Олекса Слісаренко

Activity: Culture
Date of birth: March 28, 1891
Date of death: November 3, 1937
Navigator: World Wars

Symbolist, futurist, and avant-garde poet, author of action-packed short stories and novels. Born on March 28, 1891, in the Kharkiv region. Executed on November 3, 1937, in the Sandarmokh tract in Karelia. A representative of the Executed Renaissance.

Oleksa Snisar—such was his birth name—was the son of a village harness maker. They say that during his baptism, a hard-of-hearing priest mistakenly recorded him as the “son of a Slisar” (locksmith), and from there came his literary pseudonym “Slisarenko.”
His first attempts at writing date back to his student years; from 1910, Slisarenko was published in the illegal magazine Do Pratsi (“To Work”), as well as in the journals Rillya, Pluh, Ridny Kray, Snip, Selo, Promin, and others. In 1912, he graduated from the Kharkiv Agricultural School and began working as an agronomist. Following the outbreak of the First World War, he was mobilized into the army, where he rose to the rank of officer.
After the war, Slisarenko moved to Kyiv, where he joined the symbolist poetry groups Bily Promin (“White Ray”) and Muzahet. In 1919, his first collection, Na berezi Kastalskomu (“On the Castalian Shore”), was published. These poems were inspired by the works of Oleksandr Oles, Pavlo Tychyna, as well as Russian Symbolists. However, within two years, Slisarenko distanced himself from the Symbolists after becoming acquainted with the Futurists and joining their associations Komkosmos, Aspanfut, and Komunkult.
The poems in Oleksa Slisarenko’s next collection, Poemy (“Poems”, 1923), the cover of which was designed by Mykola Bazhan, possessed a distinctly Futurist character. Yet, he did not stay in this movement for long either: in 1925, Slisarenko left Futurism and joined the union of proletarian writers Hart, later moving to VAPLITE. Following its forced “self-liquidation,” he co-founded the Techno-Artistic Group A alongside Maik Yohansen.
From 1924 onward, Slisarenko focused on prose, writing fast-paced crime and adventure novels, short stories, and novellas modeled after popular English and American writers of the genre. His lyrical heroes were “little people” caught up in the maelstrom of revolutionary events.
In 1927, the writer, then an editor for the Knyho-Spilka publishing house, entered into a polemic with the darling of the Soviet regime, Maxim Gorky. He asked Gorky to review a Ukrainian translation of his novella Mother, which the publishing house planned to release, and received the following reply:
“I am categorically against the shortening of the novella Mother; it seems to me that its translation into the Ukrainian dialect is also unnecessary. I am very surprised by the fact that people, while setting a single goal, not only multiply the diversity of dialects—trying to turn a dialect into a ‘language’—but also oppress those Great Russians who happen to be a minority in the region of the given dialect.”
Slisarenko described his response to Gorky as follows:
“[I] wrote that I did not intend to enter into a philological polemic with him about the Ukrainian language. Whether it is a ‘language’ or a ‘dialect’ is matters entirely little to me. I have no interest in how a Moscow philistine views the Ukrainian nation and its language, for I know that behind my back stands a forty-million-strong Ukrainian people with their thousand-year-old literature, art, and science. Gorky and I did not correspond any further.”
Later, Soviet secret agents would bring up this correspondence against Slisarenko as one of the grounds for accusing him of Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism.
During the infamous, fabricated show trial of the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine (SVU), Oleksa Slisarenko played the unseemly role of a public accuser. Writing about this situation, author Yuriy Vynnychuk noted that Slisarenko
“…angrily denounces the scholars and writers who ended up in the dock. But five years pass, and Slisarenko himself finds himself behind bars, accused of the exact same things as the members of the mythical SVU.”
In 1931, Slisarenko published a hoax collection of works under the pseudonym Omelko Buts. Its title, Posmertna zbirka tvoriv (“Posthumous Collection of Works”), looks ominous in light of the writer’s subsequent fate. On April 29, 1934, he was arrested, and for a year, confessions of involvement in a counter-revolutionary organization were beaten out of him. He gave in, but two months later retracted his testimony, stating it was given under duress. Slisarenko was then declared a bourgeois nationalist, particularly due to his past membership in VAPLITE—notwithstanding his notorious participation in the SVU trial and his public criticism of the by-then-deceased Mykola Khvylovy.
During a court hearing on March 19, 1935, Slisarenko repeated his renunciation of the confessions extracted under pressure. He was sentenced to ten years in prison and exiled to a camp in Solovki. In 1936, the writer was sent to a punitive isolation cell for three months, and in October 1937, his case was reviewed by an NKVD “special troika,” which replaced his imprisonment with the death penalty. Oleksa Slisarenko was shot on November 3, 1937, in Sandarmokh—alongside many other Ukrainian intellectuals. Twenty years later, the Soviet authorities posthumously rehabilitated him.

Author: Olha Herasymenko