Arkadii Kazka Vasilovich

Biography

Arkadiy Vasyliovych Kazka was born on September 11, 1890 in the Ukrainian town of Sedniv, which at that time was part of the Chernihiv province of the Russian Empire, in a family of a village shoemaker with many children (three sons and four daughters). His father - Vasyl Kindratovych - came from a Cossack family, his mother - Yefrosinia Andriivna - from a peasant family.

Graduated from Chernihiv Real School. During his studies, he became friends with the poet Pavel Tychyna, with whom he lived in a monastery dormitory, sang together in the church choir, and attended the famous "Saturdays" of Mykhailo Kotsiubynskyi.

He studied at the Kyiv Commercial Institute (now Vadym Hetman Kyiv National University of Economics), but did not graduate due to poverty. He returned to Chernihiv, worked as a draftsman in the Zemstvo administration. Subsequently, he taught in the villages of Kyiv Oblast, Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, and Odessa. He taught singing and the Ukrainian language.

On the night of September 10, 1929, Kazka was arrested in the IED case and sent to Odesa prison. Behaved decently during interrogations, did not slander anyone. Brought to suicide by the NKVD investigator, he died on November 23, 1929. The poet was rehabilitated on November 27, 1997.

Creativity

Even before 1917, he translated from Western European and Russian literature. In the USSR, he published his own poems and poems in the magazines "Literary and Scientific Bulletin", "Nova Hrodama", "Plough".

At the beginning of the 20s, he prepared a handwritten collection of poems "Sumlyve". In a letter to Tychyna (February 11, 1925), he wrote about the preparation of the collection "The Broken Necklace", and in a letter to his student Vasyl Mysyk - about the collection "Cornflowers".

The literary critic Tetyana Studentova noted:

A. Kazka's poetry is the poetry of finding oneself and one's place in literature. The author appears before the master of established canonical forms developed over time: gazelle, rondo, hexameter, tercet, triolet - in which he continues the best traditions of Ukrainian classics. The author easily improvises within the syllabic tonic and produces his original stanzas.

Destiny after death

Pavlo Tychyna dreamed of publishing his friend's collection in the early 1960s. Even then, Kazka's name, like all those killed in the IED case, was banned. However, in 1965, V. Mysyk (not Tychyna) published a number of his teacher's works in the collection "Day of Poetry".

In 1989, the publishing house "Soviet Writer" published the book "Cornflowers" (arrangement and introductory article by S. Telniuk). There are original poems, poems, letters to Pavlo Tychyna and Lidia Paparuk, translations from I. Bunin, V. Mayakovsky, V. Müller, G. Stefani.

The archive of Fairy Tales was lost during the Second World War.

Tichyna and the Tale

Pavlo Tychyna, who called Kazka an "amazingly conscientious and sincere poet", testified that friendship with this person gave him immeasurably much. In connection with the tragic death of A. Kazka in a prison cell, he wrote to his wife Lidia Petrivna: "It didn't turn out that way in his life (…) And he didn't develop his talent. And I didn't drink anything white." This sad maxim sounds painful and symbolic.

Tychyna reacted painfully to the death of A. Kazka, so he wrote the poem "The Funeral of a Friend", which he published as early as 1943.