Executed Renaissance

"Indigenization") favored the revival of minority and heritage languages, encouraging them to be taught in the schools and published and providing them with material support and visibility.

While outwardly pro-Soviet, Ukrainian language school teachers, poets, and writers refused to submit to Stalin's restoration of Tsarist policies of linguistic imperialism.

Those victims were also part of Stalin's larger 1937-1938 Great Purge, with its most infamous killing field being at Sandarmokh forest, a mass grave site in Karelia where an estimated 6000 political prisoners from the Solovki concentration camp were secretly executed and buried by the NKVD.

"The Executed Renaissance", as a term, was first suggested in 1959 in Paris[2] by anti-communist Polish émigré publisher Jerzy Giedroyc of the influential Kultura magazine.

""So be it," replied Lavrinenko.The book The Executed Renaissance, An Anthology, 1917–1933: Poetry, prose, drama and the essay, published in Paris by Kultura (1959), remains one of the most important sources for the history of Ukrainian literature during the period.

That same year, the magazine Neo-Lif appeared with a preface by Gadzinskyi:[9] "For us the past is only a means of cognizing the present and future," he wrote, "a useful experience and an important practice in the great structure of the Red Renaissance."

Arising from the lower classes (servants, families of priests, industrial workers and peasants), the new generation of the Ukrainian elite often lacked the opportunity for systematic education because of war, famine and the need to earn their daily bread.

Working "on the brink of the possible", using every opportunity to get in contact with world culture and to spread the wings of their creativity, the new generation of the Ukrainian artistic elite were imbued with the latest trends and created truly topical art.

The main themes of Khvylovy's novel Ya (Romantyka) (I am (romance))[18] are disappointment in the Revolution, and the screaming contradictions and divided nature of human beings at that time.

In The Clarinets of the Sun, Tychyna reflected the breadth of an educated and subtle mind contemplating the richness of his national heritage and striving to uncover its root causes.

When the Communist Party of the USSR realized it could not control such writers [clarification needed], it began to use impermissible methods of repression: it forced them into silence, subjected them to crushing public criticism, and arrested or executed them.

Writers faced a choice between suicide (Khvylovyi in 1933) and the concentration camps (Gulag) (B. Antonenko-Davidovich and Ostap Vyshnya); they could retreat into silence (Ivan Bahrianyi and V. Domontovich), leave Ukraine (V. Vynnychenko and Yevhen Malaniuk), or write works that glorified the Communist Party (P. Tychyna and Mykola Bazhan).

The systematic elimination of the Ukrainian intelligentsia dates back to May 1933 when Mykhailo Yalovyi was arrested; in response Mykola Khvylovy committed suicide in the "Slovo" (Word) Building in Kharkiv.

Almost three hundred representatives of the Ukrainian Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s were shot between 27 October and 4 November 1937 at Sandarmokh, a massive killing field in Karelia (northwest Russia).

Many remained in the Soviet Union: Oleksandr Dovzhenko, Pavlo Tychyna, Maksym Rylskyi, Borys Antonenko-Davydovych, Ostap Vyshnia, and Mykola Bazhan.