Vlyzko, Oleksandr

Description

Creators

Oleksandr Vlyzko (d.b. unknown), Author

Volodymyr Maniak

, Recipient

Media Type

Text

Item Types

Correspondence

Envelopes

Description

Letter sent from: Simpheropol
Letter describes events in 1932-1933 in: Kyiv
Current location name: Kyiv

The enclosed literary sketch signed by Oleksandr Vlyzko depicts a scene in 1933 on Brest-Litovsk Prospekt (today prospekt Peremohy), one of the main streets in Kyiv, leading to the train station.

The author recalls jumping on a streetcar and observing exhausted peasants moving along the broad avenue toward the city center in search of bread. The ones who did not find it would eventually sit down in the snow, next to street car stops, residential and administrative buildings, never to rise again. Meanwhile, jobless residents searched the city for “restricted canteens” in the hope of finding a bowl of watery soup.

Vlyzko quotes Oleksa and ruminates about not losing a spiritual perspective on the deprivation he was seeing, as the hardship people were going through was a sacrifice on the road to the higher goals of the socialist revolution.

Note: The letter is signed in a name similar to a Ukrainian futurist poet called Oleksa Vlyzko (1908-1934), who was a victim of Stalinist repressions. Executed in 1934, he could not have sent this letter in 1988 from Simferopol. Oleksandr Vlyzko is probably Oleksa Vlyzko’s big brother. Oleksa’s biographical information can be found here https://ukrlit.net/biography/vlizko.html

Notes