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| Pavlo Tychyna (1891-1967) experienced an unremarkable childhood in late nineteenth-century Ukraine. He was born on27 January 1891, near Chernihiv in West Central Ukraine into the family of a village deacon. He received a secondaryeducation in exchange for tendering his services to the monastery choir and became an accomplished player of theclarinet and oboe, and displayed an ability to produce striking pencil sketches. In 1910 he met the author who wouldbecome his artistic mentor, Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky (1864-1913), whose most well known work is perhapsTini zabutykh predkiv (1913, "Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors"). Tychyna studied at the Commercial Institutein Kyiv from 1913-1917. During the 1920s he became one of a generation of supremely gifted Ukrainian writers who cameto be known as the "Executed Renaissance" because most of them died at the hands of the Soviet regime during the 1930s.Tychyna survived by writing collections of hideous Stalinist doggerel. In later years, as the political climate relaxed,he was able to rediscover his talent and produce work which was both supreme poetry and acceptable to the regime.He always remained haunted by the repressions of the 1930s during which millions of Ukrainians died in the terrorfamine of 1932 to 1933. | ||
Books available from Poetry Salzburg: Pavlo Tychyna: The Raspberry's Eyelash, translated and edited by Steve Komarnyckyj, January 2012. 120 pp. ISBN-13 978-3-901993-36-7 Send an e-mail to order this book |
