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Ivan Bahrianyi (Ukrainian: Іван Багряний) (2 October 1906 – 25 August 1963) was a Ukrainian writer, essayist, novelist and politician, Shevchenko prize awardee (1992, postmortem). The writer's real name was Ivan Pavlovych Lozoviaha (Lozoviahin).

Ivan Bahrianyi was born in the village of Kuzemyn, Okhtyrskyi Raion, Sumy Oblast, in eastern Ukraine, in the family of a bricklayer. His education was not consistent, due to the difficulty of life during First World War, the revolution and the post-war chaos in education. He started at age of 6 in church-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.

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 homeless and orphans. At that time he visited Donbas, Crimea and Kuban. Bahrianyi did enter the Kyiv Art Institute, but did not graduate f due to material distress and prejudiced attitude of the management. Due to that he was speaking Ukrainian and was Ukrainian-spirited young man, his peers mocked him for a long time and called him mazepian (a Russian derogatory term for Ukrainians after Ivan Mazepa, similar to modern Banderites), that 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 the 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 on a charge of "counter-revolutionary propaganda" he allegedly spread in his poems. He spent 11 months in a separate cell (solitary confinement) in OGPU inner prison. On October 25, 1932 he was sentenced to 3 years of colony at the Far East. He tried to escape, but unsuccessfully, sentence was extended for 3 years, Ivan Bahrianyi was transferred to another camp - BAM.

The exact date when he returned home is unknown, but on June 16, 1938 he has been re-arrested and placed in Kharkiv NKVD jail. Bahrianyi was charged on 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).

After the end of the war, on behalf of ex-OST-Arbeiter and war prisoner, Bahrianyi wrote a pamphlet named Why I am not going back to the Soviet Union?. The pamphlet was presenting the Soviet Union as a "stepmother" that arranged genocide against its own people. In 1948 he founded the Ukrainian Revolutionary Democratic Party (URDP). Starting from 1948 till his death in 1963 he had been editing the newspaper Ukrains'ki visti (eng. Ukrainian news). He headed the executive committee of the Ukrainian National Council, 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, but his sudden death failed him to be formally forwarded for the award. Ivan Bahrianyi died on August 25, 1963. He was buried in Neu Ulm (Germany).

Courtesy -- wikipedia
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