Literaturnyi iarmarok

Literaturnyi iarmarok (Literary Fair). A literary and art almanac in Kharkiv, edited by Mykola Khvylovy. Twelve issues appeared between December 1928 and February 1930. Officially nonpartisan, Literaturnyi iarmarok was in fact the organ of the group of former members of the dissolved Vaplite. The literary-historical significance of the almanac lies in its representing one of the last organized attempts to resist the Communist party's efforts to force all writers to adopt socialist realism. Literaturnyi iarmarok published works which were later labeled bourgeois-nationalist, including Mykola Kulish's plays, Khvylovy's satires Ivan Ivanovych and Revizor (The Inspector General), Volodymyr Gzhytsky's novel Chorne ozero (The Black Lake), Ivan Senchenko's Chervonohrads’ki portrety (Chervonohrad Portraits), Volodymyr Sosiura's poem Mazepa, poetry and prose by Vasyl Mysyk, Oleksa Vlyzko, and Maik Yohansen, and intermedes by Ostap Vyshnia and Volodymyr Yurynets. Attacks from the official critics even provoked an original arrangement of the almanac, in which modernism (particularly the illustrations) was combined with traditional Ukrainian forms (framing and linking the whole text were intermedes, which were written by different authors in each issue). After the forced liquidation of Literaturnyi iarmarok the nucleus of its contributors, together with many other writers, founded the group Prolitfront, which published a journal Prolitfront.

Ivan Koshelivets