Ivan Bahrianyi

Ivan Bahrianyi (; 2 October 1906 – 25 August 1963), real name Ivan Pavlovych Lozoviaha (Lozoviahin), 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.

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

* ''Etude'' (, 1921)

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''. On 13 July 2023, Pushkin Park in Kyiv was renamed Ivan Bahrianyi Park.

References

Further reading

*

External links

A short biography by Yevhen Shtendera






Ivan Bahrianyi at Virtual International Authority File

Ivan Bahrianyi. Sad Hetsymansʹkyĭ

Ivan Bahrianyi. The Hunters and the Hunted (1954)

{{DEFAULTSORT:Bahrianyi, Ivan
1906 births
1963 deaths
20th-century pseudonymous writers
20th-century Ukrainian politicians
Executed Renaissance
People from Kharkov Governorate
People from Sumy Oblast
Politicians from the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic
Recipients of the Shevchenko National Prize
Soviet emigrants to Germany
Soviet prisoners and detainees
Soviet writers
Ukrainian collaborators with Nazi Germany
Ukrainian exiles
Ukrainian male writers