14 Facts About Mykola Khvylovy

Mykola Khvylovy spoke Russian, and it was thanks to him that the boy read both Russian and foreign classics.

Mykola Khvylovy shared his father's interest in the revolutionary movement of the 1860s, sympathised with the ideology of the Narodniks, the former Russian populists of that era, and was equally inspired by the works of Nikolay Dobrolyubov, Vissarion Belinsky and Dmitry Pisarev.

Mykola Khvylovy studied at an elementary school in the village of Kolontayev, where his mother, Yelyzaveta Ivanivna, was a teacher, then continued his studies at the Okhtyr Male Gymnasium, which he was forced to leave due to his participation in a so-called Ukrainian revolutionary circle, and later at the Bogoduhiv Gymnasium, from which he was expelled for his connections with socialists during the revolutionary unrest.

Mykola Khvylovy worked as a locksmith and married Yulia Umantseva, who had a daughter from her first marriage, Lyubov, whom Khvylovy accepted as his own and affectionately called Lyubistka.

Mykola Khvylovy threw himself into organizing literary and artistic movements and organizations.

Mykola Khvylovy was associated with the literary movement known as "Prolitfront", but became disenchanted with it due to its hostility to issues of Ukrainian identity.

Mykola Khvylovy was sharply critical of Russian literature, both past and present, and urged Ukrainian writers to look to the West instead.

Mykola Khvylovy was just as critical of the Russian proletarian literature of the time, which he thought had substituted bureaucratic slogans and "all-Union Philistinism" for a genuine revolutionary attitude.

Stalin's criticism triggered a campaign of denunciation of Mykola Khvylovy, who was singled out for criticism at the June 1926 Plenum of the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Communist Party, and Alexander Shumsky, a prominent political champion of Ukrainization.

Mykola Khvylovy tried to meet the challenge by creating another organization, Prolitfront, but it made so many concessions to the proletarian ethos and partisan ideology embodied by VUSPP that it ultimately lost any semblance of independence.

Mykola Khvylovy changed his style to conform to the new standards of socialist realism, joining VUSPP and producing propaganda pieces for the Soviet regime.

Mykola Khvylovy wrote a number of pamphlets presenting his views of the connection between politics and art.

Mykola Khvylovy advocated an orientation toward cultural trends in Western Europe in order to loosen Ukraine's dependence on Russian forms and inspiration, as he deemed excessive Russian influence on Ukrainian literature as something akin to colonialism.

Mykola Khvylovy's pamphlets created a major controversy and divided representatives of the budding Ukrainian literary scene and created tensions with the authorities.