Vasyl Barka

He was seen as the future luminary of Ukrainian poetry, but he is best remembered for his novel, in which he told the world about the great tragedy of the Ukrainian people — Holodomor. A writer who miraculously escaped from the Soviet “paradise” and became one of the symbols of the Ukrainian diaspora.

Mykhailo Sokulsky, journalist

Vasyl Barka was a writer, literary critic, translator, and author of one of the first and most famous works about the Holodomor of 1932-1933 in Ukraine, “Zhovtyi kniaz” (The Yellow Prince). He was the first winner of the Antonovych Foundation Award (1981).

Vasyl Barka (real name — Vasyl Ocheret) was born on July 16, 1908, in Solonytsia (now Lubny district, Poltava region) and went through the most challenging trials that the Ukrainian people faced in the twentieth century — the revolution, World wars, Bolshevik occupation and repression, Holodomor, and emigration.

As a young man, the artist was passionate about words and helping others, so he became a teacher. Vasyl Barka got pedagogical and philological education at the Lubny Pedagogical College and Krasnodar Institute, where he later taught the history of Western European literature of the Middle Ages. He received his PhD in philology in 1940.

A participant in World War II, he was wounded twice and, in 1943, was taken by the Germans to Berlin as an Ostarbeiter (civilians from occupied eastern territories, who were taken to Germany as slave workers during WW2). He left the DP camp and emigrated to the United States in 1950. Barka first lived in New York City, and from the early 1970s until the end of his life in Glen Spey, never having a home or family.

Vasyl Barka’s literary career began with his poetry collections of the early 1930s, “Shliakhy” (Pathways) and “Tsekhy” (Guilds). Later, in Germany, he published the collections “Apostoly” (Apostles, 1946) and “Bilyi svit” (The White World, 1947) and others, and in the United States, he wrote most of his works, a significant part of which is poetry. 

Among his most famous works are “Psalom holubynoho polia” (The Psalm of the Dovelike Field, 1958), “Okean” (Ocean, 1959, 1979, 1992), the poem “Kavkaz” (Caucasus, 1993), and the poetic novel “Svidok dlia sontsia shestykrylykh” (The Witness for the Sun of Seraphims, 1981). Particularly noteworthy are “Rai” (Paradise, 1953), which exposes the essence of the USSR, and “Zhovtyi kniaz” (The Yellow Prince, 1963), one of the most imaginative, heavy, and truthful novels about the Holodomor. As a witness, V. Barka felt the tragedy of his people so strongly that he refused to eat while describing the suffering of the starving. In total, more than 20 books of poetry, prose, translations, and literary studies by the writer have been preserved, not counting manuscripts.

In the last years of his life, after a stroke (1999), Vasyl Barka could not write and lived in a nursing home in Glen Spey until his death on April 11, 2003.

Streets in Kyiv, Lubny, and Poltava are named after the prominent writer.