Ivan Bahrianyi

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. 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.

"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 the year 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 the other grandchildren, while we were screaming and shouting, killed him and his son (my uncle). They martyred my grandfather because he was a wealthy Ukrainian peasant (he had 40 acres of land) and was against the "commune". My uncle was killed because he was a soldier in the national army of the Ukrainian People's Republic (UPR) during the national liberation struggle in 1917-18. He was murdered for fighting for the freedom and independence of his people," wrote Bahrianyi later 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 Okhtyrka 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 the fact that he spoke Ukrainian 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 OUN in the future.

During the Civil War and later, 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 banned by censorship and removed from the book trade. Bahrianyi was a member of the Kyiv Association of Young Writers, MARS (an abbreviation for Workshop 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", written in verse, was published. 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 in protest against national oppression.

On April 16, 1932, Ivan 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 October 25, 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 transferred to another camp, Bamlag. The exact date of his release 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. Ultimately, the prosecution failed to convict him, and Ivan Bahrianyi returned to Okhtyrka. Later he used his autobiographical details in his 1946 novel The Tiger Trappers and 1950 novel Sad Hetsymans'kyi (English: Garden of Gethsemane).

 

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 the German army's defeat in 1945, Bahrianyi moved to Germany with the help of OUN.

After the end of the war, 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 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 nominated for the award. Ivan Bahrianyi died on August 25, 1963. He was buried in Neu Ulm (Germany).

• Etude (Ukrainian: Етюд) (1921)

• novella Defeat (1948)
• The Fiery Circle (Neu Ulm, 1953)

• novel in verse "Skelka" (Ukrainian: Скелька) (Kharkiv, 1929)
• Zvirolovy (eng. Trappers) (Lviv-Kraków, 1944) / novel Tyhrolovy (eng. Tiger trappers, published in English as "The Hunters and the Hunted") (Neu Ulm, 1946)
• 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)

• Mongolia (Ukrainian: Монголія) (1927)
• Ave, Maria (Kharkiv, 1928)
• Huliaipole (Ukrainian: Гуляй-Поле)
• poem for children The Phone (1956)
• collection of poems In the Sweat of the Forehead (Ukrainian: В поті чола) (1929, was prohibited for publication by censorship)
• collection of poems The Golden Boomerang (Ukrainian: Золотий бумеранґ) (1946)

• Lilac (Ukrainian: Бузок)
• The General (Ukrainian: Генерал) (1947)
• Morituri (Ukrainian: Морітурі) (1947)

• pamphlet Why I am not going back to the Soviet Union?

• Mother tongue
• Shots in the taiga

Ivan 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.

 

In 1992, Ivan Bahrianyi posthumously received the national Shevchenko Prize (Ukrainian: Шевченківська премія) for his novels Tyhrolovy and Sad Hetsymanskyi.^[2]

On July 13, 2023, Pushkin Park in Kyiv was renamed Ivan Bahrianyi Park.^[3]

• A short biography by Yevhen Shtendera
• Ivan Bahrianyi (in Ukrainian) Archived 2017-07-09 at the Wayback Machine
• Ivan Bahrianyi at The Library of Congress
• Ivan Bahrianyi at Virtual International Authority File
• Ivan Bahrianyi. Sad Hetsymansʹkyĭ
• Ivan Bahrianyi. The Hunters and the Hunted (1954)