Ivan Drach was born 17 October 1936, in
Telizhyntsi,
Kyiv Oblast,
Ukrainian SSR and died in 2018 at the age of 81.
Early life Drach was born to a family of collective farmers His father worked in a beet sugar refinery and Drach's mother worked on a farm.
Education After finishing high school, Ivan Drach complied with military service, after which he studied in the Faculty of Language and Literature of
Kyiv University from 1959 to 1963. Drach would write in his diaries and then note in later interviews that students at University looked down on him for his peasantry and Ukrainian language.
Poetry career At this time, Drach visited the popular
"Klub tvorchoyi molodi" () ["Club for Creative Young People" (CCY)] and took part in literary evenings with reading of innovative poems. The Club started in the period of
Khrushchev thaw became a gathering place of a
Ukrainian Nationalism movement in Literature and Arts known as the
Sixtiers. Drach made his debut in 1961 with the publication of his poem-tragedy
Knife in the Sun in the Kyiv literary newspaper. He worked in the newspapers "Literary Ukraine" and "Fatherland."
Ivan Dziuba introduced
Knife in the Sun in
Literaturna hazeta as a sign the last vestiges of Stalinism were falling. In January 1962, Ivan Drach spoke at the Third Plenum of the Ukrainian Writers' Union. Toles Honchar, Soviet Ukrainian poet-laureate and president of the Union welcomed the Sixtiers to the Union and Drach served as unofficial spokesperson for the young poets: create the art of communism, of which Soviet Ukrainian will form a part; that young intellectuals are enthusiastic about Western European and that several "forgotten" Ukrainian writers and artists of the past ought to be remembered and treated with dignity. At the Fourth Plenary Session of the Soviet Writers' Union, in March 1963, Drach fell under criticism of Leonid Novychenk who compared Drach to Yevhen Yevtushenkoa a Russian poet of Ukrainian background who Novychenk calle a " very uneducated man, both generally and in the sense of Marxist education, and Marxist worldview." In response Drach published a satirical poem "Ode to an Honest Coward." Drach complied with new reality and his second collection of poetry "Solar Prominences of the Heart" was noted by critics as returning to social realism and losing the literary devices and focusing on transmitting important socialist ideals. Other shestydesiatnyky did not follow suit, and many were arrested. Drach spoke up against these arrests, and in fact mentioned them while speaking at the United Nations. Legend has it Drach escaped his KGB handlers in New York City and wandered into a Cafe where he met Alan Ginsberg. The Fifth Congress of the Ukrainian Hriters' Union, held in November 1966 would defend Drach's work and declare it free of formalism and literary twists. In 1976, he won the
USSR State Prize for his work,
The Root and the Crown. In the aftermath of the 1986
Chernobyl disaster, Drach was involved in a growing movement of Ukrainian dissident intellectuals that demanded larger cultural autonomy for Ukraine and an honest conversation in the Soviet Union about the
stalinist government's actions in Ukraine, particularly the
Holodomor. After the beginning of
Perestroika, he resumed contacts with dissident circles. Together with
Vyacheslav Chornovil,
Mykhailo Horyn, and a number of other Ukrainian activists, in 1989 he created Rukh or People's Movement of Ukraine, first official Ukrainian pro-reform organization. Ivan Drach was the first chairman of Rukh from 8 September 1989 to 28 February 1992.
Political career He was co-chairman of the NRU with Chornovil and Horyn from 28 February to 4 December 1992. In the spring of 1990, Ivan Drach was elected to the
Verkhovna Rada from
Artemivsk (No. 259) constituency by the 66.38% of voters. After retiring from his office in the NRU in late 1992, Ivan Drach retired from politics in 1994. He promoted the use of the
Ukrainian language and whilst serving as Ukraine's minister of communication, he proposed wide-ranging measures, including setting quotas for Ukrainian-language broadcasts and tax breaks for Ukrainian publishing.
Death Ivan Drach died 19 June 2018 in Feofania Hospital, Kyiv, following an undisclosed illness. Drach requested to be buried next to the grave of his son Maksym in his native Telizhyntsi. == Art and philosophy ==