10 Facts About Pavlo Tychyna

Pavlo Tychyna composed the lyrics to the Anthem of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.

At first young Tychyna studied at the district's elementary school which was opened in Pisky in 1897.

Pavlo Tychyna met Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky who greatly influenced his early works.

Pavlo Tychyna found sanctuary at the house of another poet, Volodymyr Samiylenko, in Dobrianka.

Controversy about the ideological tendencies of VAPLITE and the content of several of Pavlo Tychyna's poems led to him being criticized for ideological reasons.

However, as the Communist approach to artistic expression hardened and the role of a state-supported artist became more defined and restricted, Pavlo Tychyna's poetry shifted rather dramatically, using clear pro-Communist political language, including a famous ode to Joseph Stalin, and the lyrics of the state anthem of the Ukrainian SSR.

Pavlo Tychyna was often criticized by Ukrainian exiles for the praising of Communism in his work and co-option by the regime, but recent scholarship has stressed his subtle distancing and mocking of Communist excesses and brutality through over-the-top suffusive praise.

Pavlo Tychyna represents a complex figure in both a political and academic sense.

Pavlo Tychyna was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1967 by Omeljan Pritsak, but died in September that year.

The poems of Pavlo Tychyna were translated into English by Stephen Komarnyckyj.