Vasil Bobinskii Petrovich

Biography

Vasyl Petrovych Bobynskyi (March 11, 1898, Krystynopol, Lviv Voivodeship; now Chervonograd, Lviv Region - January 8, 1938, USSR Gulag) was a Ukrainian poet, journalist, and translator. Member of literary organization "Western Ukraine" and VUSPP. One of the representatives of the shot revival. A victim of Stalinist terror.

He was born in the family of a railway worker. He studied at Lviv and Vienna gymnasiums. Participant in the military operations of 1918-1920 as part of the Ukrainian Galician Army. In 1920, he spent some time in Kyiv, where he met Ukrainian modernist poets, in particular Yakov Savchenko and Dmytro Zagul. In 1921, he left for the Polish occupation zone of Ukraine and settled in Lviv. He edits together with Shkrumelyak, Kupchynskyi and Babiy the magazine "Mytusa".

He was one of the first Ukrainian poets to perform in the genre of erotic poetry. This is the crown of the sonnets "Night of Love" (written in 1921-1922, and published as a separate book in 1923 by the Lviv publishing house "Milky Way").

Since 1923, he has been working in the illegal communist press of Poland, a member of the CPSU. In 1925, his poem "The Path" was published in the Dnipropetrovsk magazine "Zorya". He published the literary weekly Svitlo (1925-1927), and was the editor of the magazine Vikna (1927-1930), which was distributed in the USSR. One of the organizers of the group of pro-Moscow writers "Gorno" in Poland.

He was persecuted by the Polish authorities. In 1926, in a Polish prison, he wrote the poem "The Death of Frank", which, for political reasons, was awarded the prize of the People's Commissariat of Education of the USSR on the eve of the 10th anniversary of the events of October 1917.

From 1930 he emigrated from Poland to Kharkiv, in Bolshevik Ukraine. He was a member of the literary organization "Western Ukraine" and the VUSPP, but almost immediately fell under the fire of boorish Bolshevik criticism. Shortly after, on December 25, 1933, he was arrested by the NKVD team of the USSR, allegedly as a member of the Security Guard, and imprisoned in the basement of the special corps of the NKVD prison on Chernyshevska Street in Kharkiv. Prosecutor Krayniy, who himself would soon be killed by the communists, demanded three years of concentration camps for the poet.

In 1934, Bobynskyi was taken in calf wagons to hard labor on the Volga-Moscow canal. A young wife with a small child tried to follow him along the stage, but soon disappeared.

In 1937, he was arrested again. On January 2, 1938, he was sentenced to death. Shot on January 8, 1938. Rehabilitated in 1956.

Works

He published four poetry collections in Poland:

• In the vestibule of the temple. — Lviv, 1919
• Poetry. Book one. — Lviv, 1919
• Night of love. Wreath of sonnets. — Lviv, 1923
• The secret of dance. — Lviv, 1924

Three poetry books were published in the USSR:

• Poetry. Selection for the decade 1920-1930. — Kharkiv, 1930
• Words on the wall. — Kharkiv, 1932
• Poems and pamphlets. — Kharkiv, 1933

He also worked as a translator, in particular, a number of novels by Stefan Zweig ("Letter from a Stranger", "Amok", "Street in the Moonlight", "The Extinguished Heart").

Memory

There is a small Bobynskyi street in his hometown of Chervonograd.