Maik Yohansen (1895-1937), or else Mike Johansen, was a Ukrainian modernist poet and fiction writer from Kharkiv. Although his high school friends became Russian-language Ukrainian Futurists, he deliberately turned to Ukrainian for his working language. His carefully chiseled poetry displays a mastery of phonetic organization and paronomasia. His erudite and ironic novel, Dr. Leonardo’s Journey to Sloboda Switzerland with His Future Lover, the Beautiful Alcesta (1928), is a playful metaliterary deconstruction of narrative conventions. Translator of Edgar Allen Po and Shakespeare’s Othello, he collaborated with the avant-garde theater of Les Kurbas and co-wrote Oleksander Dovzhenko’s silent film Zvenyhora. Yohansen was arrested and shot in 1937, four days after Semenko, in a mass purge of Ukrainian-language writers.

Mykhail Semenko (1892-1937) was the founder and main poet of Ukrainian-language Futurism. He issued two formally daring chapbooks shortly before World War I, and an iconoclastic manifesto threatening to burn the sacrosanct classic of nineteenth-century Ukrainian poetry, the Kobzar of Taras Shevchenko. After Ukraine was joined to Soviet Russia, he reinvented himself as a politically engaged, communist “Panfuturist,” running a sequence of avantgarde associations and journals throughout the 1920s until the forced demise of the avantgarde in the USSR. A deputy at the Soviet Writers Congress of 1934, he confessed to Isaac Babel of his “simply maniacal urge to take a piece of sh[it]… and throw it at the Congress presidium,” or at least so their conversation appears in a secret police report (see p. 169 here). Semenko was arrested and shot during the Great Purge with many other Ukrainian-language writers, whose great contributions to Ukrainian literature led to that generation being called the “Executed Renaissance.”