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September 13, 1834

Anatolii Svydnytsky was born on September 13, 1834, in Mankivtsi, a village in Podillia about 50 miles west of Vinnytsia. While a student at Kharkiv University, he joined the clandestine Kharkiv-Kyiv Society, whose objectives were the overthrow of Russian tsarist autocracy and the emancipation of the peasantry.

Members of the society busied themselves writing and distributing anti-tsarist leaflets, essays and verse. Svydnytsky wrote a number of lyric poems in the 1860s, of which most were published posthumously by Ivan Franko in the Literaturno-Naukovyi Vistnyk in 1901.

Svydnytsky wrote essays on ethnography which were published in the journal Osnova; after the Ems Ukase banned all Ukrainian publications, he published a number of articles and stories in the Russian-language newspaper Kievlianin.

His novel, "Liuboratski," is a wide-ranging chronicle of the downfall of a family of clergymen in the author's native Podillia. Franko considered the work to be the first Ukrainian realist novel. However, the novel had no immediate influence on Svydnytsky's contemporaries, because it also did not appear during his lifetime. It was first serialized in the journal Zoria in 1886, 15 years after the writer-activist's death in Kyiv on July 18, 1871.

Source: "Svydnytsky, Anatolii," Encyclopedia of Ukraine, Vol. 5 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993).

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, September 7, 1997, No. 36, Vol. LXV

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