Veronika Oleksandriwna Chernyakhivska ( Ukrainian: Вероні́ка Олекса́ндрівна Черняхі́вська, 25 April 1900 Kyiv - 22 September 1938 Kiev ) was a Ukrainian poet and translator . She is one of the artists of the Executed Renaissance, and was shot during the Great Purge.
Life
Veronika Chernyakhivska was born on April 25, 1900 and grew up in a circle of artists and academics. She received an excellent education and upbringing, learning foreign languages and playing the piano at a young age. She took part in theater performances and music evenings held in the Ukrainian Club and in Lysenko's house. After the February Revolution of 1917, the Secretary General for Education Ivan Steschenko, her aunt's husband, opened the Second Ukrainian Gymnasium. She attended it with enthusiasm and was awarded a gold medal as one of the best students at her graduation in June 1918. At the age of seventeen, she fell in love with officer Konstantin "Koka" Veligorski, who enlisted as a volunteer in the army of the autonomous republic. Like several of her classmates, he was killed on the Northern Front in January 1918. She only received the news of his death in August.
The following year her father and the medical institute were evacuated. Beset by Bolshevik and then " white " rule, she and her mother set out to look for her father. After several weeks they found him in Kamenets-Podolsk. There, Veronika Chernyakhivska translated articles from foreign newspapers into Ukrainian, worked in a military hospital, and helped the sick in a typhus hospital. In May 1920, with the government of Symon Petliuras, the family returned to half-destroyed Kiev. She tried to support herself and, while studying at the Institute of Foreign Relations, worked in jobs including the National Library. After that, she earned her living through literary and translation work. She married in 1921, but the marriage fell apart after eight months. From 1922 to spring 1923 she worked in the parcel office of the American Relief Administration (ARA). After its dissolution, she worked as a clerk and printer in the People's Commissariat. After graduating, she worked mainly as a translator. She was fluent in ancient Greek, Latin, Russian, French, German and English.
In 1926, Tschernjachiwska and her father moved to Berlin for five months, where she assisted him in translating from German and attended courses in modern German art. There she met the banker Theodor Hecken, whom she married in 1928. She then became a student at the University of Berlin, improved her English and German skills and traveled extensively throughout Europe. As this marriage also failed, she returned to Kiev in 1929. In 1938, the mathematician Mykola Hansha was her third husband.
References
- ^ "Ольга Гураль. «В душі людини я бачу вічність...»: трагічна доля Вероніки Черняхівської". www.historians.in.ua. Retrieved 2024-11-17.
- Slavutych, IAr (1956). The muse in prison; eleven sketches of Ukrainian poets killed by Communists and twenty-two translations of their poems. Ukrainian daily.