Vladimir Narbut

Volodymyr Ivanovych Narbut was born on his family's estate at Narbutivka, near the town of Hlukhiv in the Chernigov Governorate of the Russian Empire (now part of the Sumy Oblast of Ukraine).

His second collection, Alliluiia ("Hallelujah," 1912)—filled with "grotesque and vivid imagery" according to the Handbook of Russian Literature—satirized the landed gentry,[1] and copies were seized by the police as pornographic.

To avoid the ensuing scandal and a court trial, Narbut spent the next five months on an ethnographic expedition to Ethiopia and Somalia.

In the 1920s, he edited the magazines Lava and Oblava in Odesa and issued further collections of his own verse, including Aleksandra Pavlovna (1922), the last to appear in his lifetime.

He began writing lyrics again in the 1930s and another collection, Spiral', was due to be published when he was arrested on October 26, 1936, and accused of belonging to subversive "Ukrainian nationalist" group.