Turning the pages back... November 5, 1895 (11/02/97)

Turning the pages back...

November 5, 1895

One of the more urbane members of Ukraine's "Fusilladed Renaissance" (Rozstriliane Vidrodzhennia) of the 1920s, Maik (Mykhailo) Yohansen was born on November 5, 1895, in Kharkiv, which was briefly the capital of Soviet Ukraine and the center of much of the literary ferment in the country. His father was Swedish and a teacher of German. This, and his studies in linguistics at Kharkiv University, where he studied under the great comparative scholar Leonid Bulakhovsky, gave him a unique window into the Western world.

His experience of the Denikinist ravages of 1919 made Yohansen a fervent Ukrainophile, setting the stage for his encounters with Mykola Khvyliovy, Vasyl Ellan-Blakytny, Pavlo Tychyna and others in 1920, joining the current of what they declared to be "Ukrainian proletarian literature."Yohansen's creativity erupted, and he published four collections of poetry, including "D'hori" (To the Pinnacle, 1921) and "Krokoveie Kolo" (The Dancing Circle, 1924), and a text in literary theory (Elementary Rules of Versification, 1922). He joined the massist writers' group Hart in 1923, led by his friend Blakytny, but then followed the "Urbino" group led by Khvyliovy, who insisted that artistry was the defining goal of literary activity, and was one of the co-founders of the excellent, but doomed, Vaplite (Free Academy of Proletarian Literature, 1925-1928).

Yohansen began writing prose, employing the technique of "uchudnennia," which aimed to make the ordinary appear strange or miraculous, while infusing his narratives with a characteristic humorous edge. His published works include "17 Khvylyn" (17 Minutes, 1925), "Podorozh Doktora Leonardo po Slobozhanskii Shvaitsariyi" (Doctor Leonardo's Travels through the Switzerland of Slobidska Ukraine, 1928) and "Podorozh Liudyny pid Kepom" (The Journey of a Man Under a Cap, 1932).

He also continued his scholarly work, assisting in the compilation of a Russian-Ukrainian dictionary (1926), and a Russian-Ukrainian dictionary of folk sayings. He participated in the All-Ukrainian Orthographic Conference in 1927, which first produced a synthesis of western and eastern Ukrainian forms and resulted in the issuance of a standard orthography in 1928. He also began working on a project to Latinize Ukrainian script.

Yohansen managed to escape the initial fury of Stalin's terror that swept up his friends in the early 1930s, but was arrested during the NKVD's "Yezhov Terror." He was sentenced to death by firing squad and executed in Kyiv on October 27, 1937.

Sources: "Yohansen, Maik," Encyclopedia of Ukraine, Vol. 5 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993); "Rozstriliane Vidrodzhennia," Yuriy Lavrinenko, ed. (Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1959).

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