1893–1933
Mykola Khvylovy
Voice of the Executed Renaissance
Writer and pamphleteer, one of the leaders of the Ukrainian cultural revival of the 1920s. His slogan “Away from Moscow!” called for turning towards Europe, and his fate became a symbol of a generation of artists destroyed by the Soviet regime.
Key accomplishments
- The short-story collections Blue Etudes and Autumn, and the story “I (Romance)”
- Guiding spirit and a co-founder of the literary organization VAPLITE (1925)
- Pamphlets of 1925–1926 calling for a “psychological Europe”
Who he was
Mykola Fitilov (pen name Khvylovy) was born in Trostianets in Slobozhanshchyna (Sloboda Ukraine). He fought in the First World War, and in 1919 he joined the Communist Party, believing in the ideals of the revolution. In the early 1920s he settled in Kharkiv, then the capital of Soviet Ukraine, and became one of the brightest writers of the era.
His story
Khvylovy wrote innovative prose, and in his pamphlets of 1925–1926 he urged Ukrainian culture to look not to Moscow but to a “psychological Europe”. His slogan “Away from Moscow!” became a symbol of the striving for cultural independence. Writers of the Free Academy of Proletarian Literature (VAPLITE) gathered around him, and he was its guiding spirit.
Under pressure from the authorities, Khvylovy was forced to retreat: in 1927 he left VAPLITE, and in January 1928, in an open letter, he publicly renounced the slogan “Away from Moscow!”. The Stalinist regime still branded his views a “nationalist deviation”. After the arrest of his friend, the writer Mykhailo Yalovyi, in May 1933, at the time of the Holodomor and the terror, Khvylovy took his own life on 13 May 1933. His contemporaries saw his death as a protest.
Why it matters today
Khvylovy is a symbol of the Executed Renaissance, the generation of artists of the 1920s–1930s destroyed by the Soviet authorities. His idea of Ukraine’s European choice has become relevant again in our time.
