Svidzinsky, Volodymyr

Svidzinsky, Volodymyr [Svidzins’kyj] (Svidzynsky), b 9 October 1885 in Maianiv, Vinnytsia county, Podilia gubernia, d 18 October 1941. (Photo: Volodymyr Svidzinsky.) Poet and translator. His first collection, Lirychni poeziï (Lyrical Poetry), was published in 1922; it was followed by Veresen’ (September 1927) and Poeziï (Poems, ed Yurii Yanovsky, 1940). His poems, written in 1927–36 and printed in Ukraine in the years 1937–40, were collected by Oleksa Veretenchenko and published in Munich in 1975 in the collection Medobir (Honey Wood). Poeziï (Poems, 1986) was a more recent edition of his work published in Ukraine. His collected poems and translations in two volumes were published in Kyiv in 2004. In his early collections Svidzynsky leaned toward symbolism, but in the two last collections there are elements of surrealism combined with classical forms. An important part of Svidzinsky's work is stories with folk or exotic motifs; there are also translations from the classics (Hesiod, Aesop, Ovid, Aristophanes) and from French, German, Polish, and Russian poetry. Svidzinsky died while under arrest, during the evacuation of Kharkiv in the fall of 1941. (According to eyewitness accounts, he was burned alive together with other prisoners in Saltiv, near Kharkiv. According to Soviet records, he was killed by a German bomb.)

Bohdan Kravtsiv

[This article was updated in 2007.]