1899–1934

Hryhorii Kosynka

Writer of In the Wheat Fields

Writer

Why would a writer name himself after a flower? Hryhorii Strilets signed his work “Kosynka”, a small red flower his mother loved. One of the best Ukrainian short-story writers of the 1920s, he wrote about the village in years of revolution and war. He was shot in Kyiv in December 1934.

Key accomplishments

  • His first story, At Beet Harvest (1919), already signed Hryhorii Kosynka
  • The story collections Against the Golden Gods (1922), Behind the Gates (1925), In the Wheat Fields (1926), Politics (1927)
  • About 20 story collections in his lifetime; the censors kept The Heart (1933) from readers
  • Translations of Gogol, Chekhov, Gorky and Sholokhov
  • Member of the Kyiv literary groups Hrono, Aspys and Lanka (MARS)

A flower’s name

The writer’s real surname was Strilets. Hryhorii was born in 1899 in the village of Shcherbanivka in the Kyiv region (now Obukhiv district), into a poor peasant family. His grandfather taught him to read when he was four, and as a boy he already worked at a sugar mill. His mother’s brother, Kalistrat Anyshchenko, later a well-known prose writer, encouraged him to study. His mother loved flowers, and he took that love from her: for his pen name he chose kosynka, a small red flower. In 1919 the paper Borotba printed his first story, At Beet Harvest, signed “Hryhorii Kosynka”.

The book that surprised him

The first Ukrainian book Hryhorii read was The Witch of Konotop by Kvitka-Osnovianenko. It amazed him: it turned out there were people who wrote simply, the way peasants talk. In 1914 he moved to Kyiv. He took whatever work he could find, went to evening classes, passed the exams for six years of secondary school on his own, and from 1919 to 1922 studied at the Kyiv Institute of People’s Education. Later he worked for newspapers, magazines and publishers and at the Kyiv film studio, and headed the radio committees in Kharkiv and Kyiv.

The village in a storm

In his lifetime Kosynka published about 20 story collections, among them Against the Golden Gods (1922), In the Wheat Fields (1926) and Politics (1927). He wrote about how the Ukrainian village lived, thought and changed during the revolution and wars of 1917–1921. Soviet critics saw him as a mere follower of Mykhailo Kotsiubynskyi, Stepan Vasylchenko and Vasyl Stefanyk, but his stories are full of experiment, like those of his contemporary Mykola Khvylovy. In Kyiv Kosynka belonged to the literary groups Hrono, Aspys and Lanka (later MARS). In Aspys he was joined by Mykola Zerov and Valerian Pidmohylnyi, and in Lanka also by the poet Yevhen Pluzhnyk.

The Heart that was banned

In the early 1930s Party critics accused Kosynka of “kulak ideology” and “banditry”. His stories could no longer be published, and the censors kept his collection The Heart (1933) from readers. So he wrote film scripts and translated: Chekhov, Gorky, Sholokhov and the Dead Souls of Nikolai Gogol.

December 1934

On 4 November 1934, after a critical speech at the Writers’ House, Kosynka was arrested. On 1 December the Bolshevik leader Sergei Kirov was killed in Leningrad, and the regime answered with a wave of repression. On 13–15 December a military court in Kyiv, in a fabricated case of “White Guard terrorists”, sentenced 28 people to death, among them Kosynka and the writers Dmytro Falkivskyi, Oleksa Vlyzko and Kost Burevii. Hryhorii Kosynka was shot in Kyiv on 15 December 1934. He was rehabilitated in 1957, and in 1979 a monument to him was put up in his native Shcherbanivka.

Why it matters today

Hryhorii Kosynka showed that a boy from a poor peasant family could make his way into serious literature and write about his own people the way they spoke. His stories keep the Ukrainian village of the revolution and the wars alive: how it lived, thought and changed. And he wrote about it in a new way, full of experiment. The regime banned his stories and shot their author, but since 1962 his books have come out again, and he is read in many languages. Anyone who wants to understand what the Ukrainian village lived through a hundred years ago can open Kosynka.