Mykhail Semenko
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.”
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By Mykhail Semenko trans. Eugene OstashevskyMykhail 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.”
