Ivan Switlychnyj

Ivan Oleksijowytsch Switlychnyj ( Ukrainian: Іва́н Олексі́йович Світли́чний ; born September 20, 1929 in Polowynkyne , Ukrainian SSR ; † October 25, 1992 in Kiev , Ukraine ) was a Ukrainian literary critic, poet, translator, human rights activist and dissident .

Life

Ivan Switlychnyj was the child of collective farm workers . His mother had to work in the Donbas during the Holodomor to keep the family from starving. From 1937 he attended the school in his home village. In 1947 he graduated from school in Starobilsk with honors and then studied philology at the Faculty of Ukrainian Language and Literature at the University of Kharkov . As a student he began to write critical articles that were published in magazines in Ukraine. From 1952 he worked among other things as an editor, as a research assistant at the Institute for Literature and as a researcher in the dictionary department of the Institute for LinguisticsAcademy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR . In 1965 he was fired from his job and he was arrested for "nationalist activities" and imprisoned for eight months because he wanted to smuggle the works of Wassyl Symonenko ( Василь Андрійович Симоненко 1935–1963) abroad. In 1968 he was one of the initiators of Protest Letter 139 , an open letter in which 139 prominent scholars and cultural workers addressed the Soviet leadership from Kiev and demanded compliance with democracy and legal norms as well as the discontinuation of the practice of illegal political trials against dissidents.

On January 13, 1972, he was arrested for distributing samizdat and sentenced, along with Yevhen Swerstyuk , to seven years of forced labor and five years in exile.

Grave of Ivan Switlychnyj in the Kiev Baikowe Cemetery

The appeal in which Nobel Peace Prize winner Andrei Sakharov asked US President Jimmy Carter for support for 15 dissidents in 1977 also contained his name. Switlychnyj fell seriously ill in the labor camp and suffered two strokes in exile, so that after his release in 1984 he returned to Kiev permanently paralyzed. There he died at the age of 63 and was buried in the Kiev Baikowe cemetery .

plant

Switlychnyj translated Czech, Slovak and French literature into Ukrainian . During his imprisonment and in exile, he wrote poems, some of which were published in western countries. In the course of perestroika, some of his works and articles were published in the Soviet press at the end of the 1980s and in 1991 one appeared under the title Serze dlja kul 'i dlja rym / Серце для куль і для рим (German: A heart for balls and rhymes ) Collection of his poems, for which he was posthumously awarded the Taras Shevchenko Prize , the State Prize of Ukraine, in 1994.

family

Ivan Switlytschnyj was the older brother of Nadija Switlychna (1936-2006), who was also a writer and human rights activist.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d} Biography of Ivan Switlytschnyj in the Virtual Museum ( Memento of the original from May 30, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. - dissidents of the Ukrainian National Movement; accessed July 30, 2016 (Ukrainian)  
2. ↑ ^{a b c} Biography of Ivan Switlychnyj in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine ; accessed July 30, 2016
3. ↑ How was the Kiev letter prepared? ( Memento of the original from July 27, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. ; accessed on October 22, 2016 (Ukrainian)  
4. ↑ List of the 15 dissidents in Sakharov's appeal , special for the New York Times of January 29, 1977 (English)