Ivan Pavlovych Bahrianyi (né Lozoviaha, Lozoviahin; 2 October 1906 – 25 August 1963) was a Ukrainian writer, essayist, novelist, and politician. In 1992, he was posthumously awarded the Shevchenko National Prize in literature.
Biography
Early years
Ivan Bahrianyi was born in the village of Kuzemyn, Kharkiv Governorate,
Russian Empire, to the family of a bricklayer. He could not receive education consistently due to difficult living conditions during World War I, the Russian Revolution, and the post-war chaos. At the age of six, he started in parochial school. Later, Bahrianyi finished higher elementary school in
Okhtyrka. Having completed his secondary education in 1920, he entered a locksmith school before being admitted to an artistic school. That same year, he witnessed the murders of his grandfather and uncle.
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In 1922, a period of work and active social and political life began: he was deputy chief of a sugar mill, then a district political inspector at the Okhtyrka police, and a drawing teacher in a colony for the homeless and orphans. At that time, he visited Donbas, Crimea, and Kuban. Bahrianyi entered the Kyiv Art Institute but did not graduate due to material distress and the prejudiced attitude of the management. Due to the fact that he spoke the Ukrainian language and was a Ukrainian-spirited young man, his peers mocked him. They called him Mazepian (a Russian derogatory term for Ukrainians after Ivan Mazepa, similar to modern Banderites), which may have been one of the reasons for his joining the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) in the future.
During the Russian Civil War and later in the early 1920s, Bahrianyi was involved in Soviet social and political work but he left Komsomol in 1925. In 1926, he began to publish poetry in newspapers and journals, and his first published collection of poetry appeared in 1927. In 1929, he published Ave Maria, a collection of poems that was almost immediately banned by censorship and removed from the book trade. Bahrianyi was a member of the Association of Young Writers in Kyiv, also known the Workshop of Revolutionary Word (MARS), where he met such writers as Valerian Pidmohylny, Yevhen Pluzhnyk, Borys Antonenko-Davydovych, Hryhory Kosynka, Teodosiy Osmachko, and others who were criticized and repressed by official Soviet authorities. In 1930, Bahrianyi's historical novel Skelka, written in verse, was published. It tells of the uprising in the village of Skelka in the 18th century against the arbitrariness of the Moscow monks of the monastery near the village. The peasants burned down the monastery in protest against national oppression.
Arrest and detention
On 16 April 1932, Bahrianyi was arrested in Kharkiv for “counter-revolutionary propaganda” he allegedly had spread in his poems. He spent 11 months in solitary confinement in the OGPU prison. On 25 October 1932, he was sentenced to 3 years of forced labor camp in the Far East. He tried to escape but was unsuccessful, and his sentence was extended by 3 years. Bahrianyi was then transferred to another camp,
Bamlag. The exact date of his release is unknown; on 16 June 1938, he was re-arrested and placed in Kharkiv
NKVD jail. Bahrianyi was charged with participating in and even leading the nationalist counter-revolutionary organization. Ultimately, the prosecution failed to convict him, and Bahrianyi returned to Okhtyrka. Later, he used his autobiographical details in his 1946 novel
Tiger Trappers (
Tyhrolovy) and 1950 novel
Garden of Gethsemane (
Sad Hetsymans'kyi).
World War II years
After Okhtyrka was overrun by the German Army at the onset of World War II, Bahrianyi joined the Ukrainian nationalist underground organization and later relocated to Galicia. He worked in the OUN propaganda sector, writing patriotic songs and articles, as well as drawing cartoons and propaganda posters. He also helped to establish the Ukrainian Supreme Liberation Council (USLC) and contributed to drafting its founding documents. Simultaneously, he resumed his literary activities. Bahrianyi published his novel
Tygrolovy (translated as
Tiger Trappers or
The Hunters and the Hunted in English) and the poem
Huliaipole in 1944. Before
Nazi Germany's defeat in 1945, Bahrianyi moved to
West Germany with the help of OUN.
Emigration
After the end of World War II, on behalf of ex-
Ostarbeiter and prisoners of war, Bahrianyi wrote a pamphlet titled
Why I Am Not Going Back to the Soviet Union. The pamphlet presented the Soviet Union as an "evil stepmother" that staged a genocide of its own people. In 1948, he founded the Ukrainian Revolutionary Democratic Party (URDP). From 1948 until his death in 1963, he edited the newspaper
Ukrains'ki visti (
Ukrainian News). He headed the Ukrainian National Council's executive committee and also performed the duties of the Deputy President of the Ukrainian People's Republic in exile. In 1963, the Democratic Union of Ukrainian Youth based in Chicago started action to support awarding Bahrianyi with the
Nobel Prize. Still, his sudden death prevented him from being formally nominated for the award, which is not awarded posthumously. Bahrianyi died on 25 August 1963. He was buried in
Neu-Ulm, Bavaria, West Germany.
Works
Stories
Novellas and tales
-
Defeat (1948), a novella
-
The Fiery Circle ( Neu Ulm, 1953)
Novels
-
Skelka (, Kharkiv, 1929), a novella in verse
-
Zvirolovy ( Trappers, Lviv-Kraków, 1944) and Tyhrolovy ( Tiger Trappers, published in English as The Hunters and the Hunted, Neu Ulm, 1946)
-
Sad Hetsymanskyi (, Garden of Gethsemane, Neu Ulm, 1950)
-
Marusia Bohuslavka, the first book of the novel Wild Wind (Munich, 1957)
-
A Man Runs Over an Abyss (published posthumously, Neu Ulm-New York, 1965)
Poems
-
Mongolia () (1927)
-
Ave, Maria (Kharkiv, 1928)
-
Huliaipole ()
-
The Phone (1956), a poem for children
-
In the Sweat of the Forehead (, 1929), a collection of poems that was prohibited for publication by censorship
-
The Golden Boomerang (, 1946, a collection of poems
Plays
-
Lilac ()
-
The General (, 1947)
-
Morituri (, 1947)
Articles
-
Why I Am Not Going Back to the Soviet Union (1946), a pamphlet
Unknown
-
Mother Tongue
-
Shots in the Taiga
Family
Bahrianyi was married twice; his first wife was
Antonina Zosimova, and they had two children: a son, Boris, and a daughter, Natasha. In exile, he married again to
Halyna Tryhub (born in
Ternopil). They also had two children: son Nestor and daughter Roksolana.
Awards and honours
In 1992, Bahrianyi posthumously received the Shevchenko Prize () for his novels
Tyhrolovy and
Sad Hetsymanskyi.
[Listratenko, Nataliya Volodymyrivna ed. Ukrayina: knyha faktiv (Ukraine: the book of facts). Knyzhkovyi Klub, Kharkiv, 2006:214.] On 13 July 2023, Pushkin Park in Kyiv was renamed Ivan Bahrianyi Park.
Notes
Further reading
External links
