Novychenko, Leonid
Novychenko, Leonid [Новиченко, Леонід; Novyčenko], b 31 March 1914 in Rusanivka, Hadiach county, Poltava gubernia, d 22 November 1996 in Kyiv. Literary scholar and critic; full member of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR. He graduated from Kyiv University in 1939 and worked in an editorial capacity on various literary journals. He was secretary of the executive of the Writers' Union of the USSR (1959–86) and of the Writers' Union of Ukraine (elected in 1966). From 1949 he worked at the Institute of Literature of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR. He began publishing in his field in 1939. His works include Pavlo Tychyna (1941), Povist’ pro poeta: Liryka M. Ryl’s’koho (The Story of a Poet: The Lyric Poetry of M. Rylsky, 1942), Tvorchist’ Pavla Tychyny (The Works of Pavlo Tychyna, 1949), Poeziia i revoliutsiia (Poetry and Revolution, 1956), Shevchenko i suchasnist’ (Shevchenko and the Present, 1964), Poetychnyi svit Maksyma Ryl’s’koho, 1910–41 (The Poetical World of Maksym Rylsky, 1910–1941, 1980), and T. Shevchenko—poet, borets’, liudyna (Taras Shevchenko, Poet, Fighter, Human Being, 1982). Novychenko also wrote studies of the work of Myroslav Irchan, Leonid Pervomaisky, and others, assisted in the preparation of curricula for Ukrainian literary history, and wrote in the official vein a number of works on the theory of socialist realism. They include Pro riznomanitnist’ khudozhnikh form i styliv u literaturi sotsialistychnoho realizmu (On the Many Different Artistic Forms and Styles in Socialist-Realist Literature, 1959) and Ne iliustratsiia—vidkryttia! (Not Illustration, Revelation!, 1967). In the 1950s and 1960s he welcomed the works of the shisdesiatnyky but came out against the rehabilitation of victims of the Stalinist terror of the 1930s, particularly that of Mykola Khvylovy and Mykola Zerov. Editions of his selected works have appeared in Ukrainian (1974; 1983; 2 vols, 1984) and Russian (1985).
Ivan Koshelivets
[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 3 (1993).]