Микола Зеров

Activity: Culture
Date of birth: April 26, 1890
Date of death: November 3, 1937
Navigator: World Wars

A Ukrainian poet and literary scholar, a leader of the Neoclassicists, a master of the sonnet form, and a translator of ancient poetry. He was born on April 26, 1890, in Zinkiv in the Poltava region. He was executed on November 3, 1937, in the Sandarmokh tract in Karelia, along with many other representatives of the Executed Renaissance.

Mykola Zerov came from a large family of teachers. “My father was a teacher, later the head of a city school, and finally—by 1905—an inspector of public schools; my mother came from a minor landowning family, the Yareskos, from near Dykanka, of Cossack origin, though claiming noble status,” he wrote in his autobiography. One of his brothers, Dmytro, later became a botanist and an academician of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR, while another, Mykhailo, became a writer and translator known under the pseudonym Mykhailo Orest.
In primary school, Mykola Zerov studied together with another future representative of his generation’s literature—Pavlo Hubenko, who later became the humorist Ostap Vyshnia. He then studied at the Okhtyrka Gymnasium and the First Kyiv Gymnasium, which became the starting point of his literary career. Together with friends, the 13-year-old Zerov founded a handwritten journal, The Bored Eighth-Grader, where they published parody poems about fellow students and teachers. The school administration, however, did not appreciate the humor and lowered Zerov’s final exam grades, depriving him of academic honors.
In 1914, Zerov graduated from the Faculty of History and Philology at Saint Volodymyr Kyiv University (now Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv). While still a student, he began publishing articles and reviews in the journal Svitlo and the newspaper Rada. After completing his studies, he taught history at the Zlatopil boys’ and girls’ gymnasiums, and in 1917 became a Latin teacher at the Second Kyiv Gymnasium named after the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius.
Due to poor eyesight, Zerov was not mobilized into the army, so during the turbulent revolutionary years he continued teaching. From 1918 to 1920, he taught Ukrainian studies at the Architectural Institute, and from the autumn of 1923 became a professor at his alma mater, renamed by the Bolsheviks as the Kyiv Institute of Public Education. One of his contemporaries described his teaching talent as follows: “At the art institute, the students’ enthusiasm was so great that during Mykola Zerov’s lectures, classes in other subjects could not take place: all the lecturers went to listen to his lectures on Ukrainian literature. To prevent disruption, it was decided to schedule Zerov’s course at the last hours of the day.”
In 1920, two major works by Zerov were published: An Anthology of Roman Poetry and New Ukrainian Poetry, both with covers designed by Heorhii Narbut, the “father” of the banknotes and postage stamps of the Ukrainian People’s Republic. Together with Narbut, as well as Serhii Yefremov, Pavlo Zaitsev, and Vadym Modzalevskyi, Zerov participated in creating a literary mystification: the fictitious “non-serving nobleman Lupa Yudych Hrabuzdov,” under whose name poems and parodies of contemporary writers were published—including those of Pavlo Tychyna.
In 1924, Zerov, around whom a circle of Kyiv neoclassicists had already formed, published his first collection Kamena, which included both original poems and translations from Roman poets. That same year saw the publication of his essay New Ukrainian Literature and the monograph Lesya Ukrainka. Altogether, this provoked a wave of criticism from panfuturists, members of Hart, and even the authorities: he was accused of being outdated, indifferent to contemporary issues, and overly attached to the past, which, they argued, should be rejected.
In 1925, Zerov took part in the famous three-year Literary Discussion, siding with Mykola Khvylovyi in advocating for Ukrainian literature to be seen within a broader European context. In response to the famous slogan “Away from Moscow!”, Zerov proposed his own: Ad Fontes (“To the sources”), insisting on the need for deep study of global cultural traditions. He also demanded healthy literary competition instead of group-based favoritism: “We want a literary environment in which not manifestos but the writer’s work is valued; not petty theoretical disputes—the same record played over and over on a shouting gramophone—but a living and serious literary study; not the careerism of the ‘man from the organization,’ but the artistic exactingness of the author, first and foremost toward himself.” For this, Zerov was branded a “bourgeois nationalist,” and after Stalin’s personal intervention in the discussion, he became a target of open persecution.
What followed was his removal from his professorship, dismissal from work, and a ban on literary activity. Zerov’s moral state deteriorated: his friend Mykola Khvylovyi committed suicide, and later his son Kostyk-Kotyk died of scarlet fever. At the funeral, Zerov delivered a speech in Latin—the “language of the dead”—and then said: “Did this seem inappropriate to you? Can you not understand that I am burying not only Kotyk, but myself as well? That I address my dead son because I will no longer be able to speak before the living?”
On April 27, 1935, Mykola Zerov was arrested and accused of leading a counterrevolutionary organization. The basis was a denunciation by a colleague who told the secret police about a “mourning gathering” in Maksym Rylskyi’s apartment a few days after the execution of Hryhorii Kosynka, where those present read poems in memory of the writer. At first, Zerov tried to resist and deny the accusations, but after a year of interrogations he broke down. “One must say something against oneself, otherwise they will shoot us all,” he advised others.
In 1936, Zerov was sentenced to ten years in labor camps and sent to Solovki. Due to poor health, he could not perform heavy labor, so he cleaned barracks and later worked in a guardhouse on new translations. In letters to his wife, he mentioned that he had finally completed his long-term work on translating Virgil’s Aeneid. However, this translation never saw publication: it perished along with its creator, who, after a review of his case by an NKVD “special troika,” was executed in Sandarmokh.

Author: Olha Herasymenko

Brief conclusions

Cultural figure and reformer — a symbol of the Ukrainian literary renaissance of the 1920s.
Public figure — defended classical canons in Ukrainian literature and culture, for which he, along with other neoclassicists, was repressed. He led a group of poets who sought to preserve and develop the classical tradition under conditions of modernism.
Creative legacy — published poetic works, including the collection Kamena, sonnets, translations, and literary-critical and scholarly works exploring Ukrainian and world literature.
Legacy — left a significant mark on Ukrainian translation tradition and poetry, especially in the sonnet genre.

Portal Editorial Team