Василь Еллан-Блакитний

Activity: Culture, Politics
Date of Birth: January 9, 1984
Date of Death: December 4, 1925
Navigator: World Wars

Ukrainian writer and political figure.

Vasyl Ellanskyi was the son of a poor village priest who, from an early age, warned his children against following the “priestly path.” However, after the death of the family breadwinner, the family fell into such poverty that Vasyl had to enroll in a religious school, as education there was free of charge. Due to poor health, he struggled academically and even had to repeat a year, yet he passionately loved reading all kinds of literature — he would even bring a book to the dinner table.
In 1910, Ellanskyi entered the Chernihiv Theological Seminary, though he regarded studying there as a burden. During this period, he began attending the famous “Saturday gatherings” in the salon of Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky, where he read his poems and received favorable reviews from the renowned writer. In 1914, after completing the fourth year of seminary, he enrolled at the Kyiv Commercial Institute, where his friend Pavlo Tychyna was also studying. However, he never completed his education there, immersing himself entirely in the turbulent revolutionary events of 1917.
According to the recollections of his friend Roman Bzheskyi, Ellan-Blakytnyi “was a fiery, expansive, and exalted man with abrupt movements and a tendency to command.” In the mid-1910s, he headed the Chernihiv branch of the Brotherhood of Independists, a secret organization uniting representatives of various political movements to promote the idea of Ukrainian independence. Later, he belonged to various revolutionary circles and the Prosvita society, eventually joining the Ukrainian Party of Socialist Revolutionaries. At the same time, his active literary career began, marked by the poem “Forward” (“Not a Word About Fatigue!”). Most of Ellan-Blakytnyi’s poetry was written between 1917 and 1920 and was devoted to revolutionary struggle; these poems were published in Kyiv in the collection Blows of the Hammer and the Heart (1920).
In 1918, during the period of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, the poet was imprisoned in Lukianivska Prison in Kyiv for the anti-government appeal “To the Workers and Peasants of Ukraine.” He co-founded an underground printing house in Odesa, led an anti-Hetman uprising in Poltava, and during Denikin’s military offensive headed the underground network of the Borotbyst Communist Party, hiding in Baikove Cemetery.
After the Borotbysts merged with the Bolsheviks, Ellan-Blakytnyi directed his efforts toward organizing a cultural revival in the Ukrainian SSR. He worked as editor of the Ukrainian-language government newspaper Visti VUTsVK, founded and edited the magazines Vsesvit and Chervonyi Perets (while collaborating with Ostap Vyshnia), and headed Hart, the first association of proletarian writers. The organization sought to create a unified international communist culture while simultaneously requiring its members to write exclusively in Ukrainian.
“Believe me, there are thousands like me. When necessary, we can be cold as stone and burn like fire. But we are living people. We live, search, learn, make mistakes, correct those mistakes, know how to trudge through both mud and blood, and know how to love all living things,” Ellan-Blakytnyi wrote in a letter to his mother two years before his death. He died at the age of 32, his congenital heart condition ultimately taking its toll.
In December 1925, the writer was posthumously awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labor of the Ukrainian SSR. However, in the 1930s he fell into disfavor with Stalin’s regime as a “bourgeois nationalist.” His works were banned and removed from libraries, and in 1934 even the gravestone on his grave was dismantled. The exact burial place of Vasyl Ellan-Blakytnyi, on the territory of today’s Molodizhnyi Park in Kharkiv, remains unknown; today only a cenotaph stands there in his memory.

Author: Olha Herasymenko