Volodymyr Vynnychenko - Biography

Biography

Vynnychenko was born in Yelisavetgrad (Kirovohrad), the Kherson Governorate of the Russian Empire in a family of peasants. His father Kyrylo Vasyliovych Vynnychenko earlier in his life was a peasant-serf has moved from a village to the city of Yelisavetgrad where he married a widow Yevdokia Pavlenko (nee: Linnyk). From her previous marriage Yevdokia had three children: Andriy, Maria, and Vasyl, while from the marriage with Kyrylo only one son Volodymyr. Upon graduating from a local public school the Vynnychenko family managed to enroll Volodymyr to the Yelyzavetgrad Male Gymnasium (today is the building of the Ukrainian Ministry of Extraordinary Situations). In later grades of the gymnasium he took part in a revolutionary organization and wrote a revolutionary poem for which was incarcerated for a week and excluded from school. That did not stop him to continue his studying as he was getting prepared for his test to obtain the high school diploma (Matura). He successfully took the test in the Zlatopil gymnasium from which obtained his attestation of maturity.

In 1900 Vynnychenko joined the Revolutionary Ukrainian Party (RUP) and enrolled in the law department at Kiev University, but in 1903 he was expelled for participation in revolutionary activities among the Kievan workers and peasants from Poltava and jailed for several months in Lukyanivska Prison. He managed to escape his incarceration. Afterward, he was forcibly drafted into the Russian tsarist army, where he began to agitate soldiers with revolutionary propaganda. Tipped off that his arrest was imminent, Vynnychenko fled to Western Ukraine, Galicia, a region that was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. When trying to return to Russian Ukraine in 1903 with revolutionary literature, Vynnychenko was arrested and jailed in Kiev for two years. After his release in 1905, he passed his exams for a law degree in Kiev University.

In 1905 Vynnychenko became a founding and leading member of the Ukrainian Social Democratic Worker's Party, which was affiliated with the Russian Social Democratic Party and led by Martov & Lenin. In 1906 Vynnychenko was arrested for a third time, again for his political activities, and jailed for a year; before his scheduled trial, however, the wealthy patron of Ukrainian literature and culture, Yevhen Chykalenko, paid his bail, and Vynnychenko fled the Russian Ukraine again, effectively become an emigre writer abroad from 1907 to 1914, living in Lemberg (Lviv), Vienna, Geneva, Paris, Florence, Berlin. In 1911 Vynnychenko married Rosalia Lifshitz, a Russian Jewish doctor. From 1914 to 1917 Vynnychenko lived near Moscow throughout much of WWI and returned to Kiev in 1917 to assume a leading role in Ukrainian politics.