Turning the pages back... August 5, 1899 (08/02/98)

Turning the pages back...

August 5, 1899

Borys Antonenko-Davydovych was born Borys Davydov on August 5, 1899, in Romen, a town in northeastern Ukraine half-way between Kyiv and Kharkiv, to the family of a railroad engineer, Dmytro Davydov.

His studies at Kharkiv University in the natural sciences were interrupted by the Russian Revolution, but he resumed them at the Kyiv Institute of People's Education (graduating in 1923), where he was taught philology by the great literary scholar and Neoclassicist writer Mykola Zerov.

The young Davydov joined the autonomist Ukrainian Communist Party and served as secretary of its Kyiv oblast executive committee, but soon gauged the repressive winds blowing from Moscow and quit its ranks to become a non-party journalist and writer.

In 1923 he joined the editorial board of Hlobus, a popular illustrated semimonthly supplement to the newspaper Bilshovyk and (from 1925) Proletarska Pravda. In this position, he nurtured the talent of one of the outstanding lights of the Fusilladed Renaissance (Rozstriliane Vidrodzhennia), Yurii Yanovskyi.

The following year, together with the greatest prose writer of the period, Valerian Pidmohylnyi, Antonenko-Davydovych (he'd adopted that pseudonym by then) founded the literary group Lanka (known as MARS from 1926), an ensemble united by a desire to be independent of official literary politics.

His first work was a drama, "Lytsari Absurdu" (Knights of the Absurd, 1924), published by the journal Chervonyi Shliakh, followed soon after by collections of stories and novellas "Zaporosheni Syliuety" (Dusty Silhouettes, 1925), "Tuk-tuk" (1926) and "Synia Voloshka" (The Blue Cornflower, 1927).

Already with "Silhouettes," Antonenko-Davydovych had begun to draw ideological fire from Soviet critics who detected "bourgeois nationalism" in the author's insistence on highlighting the collision between Ukrainian and Russian cultures, and who bristled at his derisive treatment of Communist Party functionaries and agit-prop campaigns.

Their hostility was assured by his novel, "Smert" (Death, 1928), which became very popular. Its first few sentences identify Russian communism as a foreign presence in Ukraine, and the book's central character is a Ukrainian intellectual who becomes an oppressor of his own people because of his adherence to ideology.

In 1929, he published another collection of stories, "Spravzhnyi Cholovik" (A Real Man), and in the following year, a book of wistful travel vignettes, "Zemleiu Ukrainskoiu" (Through the Ukrainian Land), which ranged over cities, towns and villages; over the countryside of the Dnipro's southern lowlands, the mines of the Donbas and borderlands of western Ukraine.

As the Stalinist terror was reaching its apogee, Antonenko-Davydovych avoided arrest by traveling between Kharkiv and Kyiv, somehow managing to get his novella "Kryla Artema Letiuchoho" (The Wings of Artem Letiuchyi, 1932) and collection of stories "Liudy i Vuhillia" (People and Coal, 1932) published. In 1933, he went into self-imposed exile in Kazakstan, but the NKVD caught up with him in Alma-Ata in 1935 and he was imprisoned in labor camps until the Khrushchev thaw in 1956.

Rehabilitated, he returned to Kyiv and resumed his literary work, publishing three collections of short stories and a novel by 1960, but it did not take long for the regime to turn on him. His novel "Za Shyrmoiu" (Behind the Screen, 1963) was harshly criticized for deviations from Socialist Realism. His literary criticism (anthologized in "Pro Shcho i Iak," On What and How, 1962; and "V Literaturi i Kolo Literatury," In and Around Literature, 1964) and essays on linguistics (collected in "Iak My Hovorymo," How We Speak, 1970) secured his strong influence on the literary generation of the 1960s, which became known as the Shestydesiatnyky.

This work and his protests against Russification and statements in defense of Ukrainian dissidents also provoked a series of repressive measures from the Brezhnevite machine, which subjected him to incarceration, house arrest and constant harassment of his family. From the early 1970s, publication of his works was suspended and his books were banned.

Borys Antonenko-Davydovych died on May 5, 1984, in Kyiv.

Sources: "Antonenko-Davydovych, Borys" Encyclopedia of Ukraine, Vol. 1 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984); "Antonenko-Davydovych, Borys," Ukrainska Literaturna Entsyklopedia, Vol. 1 (Kyiv: Ukrainska Radianska Entsyklopedia, 1988); Yuriy Lavrinenko, ed., "Rozstriliane Vidrodzhennia," (Paris: Kultura, 1959).