Atamaniuk, Vasyl

Atamaniuk, Vasyl [Атаманюк, Василь; Atamanjuk, Vasyl'; pseudonym: Yablunenko], b 14 March 1897 in Yabluniv, Stanyslaviv county, Galicia, 3 November 1937 in Sandarmokh, Karelia, RSFSR. Writer and political activist. After studying in the Kolomyia gymnasium to 1915 Atamanchuk served in the Austrian army (for a time with the Ukrainian Sich Riflemen). In 1918 he emigrated to Katerynoslav and joined the Borotbists. He moved to Kyiv in 1922. Atamaniuk belonged to the literary organization Zakhidnia Ukraina and edited its journal Zakhidnia Ukraïna. He began to publish in 1915. His collections of poetry include Chary kokhannia (Enchantments of Love, 1921), Khvyli zhyttia (The Waves of Life, 1922), Zhovten' (October, 1924), and Halychyna (Galicia, 1925). He also produced a collection of short stories, Duma pro Stepana Mel'nychuka (Duma about Stepan Melnychuk, 1924). Atamaniuk was also a literary critic, literary scholar, and translator as well as the editor of a number of anthologies. In 1930 he was expelled from Zakhidnia Ukraina and during Stalinist terror, in late January 1933, he was arrested and sentenced to five years of hard labor. He was resentenced to death by an NKVD tribunal in October 1937 and shot not long thereafter during the mass executions of political and other prisoners marking the twentieth anniversary of the October Revolution of 1917.

[This article was updated in 2024.]