Григорій Епік

Activity: Culture
Date of Birth: January 17, 1901
Date of Death: November 3, 1937
Navigator: World Wars

Writer, translator, and publicist. A representative of the Executed Renaissance.

Hryhorii Epik was born into a large working-class family and grew up in poverty. “My childhood was such that I do not even wish to remember it. Until the age of sixteen, I did not even know what a pillow was,” he later recalled.
After graduating with honors from a rural school, Epik went in search of work. He worked as a laborer and clerk and took part in educational initiatives. During the revolution, he joined the anti-Hetman uprising — for which he was dismissed from his job — and volunteered for the First Novomoskovsk Insurgent Regiment.
In the early 1920s, Epik moved to Poltava, where he began political activity. He joined the Bolshevik Party, worked as a political education instructor, and at the same time published his first works, including the collections The Red Kobza (1923) and At the Turning Point (1924). From 1924 onward, he lived in Kharkiv, where he headed the publishing house Chervonyi Shliakh. He joined the Union of Peasant Writers Pluh and later, after becoming acquainted with Mykola Khvylovy and other Kharkiv literary figures, joined VAPLITE. During this period, Epik, already well acquainted with the inner workings of the party machine, began distancing himself from his original revolutionary idealism.
In the novel Without Foundation (1928), he sharply mocked Soviet bureaucracy:
“Paper-pushers are a system, and a very complex one. They have their own methods of defense and reproduction: obedience to the strong and merciless struggle against the weak. They have their own tactics — a dense fog about the great state savings and rationalization they supposedly achieved, and constant demonstrative dog-like devotion. ‘What the bosses say, so do we’ — this is the philosophical foundation of the paper-pushers.”
Epik’s next novel, The First Spring (1931), was also considered subversive. Although critics did not immediately realize that it dealt with peasants resisting forced collectivization, this was later remembered against the author. Against the backdrop of growing anxiety among writers before the large-scale repressions began, his 1932 novel Petro Romen, which glorified Soviet technical intelligentsia, appeared more like an attempt to smooth over his “guilt” and avoid a terrible fate. However, it did not save him.
In June 1934, the writer was expelled from the Party for allegedly having “for many years and until recently resisted the Party line in literature and supported nationalist elements in their struggle against the Party.” On December 5 of the same year, he was arrested for “participation in a counterrevolutionary nationalist organization,” which supposedly also included Mykola Kulish, Valerian Pidmohylnyi, Yevhen Pluzhnyk, Vasyl Vrazhlyvyi, and others.
Unlike his alleged “accomplices,” Epik chose a strategy of submission. At the beginning of 1935, Communist Party secretary Postyshev read aloud a letter in which the writer repented for the criminal intentions of the entirely mythical organization and admitted that all of them deserved to be shot “like rabid dogs.”
Hryhorii Epik was sentenced to ten years in corrective labor camps and sent to serve his sentence on the Solovetsky Islands. There, he still tried to save himself from the worst. In letters to his wife, which passed through the hands of censors, he enthusiastically described supposedly tolerable living conditions, literature he claimed to read in his free time, and his work on a Russian-language collection titled Solovetsky Stories. Epik even sent the manuscript to Moscow addressed to the People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs, adding a request to acquaint “the higher authorities” with it.
Gradually, however, he realized the futility of his efforts, which brought him nothing but humiliation. In Semen Pidhainyi’s book The Ukrainian Intelligentsia on Solovki, it is stated that at a certain point Epik “stopped being a shock worker, burned the novellas and novel written ‘to glorify the Cheka,’ and refused to work, citing pain in his leg.”
In October 1937, Epik’s case was reviewed by a special NKVD troika, which sentenced him to death. The writer was executed in the Sandarmokh tract on November 3, 1937, together with more than a thousand other representatives of the Ukrainian intelligentsia.

Author: Olha Herasymenko