Vasyl Barka

Wasyl Barka (pseud. of Vasyl Ocheret, born 16 July 1908 in the village of Solonytsia in the Lubensky Uyezd of the Poltava Governorate (now Lubny Raion, Ukraine), died 11 April 2003 in Liberty, New York) was an American-residing Ukrainian poet, writer, literary critic, and translator. Vasyl Barka's family had a Cossack origin. In 1927, Barka graduated from Lubny Pedagogical College, and then worked as a teacher in a mining village in Donbas. There he did not get along with the local authorities, and went to the North Caucasus. In 1928, he entered the philology faculty of Krasnodar Pedagogical Institute and worked at the Krasnodar Art Museum. Supported by Pavlo Tychyna, Barka's work first appeared in print in 1929. The publication of his first book of poems in 1930 provoked much ideological criticism, including accusations of "bourgeois nationalism" and "religious carry-overs". Barka transferred from Krasnodar Institute to the postgraduate school of the Moscow Pedagogical Institute, wrote his thesis on the realistic and the fantastic in the Divine Comedy by Dante, and presented the thesis in 1940. He has lectured at the Philology faculty at Rostov University.

In 1941, after the Great Patriotic War broke out, Barka volunteered, and in 1942 he was badly injured and caught in the occupation. After he recovered, he worked as a proofreader at a newspaper. In 1943, he was sent to Germany. After that, he lived in Germany, where he was active in the MUR literary association. In 1947, he moved to France, then, in 1950 to the United States. There he worked at Radio Liberty. Sometimes he was starving, and had to take any job - he used to work as fireman, window cleaner etc.