Mykola Khvylovy (1893–1933) was a prominent Ukrainian writer and publicist of the Ukrainian cultural renaissance of the 1920s.
Born as Mykola Fitilyov in Trostyanets, Kharkov Governorate to a Russian laborer father and Ukrainian schoolteacher mother, Khvylovy joined the Communist Party in 1919. In the same year he became the chief of local Cheka in Bohodukhiv povit. He moved to Kharkiv in 1921 and involved himself with writers connected to Vasyl Blakytny and the paper Visti VUTsVK (news from Allllkrainian Central Executive Committee). In 1921, he also published his first poetry collection.
In 1922, he began to focus more on prose writing. His initial collections Syni etiudy (Blue Etudes, 1923) and Osin' (autumn, 1924). His impressions of the work as a CheKa officer are reflected in his 1924 novel "I am (Romance)", the hero of which - the head of the local Cheka - sentenced his mother to death in the name of the ideals of the revolution.
After his death, his works were banned in the Soviet Union and because of his symbolic potency were mostly not permitted until near the end or after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
"Mykola Khvylovy wrote in his autobiography that in 1917, soon after the February Revolution, he came to a congress of soldiers, as a combatant and member of an army council, with two ribbons pinned to his suit: a red one and a yellow-and-blue one. He offered a simple explanation for his dual political views: "I wanted to be a Ukrainian Bolshevik." The drama of being divided ended in suicide: on May 13, 1933, Khyvlovy shot himself in his apartment. The revolution was devouring its children. The new Soviet authorities set out to destroy an entire generation of Ukrainian intelligentsia – and Khvylovy was one of their leaders. And as a leader and ardent communist, he could not fail to feel his responsibility for the unfolding tragedy…
…Khvylovy's story is tragic not only in that it illustrates the cruelty of Stalin's totalitarian regime, which, by the way, skillfully played on contradictions among writers, fuelling the ambitions of some and disciplining others, which made infighting between literary groups look like self-destruction. The problem was also with the political illusions of an entire generation of Ukrainian national communists who hoped that Ukraine could be built together with the Russian Bolsheviks. When their eyes were opened, they mounted resistance against the "Red Empire," but it was too late".
„The Ukrainian Week" April 29, 2011 ▪ by Volodymyr Panchenko
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