1935–1963

Vasyl Symonenko

Poet of the Sixtiers

Poet

He wrote an “Obituary for a Corncob”, a satire on the Soviet system that spread through samvydav. The poet and journalist Vasyl Symonenko published only one collection in his lifetime and died at 28, but his poems became one of the sources of the Sixtiers’ resistance.

Key accomplishments

  • His only collection published in his lifetime, Silence and Thunder (1962)
  • Samvydav poems that, to a large extent, mark the beginning of the Ukrainian opposition movement of the 1960s and 1970s
  • Excerpts from his diary, Crusts of Thoughts, published in the journal Suchasnist in 1965
  • Posthumously awarded the Taras Shevchenko State Prize of Ukraine (1995)

An obituary for a corncob

Can you write an obituary for a corncob? Vasyl Symonenko did. It was a satire on the Soviet system, and it spread through samvydav (samizdat): texts that people retyped and passed from hand to hand, out of the censors’ reach.

Because of censorship, Symonenko published little in his lifetime. His only collection, Silence and Thunder, came out in 1962, and that same year he was admitted to the Writers’ Union of Ukraine. His best-known poems, though, were the samvydav ones: satires, poems about the hard life of the peasants, about resisting despotism and great-power chauvinism, and a cycle of poems about his love for Ukraine.

A journalist in Cherkasy

Symonenko was born in 1935 in the village of Biivtsi in the Poltava region into a peasant family and lost his father early. He began writing poetry at Kyiv University, where he studied journalism and led a student literary studio. After graduating he worked for newspapers in Cherkasy and was the Cherkasy correspondent of Robitnycha Hazeta.

Symonenko died in Cherkasy on 13 December 1963, at the age of 28. According to an unofficial version, his death came a few months after he had been beaten by the Cherkasy police. The collections Earth’s Gravity and Wine from Roses came out after his death, and in the diaspora The Shore of Waiting. At first Soviet critics suppressed his samvydav poems while praising him as a poet devoted to the Party line; later his works were suppressed entirely.

Why it matters today

Symonenko’s poems largely mark the beginning of the Ukrainian opposition movement of the 1960s and 1970s. He became one of the defining figures in the struggle for Ukraine’s state and cultural sovereignty in the second half of the 20th century. In 1995 he was posthumously awarded the Shevchenko Prize.