Skrypnyk, Leonid

Skrypnyk, Leonid [Скрипник, Леонід] (pseudonyms: Leonid Lain, M. Lansky), b 1893, d 23 February 1929 in Kharkiv. Futurist writer and theorist. He graduated with an engineering degree from the Kyiv Polytechnical Institute and was involved in flying experiments at N. Zhukovsky's Aerodynamics Institute near Moscow before the First World War. In the Soviet period he worked in Kyiv in the administration of the Southwestern Railroad and then operated the film laboratory at the Odesa factory of the All-Ukrainian Photo-Cinema Administration (see Odesa Artistic Film Studio). He published prose, reviews, and literary criticism in the journals Chervonyi shliakh (the novelette ‘Ivan Petrovych i Feliks,’ 1928, no. 11), Zhyttia i revoliutsiia, Nova generatsiia, and Vsesvit (as its associate editor) and in Kul’tura i pobut, the supplement to Visti VUTsVK. From 1928 he belonged to the futurist writers' group Nova Generatsiia. He wrote the first Ukrainian reference book for the photographer (1927), the first Ukrainian book of essays on the history of film and cinematic art (1928), and the experimental ‘screen novel’ Inteligent (The Intellectual, 1929; repr in Suchasnist’ in 1984), and translated into Ukrainian Upton Sinclair's 100 Percent, the Story of a Patriot (1928). His book on art and social culture and his novel ‘Epizod z zhyttia chudnoï liudyny’ (Episode from the Life of a Strange Person) were not completed.

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 4 (1993).]