraine's oldest and largest theatres; the National Academy of Arts credits his leadership with helping the Zankovetska Theatre attain national status. Most of the company's actors of his era passed through his hands as students or protégés. His Cossack Andriy in The Lost Letter remains one of the most loved performances in Ukrainian film, and his revival of Barnych's operettas returned a lost Galician repertoire to the stage. At his death Lviv's mayor Andriy Sadovyi and the head of the Lviv regional administration Maksym Kozytskyi paid tribute: Sadovyi said his name was forever linked with the Zankovetska Theatre, and Kozytskyi said it was forever written into the history of Ukrainian theatre.

Honoured Artist of the Ukrainian SSR (1971); Shevchenko National Prize (1978, shared, for the production Tyl at the Zankovetska Theatre); People's Artist of the Ukrainian SSR (1979); Ivan Kotliarevskyi Prize (1994); Mykola Sadovskyi Prize (1996); associate professor (1996) and professor (2007); academician of the National Academy of Arts of Ukraine; Order of Merit, 1st, 2nd and 3rd class; Order of Prince Yaroslav the Wise, 5th class and 4th class (1 December 2014); Jubilee Medal 20 Years of Independence of Ukraine; Medal Veteran of Labour; Gold Medal of the National Academy of Arts of Ukraine.

Selected films: Annychka (1968), The Lost Letter (1972), When the Man Smiled (1973), Geese-Swans Are Flying (1974), Memory of the Earth (1976), Babylon XX (1979), Train of Special Purpose (1979), The Master (1979), Dudaryky (1980), Two Days in December (1981), Such a Late, Such a Warm Autumn (1981), Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka (1983), The Whirlpool (1983), Echoes of Memory (1986), A Zaporozhian Beyond the Danube (1986), Tall Tales About Ivan (1989), Stone Soul (1989), Pavlo Polubotok (1991, also director), For the Home Hearth (1992), The Promise (1992), Jesus, Son of the Living God (1995, director), Vladyka Andrey (2008) and The Guide (2014). Archive recordings of his Zankovetska productions, including Stolen Happiness (1976) and The Sea of Life (1983), are published on his YouTube channel. Book: Vasyl Hrabovskyi, Zhyteiske more: Fedir Stryhun, Taisiya Lytvynenko (Lviv: Leopol, 2015). In June 2026 he gave one of his last interviews, to LB.ua, at the fifth Mykolaichuk OPEN festival in Chernivtsi, which that year honoured Lytvynenko as its muse.

In 2019 a long-running conflict at the Zankovetska Theatre came to a head. After the theatre's general director and artistic director Andriy Matsiak declined to renew the contract of actor Yaroslav Kirhach, Stryhun announced it from the stage after a performance of Stolen Happiness in September 2019 and led the protesting actors. In November 2019 he and Lytvynenko received letters saying his contract as chief director, ending 14 December 2019, would not be renewed; he was offered a civil-law agreement instead, and she a half-time post. At a press conference they called it revenge and psychological pressure and asked the culture ministry to remove Matsiak, who said the theatre used such contracts with other senior artists. Theatres and unions across Ukraine issued statements of support.