Mykola Khvylyovy

Many called him a romantic of the Revolution. This is how he is commented in 1926 Anthology: "A revolutionary from head to heel, Khvylyovy is firmly linked with the finest traditions of the Ukrainian fiction. One must say that Khvylyovy's pursuit began at the point where Kotsyubinsky's had come to an end".

Mykola Khvylyovy was born on December 13, 1893 in the village of Trostyanets', Kharkiv Province (now a district seat in Sumy Region) into the family of a school teacher. His formal education did not go beyond primary school, and his gymnasium diploma was obtained by passing the final examinations without having actually attended classes. But this was only a step to his subsequent systematic self-education. Several years spent in the trenches of World War I played a significant role in molding his outlook. He published his first poem soon after the war, when he was a factory worker in Kharkiv. They were followed by the poem "The Electrical Age" and collections of verses "Youth" (1921) and "Symphonies of Dawn" (1922). These were works that revealed him as genuine and original master, charting-new ways for the development of the Ukrainian literature, enriching it with new imagery, styles and genres.

The author was accused of being an admirer of Dostoyevsky and an imitator of de Moupassant and, consequently, of making a fetish of the bourgeois culture.

Such ideological charges brought against Khvylyovy caused him to fight and defend his views. He saw that polemics was senseless, that the new Ukrainian literature was threatened by the reactionary ideological forces. He renounced his slogans again and again but they were swept by new waves of ideological charges. Finally he decided to commit suicide hoping it would defend a new Ukrainian literature.

His works were forbidden, his name was crossed out from the history of the Ukrainian literature.

Only recently this "rebellious Communard", who created finest poems, sketches, novelle and stories has come back to us. He undoubtedly merits the attention of the modern readers.

Lina Kostenko

Being asked about her life story Lina Kostenko, a world-wide known Ukrainian poetess, says that the biography of a poet is reflected in poet's poems, which are both works of art and all the possible explanations about poet's life and understanding of the era he lives in. In one of her verses she has this massage: "Your suffering is your personal affair, your art is a holiday for all".

Her life story is not exactly happy, which also has its logic. It is the logic of the rebellious spirit of a poetess who persistently abided by the standards and principles of literary ethics when it came to such things as conscience, honour and tmth. This explains her almost fifteen-year silence during the period of our social stagnation. It was a sad episode in the history of Ukrainian literature, when one of its unusually vivid personalities seemed to have completely disappeared from the horizon of culture. Within this time there grew up an entire generation of people who did not know Lina Kostenko's poetry, as they built up their own "table of ranks" in national fiction without her.

Then followed Lina Kostenko's come-back when she had already become a world-wide known poetess. She published her book of verses "On the Banks of the Eternal River", which is extraordinarily penetrat­ing in its force of feeling and concentration of thought. It literally breathed sincerity in everything — feelings, thoughts and words. Such works are important for literature not only because they become its heights of achievements, but also because they restore the creative impulse and moral wholesomeness in fiction.

This collection was followed by a historic novel in verse, "Marusya Churai", which without any exaggeration can be called an encyclopedia of Ukraine's cultural life in the 17th century, and by the books of verses "inimitableness" and "The Garden of Unmelting Sculptures". Lina Kostenko has become the most popular of the modern poets, though there are very many of talented poets in Ukraine now.

Our literature is simply inconceivable without her personality, her word, and civic stand. Poets such as she affects both the poetry, and the prose, and literary criticism of her day, "rearing" then creatively and socially.