Early years Ivan Bahrianyi was born in the village of Kuzemyn,
Kharkiv Governorate,
Russian Empire, to the family of a bricklayer. He could not receive education consistently due to difficult living conditions during
World War I, the
Russian Revolution, and the post-war chaos. At the age of six, he started in
parochial school. Later, Bahrianyi finished higher elementary school in
Okhtyrka. Having completed his secondary education in 1920, he entered a locksmith school before being admitted to an artistic school. That same year, he witnessed the murders of his grandfather and uncle. In 1922, a period of work and active social and political life began: he was deputy chief of a sugar mill, then a district political inspector at the Okhtyrka police, and a drawing teacher in a colony for the homeless and orphans. At that time, he visited
Donbas,
Crimea, and
Kuban. Bahrianyi entered the Kyiv Art Institute but did not graduate due to material distress and the prejudiced attitude of the management. Due to the fact that he spoke the
Ukrainian language and was a Ukrainian-spirited young man, his peers mocked him. They called him
Mazepian (a Russian derogatory term for
Ukrainians after
Ivan Mazepa, similar to modern
Banderites), which may have been one of the reasons for his joining the
Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) in the future. During the
Russian Civil War and later in the early 1920s, Bahrianyi was involved in
Soviet social and political work but he left
Komsomol in 1925. In 1926, he began to publish poetry in newspapers and journals, and his first published collection of poetry appeared in 1927. In 1929, he published
Ave Maria, a collection of poems that was almost immediately banned by censorship and removed from the book trade. Bahrianyi was a member of the Association of Young Writers in
Kyiv, also known the Workshop of Revolutionary Word (MARS), where he met such writers as
Valerian Pidmohylny,
Yevhen Pluzhnyk,
Borys Antonenko-Davydovych, Hryhory Kosynka, Teodosiy Osmachko, and others who were criticized and repressed by official Soviet authorities. In 1930, Bahrianyi's historical novel
Skelka, written in
verse, was published. It tells of the uprising in the village of Skelka in the 18th century against the arbitrariness of the Moscow monks of the monastery near the village. The peasants burned down the monastery in protest against national oppression.
Arrest and detention On 16 April 1932, Bahrianyi was arrested in Kharkiv for “counter-revolutionary propaganda” he allegedly had spread in his poems. He spent 11 months in solitary confinement in the
OGPU prison. On 25 October 1932, he was "released" from prison, banned from Ukraine, and sentenced to 3 years of
forced labor camp in the Khabarovsk region near the Bering Strait. He tried to escape but was unsuccessful, and his sentence was extended by 3 years. Bahrianyi was then transferred to another camp,
Bamlag. The exact date of his release is unknown. On June 16, 16 1938, he was re-arrested and placed in Kharkiv
NKVD jail for “nationalist counter-revolutionary organization."{cn|date=December 2024}} Bahrianyi was charged with participating in and even leading the nationalist counter-revolutionary organization. On April 1, 1940 the prosecution failed to convict Bahrianyi after he refused to sign a confession. It was ruled that Bahrianyi was already prosecuted for his activity and the case was dismissed. Bahrianyi returned to Okhtyrka. Later, he used his autobiographical details in his 1946 novel
Tiger Trappers (
Tyhrolovy) and 1950 novel
Garden of Gethsemane (''Sad Hetsymans'kyi'').
World War II years . Before World War II Bahriany was working in the Okhtyrka theater "Narodnyi Dim." After Okhtyrka was overrun by the
German Army at the onset of
World War II, Bahrianyi was arrested for his anti-fascist messages in the theater's curtain design.He escaped from prison after two months and joined the
Ukrainian nationalist underground organization and later relocated to
Galicia. Bahrianyi worked in the OUN propaganda sector, writing patriotic songs and articles, as well as drawing cartoons and propaganda posters. He also helped to establish the
Ukrainian Supreme Liberation Council (USLC) and contributed to drafting its founding documents. Simultaneously, he resumed his literary activities. Bahrianyi published his novel
Tygrolovy (translated as
Tiger Trappers or
The Hunters and the Hunted in English) and the poem
Huliaipole in 1944. Before
Nazi Germany's defeat in 1945, Bahrianyi moved to
West Germany with the help of OUN.
Emigration Bahrianyi became a major organizing force in thge Ukrainian émigré writers' community. He founded a group known as the Ukrainian Art Movement (MUR).. This movement would be responsible for publishing thousands of articles. The MUR held three congresses in 1945, 1947 and 1948. Literary and artistic themes focused on modernization and the diaspora of Ukrainian culture. After the end of World War II, under a 1939 agreement, all former citizens were to return to Soviet Ukraine.. Bahrianyi, who had settled in displaced persons camp in Neu-Ulm, Germany wrote a pamphlet that had a massive impact on ex-
Ostarbeiter and
prisoners of war,
Why I Am Not Going Back to the Soviet Union. The pamphlet presented the Soviet Union as an "evil stepmother" that staged a genocide of its own people. The pamphlet was included in reports to the United Nations General Assembly by Eleanor Roosevelt and it lead to the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This guaranteed freedom of movement and the right to asylum under Article 13. In 1947 Bahrianyi organized the first foreign translation of
George Orwell's Animal Farm. In 1948, he founded the
Ukrainian Revolutionary Democratic Party (URDP). From 1948 until his death in 1963, he edited the newspaper ''Ukrains'ki visti
(Ukrainian News''). He headed the Ukrainian National Council's executive committee and also performed the duties of the Deputy President of the
Ukrainian People's Republic in exile. The novel "A Man Runs Over the Abyss” was written in 1948-1949 and published. The novel was a harsh critique of Bolshevism and sought to expose lies of the
Soviet Union. In 1963, the Democratic Union of Ukrainian Youth based in Chicago started action to support awarding Bahrianyi with the
Nobel Prize. Still, his sudden death prevented him from being formally nominated for the award, which is not awarded posthumously. Bahrianyi died on 25 August 1963. He was buried in
Neu-Ulm, Bavaria, West Germany. == Works ==