Гордій Брасюк

Activity: Culture
Date of Birth: January 2, 1899
Date of Death: Summer 1944
Navigator: World Wars

Writer and screenwriter at the Kyiv Film Factory. Repressed twice by the Soviet authorities.

Hordii Brasiuk was born into the family of a church elder in the village of Luky in the Zhytomyr region. After graduating from a parish school, he enrolled in the Zhytomyr Commercial School, which at the time was headed by the brother of composer Borys Liatoshynsky. The educated Liatoshynsky family warmly welcomed Hordii: they invited him to dinners and literary-musical evenings and allowed him to use their library. It was there that he became acquainted with the works of Ukrainian classics and discovered his talent for writing.
In 1917, Brasiuk joined the Zhytomyr branch of the revived Prosvita society, where he became one of its most active members. In 1919, he graduated from the school with qualifications in accounting and volunteered for the army of the Ukrainian People’s Republic (UNR). After the forced retreat of the UNR, he spent some time hiding in villages.
After the Soviet–Ukrainian War ended, Brasiuk moved to Kyiv and entered the Institute of Public Education. There, he joined the literary association Lanka, led by Valerian Pidmohylnyi. The group, later renamed MARS (Workshop of Revolutionary Literature), also included Hryhorii Kosynka, Yevhen Pluzhnyk, Mariia Halych, Todos Osmachka, Ivan Bahrianyi, and others. In addition to his fellow “Martians,” Brasiuk was friends with Mykola Bazhan, Mykola Khvylovy, Ivan Bahrianyi, and Kostiantine Gamsakhurdia, one of the most prominent Georgian writers of the twentieth century. Brasiuk was among the first screenwriters of the newly established Kyiv Film Factory, although those films have not survived.
Hordii Brasiuk’s short stories were published in literary journals, and he also released several novellas and novels: The Wayward Ones (1926), In the Streams (1927), Ustynka (1929), Donna Anna (1929), and Dreams and Reality (1930). However, Bolshevik critics disliked his works, claiming that these “petty-bourgeois” texts did nothing to support socialist construction. His novel Donna Anna, accused of focusing on “trivial themes,” received especially harsh criticism.
Brasiuk was first arrested in 1930. He was accused of membership in Prosvita, service in the UNR, and personal ties with Kostiantine Gamsakhurdia, whose books had also been declared hostile to the Bolshevik regime.
“[Brasiuk’s works] have nothing in common with proletarian creativity… they are intended exclusively for the ignorant and petty-bourgeois layers of the population,” stated the indictment.
“I embarked on the path of struggle against Soviet power in 1918–1919… I believed that the Bolsheviks were generally against culture and, in particular, against the Ukrainian national revival,” he testified himself.
Brasiuk was sentenced to five years in labor camps for anti-Soviet activity. He became one of the first repressed writers of the Executed Renaissance, although he avoided a death sentence.
After serving his sentence in Kazakhstan and during the construction of the White Sea Canal, Brasiuk returned to his wife, who lived in Zaporizhzhia. He was no longer allowed to publish, so he had to work in his professional field as a planning economist at the Food Industry Union. However, in 1941, Brasiuk was arrested again without any new charges, simply as a potential “enemy of the people.” During the search, authorities confiscated the manuscript of his new novel Chechel, about Mykola Chechel, an active member of the Central Rada. The work was never destined to be published.
Unlike many of his fellow writers, Brasiuk never sympathized with the Bolsheviks — something he openly stated during interrogation after his second arrest.
“I stood for an independent Ukraine, for a Ukraine without the protectorate of any state. I do not wish to see Soviet power, though I am not against councils, provided those councils are without Bolsheviks,” these words were recorded in the interrogation protocol.
For this, the NKVD Special Council sentenced him to ten years in labor camps.
Brasiuk was sent to serve his sentence in Ivdellag, a camp in the northern Sverdlovsk region. There, he became gravely ill, and the camp administration eventually “released” him — to die. Barely making it to Kazakhstan, Brasiuk ended up in a hospital, from where he wrote a letter to his sisters asking for help to return home. The sisters gathered money and sent it to the hospital address but never received a reply. When his wife later inquired, the chief doctor claimed that no such patient had ever been there, although Hordii had even specified his ward number in the letter. His trail thereafter vanished into oblivion.
Hordii Brasiuk’s works remained banned until the collapse of the Soviet Union. They were not republished for more than eighty years, and some were long considered lost. As a result, his name is still known only to a narrow circle of readers.

Author: Olha Herysymenko