Maksym Rylskyi’s Main and Additional Witnesses at the Opera of ULU

Author

Naienko Mykhailo 

a literary man, a Doctor of Philology, a professor (Kyiv, Ukraine).

Maksym Rylskyi’s Main and Additional Witnesses at the Opera of ULU

Abstract

The article is about Maksym Rylskyi’s arrest and his evidences in the case of the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine (ULU). The poet has been on remand for six months and given one written and eight additional testimonies (March 23 – April 28, 1931). The author of the report characterizes these “evidences” as a self-slander of a person put on a trial quite innocently. All members of the so-called Union for the Liberation of Ukraine, a fictitious organization invented to destroy Ukrainians in Ukraine in favour of the Soviet-imperial policy of the USSR, have been innocent. Under pressure from investigative henchmen, «witness» Maksym Rylsky has given both positive and negative characteristics to the arrested suspects. These are mainly writers and other figures of culture. However, he has tried to be as restrained as possible and not deprived of purely human dignity in his assessments. His testimonies contain valuable information about the literary process of the 1920s, which is of current importance for literary science. The report is characterized by a literary emphasis. The author reveals the arbitrariness of imperial pressure on the development of literature in the conditions of colonial Ukraine and a person in it. It is emphasized also on the fair appeal of the trial of the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine and the acquittal of all its convicts. In 1989 the cynical Soviet judiciary has admitted the sentence of those accused participants unfair. All convicted are rehabilitated (most of them have perished in the Soviet torture chambers), and Maksym Rylsky had to continue writing poetry in those conditions. It has been often a kind of self-torture of the poet.

Keywords

the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine, fabricated judiciary, testimony, self-slander, “rabid Ukrainians”, poetry, artistic creativity, literary organizations, ideological differences, a sentence, absence of crime, neoclassics, rehabilitation.

References

1. BRIUKHOVETSKYI, Vyacheslav. Mykola Zerov. From the Threshold of Death. Ukrainian Writers – Victims of Stalinist Repression, 1991, 496 pp. [in Ukrainian].s. Kyiv: Soviet Writer
2. LESYA UKRAINKA. The Works in Ten Volumes. Kyiv: State Literary Publishing House, 1964, vol. 3, 288 pp. [in Ukrainian].
3. PRYSTAYKO, Volodymyr, Yuriy SHAPOVAL. The Case of the “Union for the Liveration of Ukraine”: Unknown Documents and Facts. Kyiv: INTEL, 1995, 448 pp. [in Ukrainian].
4. RYLSKYI, Maksym. Introduction. In: Hryhoriy KOSYNKA. Short Novels. Kyiv: Soviet Writer, 1962, 226 pp. [in Ukrainian].