Mykola Bazhan

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Mykola Bazhan
Ukrainian SSR, Soviet Union
Occupationwriter, poet, academician
LanguageUkrainian
NationalitySoviet

Mykola Platonovych Bazhan (Ukrainian: Микола Платонович Бажан; 9 October [O.S. 26 September] 1904 – 23 November 1983) was a Soviet Ukrainian writer, poet, highly decorated political and public figure. He was an academician of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR (1951), Distinguished Figure in Science and Technology of Ukrainian SSR (1966), Distinguished Figure in Arts of Georgian SSR (1964), People's Poet of Uzbek SSR.

Career

Bazhan was a People's Deputy of the

Council of Minister (Commissars) of the Ukrainian SSR
.

Biography

Mykola Bazhan was born in city of

cartographer and a veteran of the Ukrainian People's Army[citation needed
].

In 1923 Mykola Bazhan graduated from the Uman Cooperative College

Kiev where he studied at the Kiev Cooperative Institute (1921-1923) and in the Kiev institute of foreign relations (1923-1925).[1] He was active in the Futurist literary movement, and his first poem «Ruro-marsh» («Руро-марш») was published in Kiev in 1923 and his poetry collection "Seventeenth Patrol" in Kharkiv in 1926. In 1926 he married a Ukrainian writer and native of Kiev Halyna Kovalenko. They divorced in 1938, and he remarried, to Nina Lauer, shortly thereafter.[2]

During the 1930s Bazhan's works were viewed as "anti-proletarian" and became a subject of a number official anti-nationalist campaigns.[

1937 he felt his arrest was imminent and he rarely slept at home.[citation needed] In 1939 Bazhan was awarded the Order of Lenin for his translation into Ukrainian of the epic poem "The Warrior in the Tiger's skin" by the medieval Georgian poet Shota Rustaveli. Bazhan found out about this, from a newspaper, while hiding from his imminent arrest in a city park in Kiev.[citation needed] He was eventually told by Nikita Khrushchev that his arrest had been ordered, but Stalin was fond of his Rustaveli translation, and changed his mind.[3] In 1940 Mykola Bazhan joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and in the same year became a member of the Presidium of the Writers' Union of Ukraine
.

During the

Great Patriotic War Bazhan became a military reporter and the editor of the newspaper For the Soviet Ukraine. In 1943 he published a book, Stalingrad Notebook, for which in 1946 he received the Stalin Prize. In 1953-59 Bazhan headed the Writer's Union of Ukraine. As a head of the Union, in May 1954, at the beginning of the Khrushchev Thaw, he sent a letter to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, in which he raised the issue of publishing works and introducing creative biographies of Vasil Chumak, Myroslav Irchan, Mykyta Cherniavsky, Ivan Mikitenko, and Pilip Kapelhorodsky, most of which were killed or executed in 1937-1938, into the course of the history of Ukrainian Soviet literature. On July 2, 1956 he raised before the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine the issue of rehabilitation several repressed writers: Vasyl Bobynsky, Hryhorii Epik, Ivan Kulyk, Mykola Kulish, and many more.[4]

In 1970 Bazhan was nominated for a Nobel Prize in literature, but he was forced by Soviet authorities to write a letter refusing his candidature.[5]

From 1957 and until his death, Bazhan was the founding chief

Kiev
in 1983.

Moisei Fishbein
, a notable Ukrainian poet was Bazhan's literary secretary.

Bazhan in English

A collection of English translations of Bazhan's futurist poetry titled Quiet Spiders of the Hidden Soul was published by the Academic Studies Press in 2019. These include translations by

Roman Turovsky.[6]

Awards and prizes

Coin of Bazhan by the National Bank of Ukraine

External links

References

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Mykola Bazhan.
  1. ^ a b "Мемориальная квартира-музей Н.П.Бажана в г.Киеве". Шукач. Retrieved 3 April 2024.
  2. ^ ""ВОНА – ЛЮБОВ, СПАСЕННА І ЄДИНА…" (роздуми над рядками неопублікованого вірша Миколи Бажана та його листами до дружини) - Національний музей літератури України".
  3. ISBN 9785457055421
    .
  4. ^ ""Пильніше й глибше вдуматися в себе..."". Голос України. Retrieved 3 April 2024.
  5. ISBN 978-0307363787
    .
  6. ^ ""Quiet Spiders of the Hidden Soul": Mykola (Nik) Bazhan's Early Experimental Poetry".
  • This article may be expanded with text translated from the corresponding article in the Russian Wikipedia.
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