1891–1937

Oleksa Slisarenko

Poet and adventure-fiction writer

Poet, Writer

In 1927 he sharply rebuked Maxim Gorky himself, who had refused to let his novel Mother come out in Ukrainian. Oleksa Slisarenko was a Symbolist poet turned author of fast-paced crime and adventure fiction, and a member of Hart and VAPLITE. He was shot at Sandarmokh in 1937.

Key accomplishments

  • Poetry collections On the Castalian Shore (1919), Poems (1923) and Baida (1928)
  • More than 20 crime and adventure stories and novels, among them The Black Angel (1929), The River of Grain and The Strike (1932)
  • Editor-in-chief of the Knyhospilka publishing house in Kharkiv
  • Co-editor of Universalnyi Zhurnal (1928–1929)
  • Collected works in six volumes (1931–1933)

The agronomist from Sloboda Ukraine

Oleksa Slisarenko (born Snisar) was born in 1891 into a craftsman’s family on a farmstead in Sloboda Ukraine; today it is the village of Shypuvate in the Kharkiv region. He trained as an agronomist at the Kucheriv and Kharkiv agricultural schools, finishing in 1912. He began writing poems in 1911 but rarely published them.

From the trenches to the Symbolists

Straight after school Slisarenko was called up. He went through the First World War and rose to the rank of officer. From 1917 he lived in Kyiv, where he joined the Symbolist poets of the Muzahet group and later the Futurists. His first collection, On the Castalian Shore, came out in 1919.

How a Symbolist turned to crime fiction

From 1924 Slisarenko wrote prose, and nothing like his poems. He produced more than 20 fast-paced crime and adventure stories and novels in the English and American style. Their heroes aren’t supermen but ordinary people swept up in the revolution of 1917. The best known of these novels is The Black Angel (1929). In 1931–1933 his collected works came out in six volumes.

Taking on Gorky

In Kharkiv Slisarenko was editor-in-chief of the Knyhospilka publishing house and co-editor of Universalnyi Zhurnal. He belonged to the writers’ union Hart and, in 1926–1928, to VAPLITE, alongside Mykola Khvylovy and Mykola Kulish. In 1927 he sharply rebuked Maxim Gorky, who had refused to allow a Ukrainian translation of his novel Mother. Gorky called Ukrainian a “dialect”; Slisarenko made the letter public and accused Gorky, and the russian intelligentsia as a whole, of great-power chauvinism. Official critics accused Slisarenko of writing books with too little ideology and of fighting against keeping Ukrainian literature provincial.

Solovki and Sandarmokh

On 29 April 1934 Slisarenko was arrested. In 1935 a military tribunal sentenced him to 10 years of imprisonment, which he served on the Solovetsky Islands. On 9 October 1937 a special NKVD troika sentenced him to death. On 3 November 1937 he was shot in the Sandarmokh forest in Karelia; Mykola Kulish, Valerian Pidmohylnyi and Valerian Polishchuk were killed there the same day. He was rehabilitated in 1957.

Why it matters today

Oleksa Slisarenko showed that Ukrainian could carry fast-paced crime and adventure fiction, written the way English and American authors wrote it. His heroes aren’t supermen but ordinary people swept up in the revolution. He refused to let Ukrainian literature stay provincial, and he spoke up even when Maxim Gorky would not let his novel come out in Ukrainian. Anyone who writes or reads a Ukrainian detective novel today carries on work he was doing back in the 1920s.