(essay)

Pavlo Tychyna is one of the most famous Ukrainian poets of the XX century. His first collection, ‘Solar Clarinets’, was published in 1918 and immediately made him a star of Ukrainian modernism. It combined symbolism, musicality, and deep lyricism, and Tychyna created a new language of Ukrainian poetry that was unusual and even revolutionary at the time.

In the 1930s, Tychyna moved to Kharkiv and settled in the ‘Slovo’ House, where many Ukrainian writers lived. At first, he tried to keep his distance from politics, but with the onset of repression, he found himself under pressure from the Soviet authorities.

One of his poems, which he did not write for propaganda, ‘The Party Leads’ was taken by the authorities and turned into an official ideological anthem. After that, Tychyna was considered a “traitor” because he did not oppose the use of his name and worked in the interests of the regime.

Despite this, he was not a simple agitator. Many of his later texts were written on the edge between self-defense and censorship. Tychyna lived through a very difficult period, including the arrests and disappearances of his friends from the ‘Slovo’ House, which could not affect his future decisions. He survived a system that destroyed dozens of other artists and left behind a controversial but important legacy.