Oleksandr Oles

Ukraine got a poet-lyricist it had been looking for since Shevchenko’s time…

Mykhailo Hrushevsky, historian

Oleksandr Oles (real name Kandyba) was a Ukrainian writer, translator, journalist, representative of the literary and artistic movement of symbolism, and father of writer Oleh Olzhych.

The poet was born on December 05, 1878, in Bilopillia, Sumy region, in the family of a fisherman. In 1893, he published his first poems in Comet and Pervotsvit (Primrose) handwritten magazines. He got higher education at the Kharkiv Institute of Veterinary Science (1903-1906) and worked as a veterinarian. He married a teacher, Vira Svadkovska (1907), who called her husband Oles. Later, the poet began publishing his works under this pseudonym. In 1907, the couple had a son, Oleh Olzhych.

An important event in the formation of the poet and citizen was in 1903 when O. Oles took part in the celebrations on the occasion of the opening of the first monument to Ivan Kotliarevsky.  In 1905, he published his poems in the almanac “Bahattia (Bonfire),” edited by Ivan Lypa. His first collection, “Z zhurboiu radist’ obnialas” (Joy and Sorrow Embraced, 1907), made him famous. In 1917, O. Oles welcomed with joy and hope the beginning of the national liberation struggle of the Ukrainian people. He expressed his reflections in a series of poems, “From the diary. 1917”.

After the Bolshevik occupation of Ukraine, he left his homeland (1919). His forced emigration lasted a quarter of a century. He lived in Budapest, Berlin, Vienna, and Prague in different years. In 1922, in Vienna, together with Mykhailo Hrushevsky, he headed the relief committee “For the Hungry of Ukraine.” He wrote several poems about the Holodomor in Ukraine. Poetry in the collection “Mynule Ukrainy v pisniakh: Kniazhi chasy” (Ukraine’s Past in Song: The Princely Era, 1930) has been used by history teachers in Ukraine and abroad for almost a century. In general, O. Oles popularized Ukrainian culture outside of Ukraine through all his work.

Ivan Franko very accurately drew attention to the peculiarity of Oles’s poetic work: “Almost every poem of his asks to be set to music; it has a melody in it.” O. Oles is considered the second poet after Taras Shevchenko in terms of the number of works set to music (“Aistry (Asters),” “Zhyvy, Ukraino (Live, Ukraine,” etc.).

The poet died on July 22, 1944, shortly after he learned of the death of his son Oleh Olzhych in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. He was buried in Prague. He was re-buried at the Lukianivske Cemetery in Kyiv (2017).