Volodymyr Vynnychenko

Volodymyr Vynnychenko

Volodymyr Kyrylowytsch Wynnytschenko ( Ukrainian Володимир Кирилович Винниченко , scientific. Transliteration Volodymyr Vynnyčenko ; born July 16, ^jul. / July 28, 1880 ^greg. In Jelisawetgrad , Kherson Gubernia ; †  6. March 1951 in Mougins , France ) was a Ukrainian politician and writer .

Life

Volodymyr Vynnytschenko was born as the only son of the farmer Kirill Vynnytschenko and the former widow Evdokijej Pavlenko. In school, the young Volodymyr performed very well, which prompted his parents to specifically promote their son despite difficult financial circumstances. He successfully completed primary school at the age of ten. In the meantime, his half-brother, who himself worked as a city typographer, was able to support him with financial means. Because of a revolutionary poem which Volodymyr wrote in the 7th grade of the grammar school, he was suspended from school and sentenced to one week in prison. A little later Vynnychenko was thrown out of school - he later graduated from another high school in Ukraine. In order to make himself financially independent after graduation, he looked several times in southern Ukraine for short-term work in order to stay afloat. In parallel, he continued his self-taught on and soon began a law -Studies at the university in Kiev .

At the time of his enrollment, an underground revolutionary student organization called "Studentscheskoj Obschiny" (student community) was organized, which later played an active role in the revolutionary movement. Vynnychenko soon became politically active in the Revolutionary Party of Ukraine , spreading propaganda among the Kiev workers and the peasants in Poltava , for which he was punished with arrest and the ban on studying at other universities. He quickly escaped arrest, but was soon drafted into the tsarist army. However, Vynnychenko used this opportunity to inspire his comrades with revolutionary ideas. Soon the next arrest was imminent. Vynnychenko was imprisoned in Kiev for two years. In 1905 he was released and finished his law studies. He then became the founder and head of the Social Democratic Labor Party of Ukraine . In 1906 he was arrested again for his political work. Yevgen Tschykalenko bought him free a year later, after which Vynnychenko decided to stay in another European country for several years.

In the Austro-Hungarian Lviv he worked with the local representatives of the Ukrainian movement. Here he sat on the Foreign Affairs Committee and worked as an editor for the magazine "Gaslo", the paper of the Revolutionary Ukrainian Party. After studying German intensively, he also worked as a translator and translated works by Karl Kautsky , Paul Lafargue , Ferdinand Lassalle and other theorists of European social democracy. His stays stretched across Europe . At the beginning of the First World War , Vynnychenko lived a few years in Russia, not far from Moscow, until he moved back to Kiev for the February Revolution in 1917 .

Vynnychenko was given the post of General Secretary of the Central Na Rada to negotiate with the Russian Provisional Government . After six months, on August 13th, he resigned from his post in protest against the Russian government, which the Ukrainian Central Na Rada refused to recognize. On September 1, the government formed again under Vynnychenko: A federal agreement was reached with the Russian government until the Ukrainian People's Republic was officially proclaimed on January 25, 1918 . In April 1918 there was a coup led by Pavlo Skoropadskyi . However, the new government was crushed in December by an organized revolt on the part of Vynnychenko and replaced by the Directory of the Ukrainian People's Republic under his leadership, and the Ukrainian People's Republic was again proclaimed.

In 1920 Vynnytschenko traveled to Moscow in order to find an agreement with the Bolsheviks that was acceptable to him - namely, Ukraine should be given more sovereignty. After four failed months of negotiations, Vynnychenko gave up his hope and went into exile in Western Europe for the rest of his life, where he devoted himself more to writing.

Create

His literary work began during his student days in Kiev. In his first story "krasa i syla" (Beauty and Strength) from 1902, he gives up the conventional pious life for the new socialist life. The story is full of tension and ironic humor and told in a dynamic and impressionistic way in a cheeky dialect. However, Vynnychenko's longing for solutions to the problems of his time soon led him to drama. A great way to examine the morality of the "new man". His 20 dramas deal with the disproportion between action and idle speech and the moral code. The proclaimed equality of the sexes is exposed in “basar” (Markt, 1910), the concept of love, in “Dysharmonia” (Disharmonie, 1906), the acceptance of “surrogacy” in “sakon” (The Law, 1923), and the naive socialist thought: "a noble end justifies the means" is dealt with in "hrich" (die Sünde, 1920).

With the conviction that moral concepts exist to strengthen the interests of a certain group, Vynnychenko looked for a way to find a truly moral life with people and came up with the generally applicable rule “Be true to yourself” as the only viable moral law. This is best illustrated in his novel “Tschesnist s soboju” (Honesty with oneself, 1906). This sometimes provoked misunderstandings and sharp criticism among contemporary readers. Vynnychenko is accused of strict individualism and immorality.

A total of eleven novels appeared during his lifetime, of which "sapysky kyrpatoho Mefistofelia" (Notes of the crooked-nosed Mephistus, 1917) and "soniaschna maschyna" (The Sun Machine, 1928) stand out. Of the three novels that were published posthumously, "slowo sa toboju, Staline" (It is your word, Stalin, 1971) is an example of Vynnytschenko's political thought, who, after developing his own moral world order, called it "concordism" designated. He propagated the concept in the novel "nowa sapowid" (the new commandment, 1949). Of historical interest are Vynnychenko's three-volume memoirs on the struggle for the independence of Ukraine, which are documented in "widrodschennija natsii" (The Nation's Rebirth, 1920).

Vynnychenko was officially ostracized in Ukraine until the late 1980s. In the West, interest in him has been held primarily as a result of the efforts of Hryhory Kostiuk, under whom Vynnychenko's legacy is guarded at the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences at Columbia University in New York .

Works (selection)

• The crooked-nosed Mephisto: a relationship novel. Translated into German by Rolf Göbner. Berlin: Rütten and Loening. 1994. ISBN 3-352-00479-X
• The lie: drama in 3 acts. Translated into German by Gustav Specht. Potsdam: Kiepenheuer. 1920.

Dramas

• Dysharmoniia (1906), (German: disharmony)
• Velykyi Molokh (1907) (German: The great Moloch)
• Brekhnia (1910) (German: The Lie)
• Bazar (1910) (German: The Bazaar)
• Chorna pantera i bilyi vedmid (1911) (German: The black panther and the white bear)
• Hrikh (1920) (German: Sin)
• Zakon (1923) (German: The Law)

Web links

• Literature by and about Wolodymyr Vynnytschenko in the catalog of the German National Library
• Entry in the Ukrainian Internet Encyclopedia (English)
• Prof. Panchenko on Volodymyr Vynnytschenko on www.day.kiev.ua (English)