Yurii Lavrinenko

The fate of this great Scholar was marked by severe trials during the years of Stalinist repression in the 1930s: imprisonment and exile. Yet a fortunate star granted him life so that he could immortalize the names of his executed colleagues and friends, who together with him had revived Ukrainian culture in the 1920s. It was thanks to Yurii Lavrinenko that the world learned about the horrors of the Bolshevik system in Ukraine, and the names of the builders of the Ukrainian Renaissance of the 1920s returned from oblivion to immortality.

Oleksa-Myron Bilaniuk, President of the Ukrainian Free Academy of Sciences

Yurii Lavrinenko was a Ukrainian literary scholar and researcher of the “Executed Renaissance.” He was born on May 3, 1905, in the village of Khizhynci, Cherkasy region, into a peasant family. He studied at the Uman Agricultural Technical School, where he became interested in literature and joined the literary organization “Plow,” a union of peasant writers.

In 1926, he enrolled in the History and Philology Department of the Kharkiv Institute of Public Education (now V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University), and in 1930, he was admitted to the graduate program at the Taras Shevchenko Scientific Research Institute in Kharkiv. In 1932, he defended his doctoral dissertation “The Ukrainian Epic of Cossack Dumas.”
At that time, his main scholarly field—literary studies—took shape. His first works focused on the creativity of Ukrainian writers and poets Vasyl Ellan-Blakytny, Vasyl Chumak, and Pavlo Tychyna. He was published mainly in the journals “Krytyka” and “Pluh.”
In 1935, Lavrinenko was convicted on charges of belonging to a “Ukrainian counterrevolutionary organization.” He served a five-year sentence in the Norilsk labor camp. After his release from exile, he lived in the North Caucasus without the right to return to Ukraine. He worked as an agronomist at an experimental agricultural station near the city of Nalchik.
He returned to Ukraine illegally in 1942. He spent a short time in Kyiv, then moved to Lviv, where he worked as a teacher at an agricultural school.
At the height of World War II, he was taken by the German occupation authorities to Austria for forced labor. After the war, he was held in German DP camps. He became a member of the Ukrainian writers’ organization MUR (Artistic Ukrainian Movement) and served as editor of the newspaper “Ukrainski Visti.”
In 1950, he emigrated to the United States. Lavrinenko is best known for his research on the “Executed Renaissance”—a generation of Ukrainian artists who were destroyed during Stalin’s terror in the 1930s. He wrote dozens of in-depth studies on repressed Ukrainian writers, and his complete bibliography includes over 300 works. His most important publication, the anthology “The Executed Renaissance, An Anthology, 1917–1933: Poetry, Prose, Drama and the Essay,” was published in 1959 under the auspices of the journal “Kultura”—a leading anti-Soviet intellectual publication based in Paris that advocated for Ukrainian and Polish independence. It was Jerzy Giedroyc, the long-time editor of “Kultura,” who commissioned the book from Lavrinenko. The anthology gained wide recognition, went through several reprints, and is still in high demand in Ukraine and around the world.
In 1985, Lavrinenko published his memoirs, “Black Blizzard and Other Memories.”
He died on December 14, 1987, in New York City. He is buried in the Ukrainian Orthodox Cemetery in South Bound Brook, New Jersey, USA.