Валер’ян Підмогильний

Activity: Culture
Date of birth: February 2, 1901
Date of death: November 3, 1937
Navigator: World Wars

A writer and translator, a founder of Ukrainian urban prose. A representative of the Executed Renaissance.

Valerian Pidmohylny was born into a poor peasant family. After attending a parish school, he entered the Katerynoslav Real School and later studied at Katerynoslav University in the faculties of law and mathematics, but did not complete his education due to financial hardship.
Pidmohylny published his first adventure stories in a school magazine under the pseudonym “Lord Lister.” “He was an exceptionally gifted boy. He would listen attentively in class and then not review the lesson at home. Instead, he would borrow stacks of books from teachers and acquaintances and spend the entire night reading them. He was friends with my brother Stepan. He was quiet and shy. He liked going haymaking and fishing on the Dnipro River. Even then, my brother boasted that Valerian wrote poems and stories,” recalled a fellow villager.
Pidmohylny published his first collection at the age of 19—it included nine stories written between 1917 and 1920. For some time, he worked as a teacher and in publishing houses. In 1921, he moved to Kyiv, but soon relocated to Vorzel, where he taught at a labor school and married Katerya Chervinska, an actress and the daughter of a local priest.
In 1922, the couple settled in Kyiv. There, Pidmohylny published his next collection, In the Epidemic Barrack, and joined the literary community. In 1924, he became a co-founder of the writers’ association “Lanka,” later renamed MARS (Workshop of Revolutionary Word). His colleagues included Hryhorii Kosynka, Yevhen Pluzhnyk, Hordii Brasiuk, Todos Osmachka, Mariia Halych, Borys Antonenko-Davydovych, and other prominent representatives of the literature of that time.
During the following years, Pidmohylny wrote extensively. He participated in the literary discussion of 1925–1928 about the role of the writer in society and the development of new Soviet literature, and in particular criticized ideological demands on literary works:
“If some comrade ‘tried’ to write a sonata and claimed it was a good sonata because it had good ideology, no one would hesitate to say that it was musical nonsense, and no one would listen to that sonata… In our case, any work that absolutely and categorically does not meet the requirements of official ideology is condemned, regardless of whether it is good, real, or necessary.”
In 1928, Pidmohylny’s novel The City was published—the first urban novel in the history of Ukrainian literature.
In 1932, Pidmohylny moved to Kharkiv, hoping for better prospects for his works, and settled in the “Slovo” building. However, his hopes were not fulfilled: the shadow of impending repression was already hanging over Ukrainian writers. His works were rarely published, so he focused on translation—translating into Ukrainian the works of Denis Diderot, Gustave Flaubert, Claude Helvétius, Honoré de Balzac, Anatole France, Victor Hugo, Guy de Maupassant, and other French classics.
On December 8, 1934, Valerian Pidmohylny was arrested “for participation in a terrorist organization that aimed to organize terror against party leaders.” During interrogations, he denied the accusations, but in January 1935 a “confession” appeared in the interrogation protocol, allegedly stating that he belonged to a “group of nationalist writers with terrorist attitudes toward party leaders.” Other “terrorists” named included Mykola Kulish, Yevhen Pluzhnyk, and Hryhorii Epik—17 people in total. Among the accusations were Pidmohylny’s words that “the policy of collectivization had led the Ukrainian village to famine.”
At the end of March 1935, Pidmohylny was sentenced to ten years in labor camps with confiscation of property. He was exiled to Solovki, where he persistently continued to write—in letters to his wife, he mentioned working on the novel Autumn 1929 about the beginning of collectivization in Ukraine, as well as on short stories and translations.
In November 1937, an NKVD “special troika” reviewed Pidmohylny’s case and replaced his imprisonment with a death sentence. The sentence was carried out immediately—the writer was executed in the Sandarmokh tract in Karelia along with more than a thousand other representatives of the Ukrainian intelligentsia. In 1956, Pidmohylny was posthumously rehabilitated, but his works were scarcely published in Ukraine until nearly the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Author: Olha Herasymenko

Brief conclusions

Cultural figure and reformer — became one of the founders of the modernist movement in Ukrainian literature, known as a precursor of European existentialism.
Public figure — was not a public activist; he was a writer, translator, and one of the founders of Ukrainian urban and existential prose.
Creative output — wrote novels, novellas, and short stories. His most famous work is The City, which initiated the urban novel in Ukrainian literature.
Legacy — one of the first Ukrainian prose writers to depict the complexity of life in an urban environment, the psychology of the modern individual, and philosophical questions of existence, laying the foundations of the modern Ukrainian novel.

Editorial team of the “Portal”