Ivchenko, Mykhailo

Ivchenko, Mykhailo [Івченко, Михайло; Ivčenko, Myxajlo], b 9 August 1890 in Nykolivka, Pryluky county, Poltava gubernia, d 16 October 1939 in Vladykavkaz, RSFSR. Writer; husband of Liudmyla Kovalenko. Before the Revolution of 1917 he worked as a statistician in the Poltava region and wrote articles on economics, natural science, and the national question for periodicals such as Rada (Kyiv) and Khutorianyn. A Soviet ‘fellow traveler’ in the 1920s, member of the literary organizations Muzahet and Aspys, he was the author of the impressionistic prose collections Shumy vesniani (The Murmurs of Spring, 1919), Imlystoiu rikoiu (Along the Misty River, 1926), Porvanoiu dorohoiu (Along the Broken Road, 1927), and Zemli dzvoniat’ (The Lands Peal, 1928). His most significant work, the novel Robitni syly (The Work Forces, 1929), portrays allegorically the fostering of national consciousness. A defendant at the show trial of the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine in 1930, he received a conditional sentence. To avoid another arrest, in 1934 he left Ukraine for Moscow and then settled in Vladykavkaz in Caucasia. He translated into Ukrainian the prose of Rabindranath Tagore with whom he corresponded in the 1920s.

[This article was updated in 2008.]