Ivan Bahrianyi was born in the village of Kuzemyn, Kharkiv Governorate, Russian Empire, in the family of a bricklayer. His education was not consistent due to the difficulty of life during the First World War, the revolution, and the post-war chaos in education. He started at the age of 6 in parochial school. Later Bahrianyi finished higher elementary school in Okhtyrka. Having completed his secondary education in 1920 he entered the locksmith school, then he got admitted to an artistic school.
"I was just a little 10-year-old boy when the Bolsheviks invaded my consciousness with a bloody nightmare, acting as executioners of my people, it was 1920. I was living with my grandfather in the countryside, at an apiary. My grandfather was 92 years old and a one-armed cripple. One day, in the evening, some armed men came, speaking a foreign language, and in front of my eyes and the eyes of my other grandchildren, under our frantic screams, they killed him and his son (my uncle). They tortured my grandfather because he was a wealthy Ukrainian peasant (he had 40 acres of land) and was against the "commune," and my uncle because he was a soldier in the national liberation struggle in 1917-18. For fighting for the freedom and independence of his people," Bahrianyi would later write in his pamphlet, Why I Don't Want to Return to the USSR.[1]
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 Okhtyr police, and a drawing teacher in a colony for the homeless and orphans. At that time he visited Donbas, Crimea, and Kuban. Bahrianyi did enter the Kyiv Art Institute but did not graduate due to material distress and the prejudiced attitude of the management. Due to that, he was speaking Ukrainian and was a Ukrainian-spirited young man, his peers mocked him for a long time. 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 joining the OUN in the future.
During the Civil War and in the early 1920s, he was involved in Soviet social and political work, but in 1925 he left Komsomol. In 1926, he began to publish poetry in newspapers and journals, and in 1927, his first collection of poetry appeared. In 1929 he published a collection of poems, "Ave Maria", which was almost immediately forbidden by censorship and removed from the book trade. Bahrianyi was a member of the Kyiv Association of young writers, MARS (an abbreviation for Shop of Revolutionary Word) 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, a historical novel "Skelka" was published in verse. It tells of the uprising in the village of Skelka in the eighteenth century against the arbitrariness of the Moscow monks of the monastery, near the village. The peasants burned down the monastery, protesting against national oppression.
Arrest and detention
On April 16, 1932, Ivan Bahrianyi was arrested in Kharkiv for "counter-revolutionary propaganda" he allegedly spread in his poems. He spent 11 months in a separate cell (solitary confinement) in the OGPU inner prison. On October 25, 1932, he was sentenced to 3 years of colony in the Far East. He tried to escape but unsuccessfully, the sentence was extended for 3 years, and Ivan Bahrianyi was transferred to another camp - BAM. The exact date he returned home is unknown, but on June 16, 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. Later he used his autobiographical details in his novel Sad Hetsymans'kyi (English: Garden of Gethsemane).
War years
Okhtyrka was swept up in World War II. He joined the Ukrainian national 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 construct the Ukrainian Supreme Liberation Council (USLC) and wrote its policy texts. Simultaneously, he resumed his literary activities. Bahrianyi published his novel Zvirolovi (Eng. Tiger Trappers in English as "The Hunters and the Hunted") and poem Huliaipole in 1944.
Before Hitler's army was defeated in 1945, Ivan Bahrianyi moved to Germany via OUN.
Emigration
After the end of the war, on behalf of ex-Ostarbeiter and war prisoner, Bahrianyi wrote a pamphlet named Why I am not going back to the Soviet Union? The pamphlet presented the Soviet Union as a "stepmother" that arranged genocide against its people. In 1948 he founded the Ukrainian Revolutionary Democratic Party (URDP). From 1948 till his death in 1963 he edited the newspaper Ukrains'ki visti (Eng. Ukrainian news). He headed the Ukrainian National Council's executive committee and also performed the duties of the Deputy President of the UNR in exile. In 1963 the Democratic Union of Ukrainian Youth based in Chicago started action to support awarding Ivan Bahrianyi with the Nobel Prize. Still, his sudden death prevented him from being formally forwarded for the award. Ivan Bahrianyi died on August 25, 1963. He was buried in Neu Ulm (Germany).
novel in verse "Skelka" (Ukrainian: Скелька) (Kharkiv, 1929)
novel Zvirolovy (eng. Trappers) (Lviv-Kraków, 1944) / novel Tyhrolovy (eng. Tiger trappers, published in English as "The Hunters and the Hunted") (Neu Ulm, 1946)
novel Sad Hetsymanskyi (Ukrainian: Сад Гетсиманський) (eng. 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)
Ivan Bahrianyi was married twice; his first wife was Antonina Zosimova, and they had two children: a son Boris, and daughter Natasha. In exile, he married again to Halyna Tryhub (born in Ternopil). They also had two children: son Nestor and daughter Roksolana.
Ivan Bahrianyi thomb in Neu Ulm, Germany
Awards and honours
In 1992, Ivan Bahrianyi posthumously received the national Shevchenko Prize (Ukrainian: Шевченківська премія) for his novels Tyhrolovy and Sad Hetsymanskyi.[1]
On July 13, 2023, PushkinPark in Kyiv was renamed Ivan Bahrianyi Park.[2]
References
^Listratenko, Nataliya Volodymyrivna ed. Ukrayina: knyha faktiv (Ukraine: the book of facts). Knyzhkovyi Klub, Kharkiv, 2006:214.
