35 Facts About Hryhorii Kochur

Hryhorii Kochur was an important figure in the Ukrainian cultural revival that took place during the 1960s, and he was arrested and sent to the Gulag by the Soviet government.

Hryhorii Porfyrovych Kochur was born on 17 November 1908 in the village of Feskivka, in what was then the Russian Empire and is in Ukraine's northern Chernihiv Oblast.

Hryhorii Kochur's father, who taught him to read at the age of three, was a descendant of Zaporozhian Cossacks; the surname "Kochur" is descended from "koch", an antiquated term in Ukrainian for a boat.

From an early age, Hryhorii Kochur frequently read the works of poet Taras Shevchenko.

Hryhorii Kochur additionally learned Old Church Slavonic from the Bible as a child, and had an interest in the Niva magazine.

Hryhorii Kochur later claimed that he received no encouragement from his peers, who were not translators, instead translating the works of Semyon Nadson into Ukrainian.

In 1928 Hryhorii Kochur began studying at the philological faculty of the Kyiv Institute of People's Education in 1928.

Hryhorii Kochur was educated in translation by several leading members of the Neoclassicists, a literary movement during the 1920s.

Hryhorii Kochur was an assistant to Ahatanhel Krymsky, a leading Ukrainian Orientalist at the time.

Hryhorii Kochur's teachers began pushing him to publish his translations from his first year as a student, and invited him to write translations of French literature as part of a 1930 anthology.

From 1932 to 1936 Hryhorii Kochur taught foreign literature at the Tiraspol Pedagogical Institute.

Hryhorii Kochur later taught at Vinnytsia Pedagogical Institute from 1936 to 1941, heading the institute's department of literature.

Hryhorii Kochur continued to publish his translations from French in this period, with works being published in 1935 and 1938.

At the time, he bonded with Klen over the writings of Rainer Maria Rilke; Hryhorii Kochur was a fan of Rilke, while Klen, an ethnic German, had translated Rilke's works into Ukrainian.

Hryhorii Kochur had first protested against the Soviet state while still studying at the Kyiv Institute of People's Education, condemning the Union for the Freedom of Ukraine trial as a farce.

Later, Hryhorii Kochur narrowly avoided being caught up in the Great Purge in 1937.

The 1932 anthology of translations that had included Hryhorii Kochur's works was banned by the Soviet government, and several Neoclassicists, Zerov among them, were arrested and executed.

Hryhorii Kochur worked at several cities throughout Ukraine and modern-day Moldova prior to Operation Barbarossa, including Tiraspol, Vinnytsia, Balti and Poltava.

Hryhorii Kochur would continue to live under German occupation in Poltava until 1943, when the city was recaptured by the Soviets.

Hryhorii Kochur recounted in 1993 that he had met some men from the western Ukrainian city of Lviv during the occupation, who had given him the works of Bohdan Ihor Antonych.

Hryhorii Kochur later discovered during his trial that these individuals had been members of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists.

Hryhorii Kochur was sentenced to ten years of imprisonment in the Gulag, and he was sent to the city of Inta in the Komi Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic.

Hryhorii Kochur worked at the Gulag as a miner, and continued to translate poetry from the Hungarian, Georgian and Latvian, all of which were languages commonly spoken at the Inta Gulag.

Hryhorii Kochur was released in 1953, as part of the Amnesty of 1953 following the death of Joseph Stalin.

Simultaneously, Hryhorii Kochur was discovered by a younger generation of Ukrainian writers, known as the Sixtiers.

Hryhorii Kochur translated Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung, having previously translated portions of Flowers in the Mirror during the Hundred Flowers Campaign in China.

Hryhorii Kochur continued to be engaged in both literature and politics into the 1970s.

Hryhorii Kochur expressed opposition to Viacheslav Chornovil's 1971 formation of the Civic Committee for the Defence of Nina Strokata, which had been formed along the lines of committees for the legal defence of Angela Davis in the United States.

Hryhorii Kochur translated Dante Alighieri's La Vita Nuova in 1965, and wrote several monographs about writers from both Ukraine and other countries of Europe in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Hryhorii Kochur further supported other dissidents, led by Marynovych, who publicly celebrated Koliada in 1977.

Hryhorii Kochur was admitted back into the Union of Writers in 1988.

Hryhorii Kochur first travelled to Czechoslovakia, where he met Vaclav Havel, a Czech dissident leader who was a fan of Kochur's work.

Hryhorii Kochur later gave a lecture at the University of Illinois, and visited Poland.

Hryhorii Kochur published his final anthology of translations, Second Echo, in 1991.

Hryhorii Kochur died on 15 December 1994 in Irpin from kidney failure.