Ivan Bahrianyi

Biography

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). In 1932 Bahrianyi was arrested in Kharkiv for spreading “counter-revolutionary propaganda” with his early poems, and imprisoned in a gulag in the Russian Far East for six years. In 1938, a second arrest and a new accusation: participation in a nationalist counter-revolutionary organization. In 1940 due to severe lung disease, the writer was released. And Ivan Bahrianyi wrote about the arrest, torture, and exile in the novel “Sad Hetsymanskyi” (“Garden of Gethsemane”) (1950). During the Second World War, the poet managed to leave for Halychyna, where he wrote the novel “The Beast Hunters” (1944, republished in 1946-1947 under the title “The Tiger Hunters” ). Soon he emigrated to Slovakia, then Austria and Germany. Far from his homeland, Bahrianyi openly wrote about what hurt and worried him. Shortly after his release from the concentration camp, the writer was re-arrested for his involvement in a Ukrainian nationalist counter-revolutionary organisation. During World War II he participated in the Ukrainian national underground movement, and in 1945 he defected to Germany. An important piece of work by Bahrianyi from the post-war period is the essay "Why I am not going back to the Soviet Union?", which describes the USSR as an abusive stepmother which is committing a genocide against its own people.