Ґео Шкурупій

Activity: Culture
Date of birth: April 20, 1903
Date of death: December 8, 1937
Navigator: World Wars

A Ukrainian futurist poet, prose writer, screenwriter, and journalist. A representative of the Executed Renaissance.

Geo Shkurupii was the son of a railway worker and a teacher. In 1920, he graduated from the Second Kyiv Classical Gymnasium and entered Kyiv University, enrolling in the Faculty of Medicine. He studied there for only a year, then transferred to the Institute of Foreign Relations, but did not complete his studies there either.
Shkurupii’s true calling was writing: his first short story, We (1920), was published in the almanac Hrono when he was only 17. In 1922, his first poetry collection, Psychoetoses. Showcase Three, was published, followed a year later by The Drum. Showcase Two. These poems, written in the then-popular futurist style, attracted the attention of already established futurist writers. Shkurupii became a member of “Aspanfut” (short for the Association of Panfuturists), led by Mykhailo Semenko, and one of the signatories of its Manifesto. Shkurupii himself called himself the King of Futuro-Prairies.
After the dissolution of Aspanfut in 1924, Semenko moved from Kyiv to Kharkiv to work at the All-Ukrainian Photo Cinema Administration (VUFKU) and invited like-minded colleagues—Mykola Bazhan, Yurii Yanovskyi, and Geo Shkurupii—to join him. However, their paths diverged there: Yanovskyi and Semenko went to Odesa, while Shkurupii returned to Kyiv and began working at the Kyiv Film Factory. There, he worked as an editor and also wrote screenplays for the films The Blue Packet (1926) and Spartacus (1926)—both produced in Odesa and now considered lost.
Shkurupii combined his work in cinema with literary activity. In 1925, he tried himself as a prose writer, resulting in the short story collection The Dragon Slayer. In the following years, he published several more collections of poetry and prose and wrote the novels The Door into the Day (1929), Jeanne the Battalion Fighter (1930), and Miss Adriena (1934).
In 1930, Shkurupii became the head of the futurist group “Nova Heneratsiia” and the editor of its printed almanac published in Kharkiv. He managed to release two issues of the journal, including one that featured Oleksandr Dovzhenko’s film novella Earth, after which the publication was shut down.
On December 3, 1934, Geo Shkurupii was arrested, accused of membership in a “terrorist organization of the OUN.” The writer resisted the charges and even filed a complaint about the unlawful methods of the investigation: “Testimonies regarding my conversations with writers I knew […] were recorded incorrectly. […] The investigator took advantage of my condition, forced me to sign statements, driving me into hysteria. Therefore, I ask that these testimonies be considered invalid, as they are not truly mine but composed according to the investigator’s thoughts and wishes.”
On May 27, 1935, Shkurupii was sentenced to ten years in labor camps and sent to Solovki. His wife and son, as relatives of a “traitor to the motherland and enemy of the people,” were deprived of their home, thrown out into the street, and later expelled from Kyiv. In 1937, as Stalinist repressions intensified, Shkurupii’s case was sent for “review.” On November 25, 1937, a “special troika” sentenced him to death.
In 1956, Shkurupii’s widow Varvara wrote in a letter to Khrushchev: “Until September 1937, I corresponded with him. His last known location was Kem [Karelia]. I have received no further information about him, despite my repeated inquiries. I earnestly ask you to help review his case and inform me of his whereabouts.” The case was indeed reviewed, and Shkurupii was rehabilitated—posthumously: it was revealed that on December 8, 1937, he had been executed in the Sandarmokh tract.

Author: Olha Herasymenko