Rights Information

Rights manager Ivan Fedechko, ivan.fedechko@starlev.com.ua

Contact of the Ukrainian Book Institute: ubi@ubi.org.ua

Author Biography

Hrytsko Chubai was born on 23 January 1949 in the village of Berezyny in the Rivne region. While studying at Kozynsk Secondary School, he published his poems in a republican magazine. In 1967 he applied to Kyiv University but was not even allowed to take the entrance exams for anti-Soviet sedition, jokingly proclaimed in the university dormitory by seventeen-year-old applicants. Since then, he was under the KGB’s watchful eye. He worked for some time at Rivne Radio and came to Lviv in 1968 with his poem Vertep (Nativity Play). It was when Vyacheslav Chornovil called him an outstanding poet of Ukraine. In 1972 KGB searched his wife’s house and Hrutsko was arrested. A few-day stay in the KGB headquarters resulted in a deep depression and the exhausting physical work of a loader lead to a health disorder. Financial difficulties forced Hryhoriy Chubai to work on construction sites in Siberia, which barely destroyed his fragile health. In 1979, Hryhoriy Chubai entered the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute in Moscow after passing entrance examinations with flying colours. He studied with a famous poet Anatoliy Zhygulin who considered him the strongest student in his class. Hryhoriy Chubai died on May 16, 1982, while he was still in the third year of his studies. According to Ivan Dziuba, he was “one of the most attractive and moving legends of the Ukrainian troubled times of the 1970s and 80s”.