Fragments from the History of Ukrainian Literature in Emigration – Yurii Lavrinenko’s “The Executed Renaissance”

Abstract

Yurii Lavrinenko’s intellectual legacy encompasses more than 300 scholarly and journalistic works. The culmination of his career was the anthology The Executed Renaissance, the publication of which un­veiled the concealed “literary crime” that claimed the lives of the majority of Ukrainian Soviet writers during the 1930s. The rehabilitation of writers labeled as “terrorists” in the 1950s and the subsequent pub­lication of their “selected works” did little to challenge the official Soviet narrative. Only the release of the 1959 Paris anthology – featuring the writings of executed, “re-educated,” and forcibly disappeared Ukraini­an authors – exposed the real cause of their persecution under Stalin’s regime. This edition is unique and re­mains to this day the most important source of the history of Ukrainian literature of the twentieth century.