Maik Yohansen
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.
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By Maik Yohansen, trans. Eugene OstashevskyMaik 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.
