Korotych, Vitalii [Коротич, Віталій; Korotyč, Vitalij], b 26 May 1936 in Kyiv. Physician, poet, publicist, and Soviet media personality. The poetry in his first collections, Zoloti ruky (Golden Hands, 1961), Zapakh neba (The Scent of the Sky, 1962), and Vulytsia voloshok (The Street of Cornflowers, 1963), was similar in spirit to that of the Shistdesiatnyky. After 1965, however, his dozen or so subsequent ‘engagé’ collections were produced in conformity with the Communist Party line on literature. In the latter half of the 1960s Korotych also began writing propagandistic biographical and travel essays (reprinted in several collections) and prose. His first novella, Taka lykha pamiat' (Such a Bad Memory), appeared in 1970, and his first novel, Desiate travnia (The Tenth of May), appeared in 1979. The ‘publicistic novel’ Lytse nenavysti (The Face of Hatred, 1984) and novella Trava bilia poroha (The Grass near the Threshold, 1985) most strongly reflect current Party attitudes toward the West. A two-volume selection of his Tvory (Works) appeared in 1986.

As the chief editor of the journal Vsesvit from 1979 to 1986, Korotych did much to promote foreign literature in Ukraine. The editor of the popular biweekly Moscow magazine Ogonëk after 1986, he was a prominent spokesman for cultural liberalization in the USSR and Mikhail Gorbachev’s policies of perestroika. The Ukrainian equivalent of Yevgenii Yevtushenko, from the 1960s Korotych traveled widely in the West as an official representative of the USSR. He was the deputy head of the Ukrainian Committee for the Preservation of Peace and, after 1983, vice-president of the international Artists for Nuclear Disarmament. A book about him by V. Zdoroveha appeared in 1986.

Ivan Koshelivets, Roman Senkus

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 2 (1988).]