Hryhir Tiutiunnyk

Tiutiunnyk was born on 5 December 1931 in the village of Shilovka, which was then part of Poltava Oblast in the Ukrainian SSR of the Soviet Union.^[7] He was the son of Mykhailo Vasylyovych (born 1897) and his second wife, Hanna Mykhailivna.^[7] He had one older brother, Hryhoriy, who was born a decade earlier to Mykhailo's first wife, a teacher named Ivha Fedotivna Budenna (originally Hryhoriy went under the name Herohiy, but his grandfather Feodot renamed him after legend says he could not remember his name after a night of drinking).^[7]

During the Holodomor from 1932-33, Hryhir's family greatly suffered, and Hryhir briefly stopped walking and speaking for a period of time.^[7] A few years later, during the Great Purge, his uncle, Pavlo, was arrested and executed in a prison in Poltava while Hryhir's own father was arrested by the NKVD for conducting "counter-revolutionary agitation" and was sentenced to ten years in the gulags.^[7] He was never informed of the death of his father in exile at Usollag in April 1943.^[7]

Following the sentencing of his father, he was taken by his mother to live with her brother, Filemon, in the village of Shchotove in the Donbas.^[8] He was initially sent to the Ukrainian first class, but it was disbanded shortly thereafter as it consisted of only several students.^[9] He was then sent to an exclusively-Russian speaking school for the rest of his secondary education.^[8] After fifth grade, he quit secondary school to attend the Zinkiv Craft School back in his native Poltava, when he received the specialty of a locksmith of the 5th category.^[10] He was also given some clothes and a ration of 700 grams of bread a day during his stay at the craft school during the famine of 1946-47.^[8]

After graduating as a locksmith, he worked some odd jobs.^[8] First, he worked in Kharkiv at the Malyshev Factory, but his lungs soon came under stress and he fell ill and returned to Shchotove.^[8] Due to him not completing his mandatory three years at the plant in Kharkiv, as was standard, he was forced to serve 4 months in a colony before being allowed to work at the collective farm in the village and then at the mines near Debaltseve.^[8] He continued his streak of working odd jobs at the Myronivka Thermal Power Plant, then Mine No. 30, and finally as an auto mechanic at the mine construction unit of the Krasnolutska motor transport office.^[11] In November 1951, he decided to complete his mandatory service, and served for the next four years as a radio operator on the Pacific Fleet.^[11] While mobilized, he educated himself and was permitted to attend the Nakhodka Bay evening school and then the Vladivostok Evening School No. 1.^[11] In October 1955, he was also hired to work at the carriage depot in Schotove.^[11]

In 1957, he entered the VN Karazin Kharkiv National University, studying Russian philology at the university's Faculty of Philology.^[12] At the university, he first became interested in literary works, and in 1960 wrote his first short story entitled "At Dusk" in Russian, which was published in the magazine "Krestyanka" a year later in 1961.^[12] However, there are some older stories that have been discovered, such as "Beginners" which is dated to 1957, and published in the typewritten magazine "Enthusiast" in October 1958, alongside "The Apostate," which was published in December 1959.^[12] He almost never spoke of the two works, though, and while he had them printed in a book of memories, he did not include them in the definitive editions of his works.^[12] During his penultimate year before leaving the university, his elder brother, Hryhoriy, died in August. He decided to take up writing again, but this time in the Ukrainian language, following his brother's death.^[13] He first read Borys Hrinchenko's dictionary of the Ukrainian language, and then translated "At Dusk" into Ukrainian.^[13] As he later wrote, he said of this switch, "and since then I have never parted with [my native language], thank God, and will not part with it until my death."^[14] He graduated from the university in 1962, with his diploma thesis being on a psychological analysis of Leo Tolstoy.^[12]

Following his graduation, he first worked as a teacher in Donetsk Oblast, before moving to Kyiv in 1963 to work in the editorial offices of the newspaper "Literaturna Ukraina".^[8] Over the following decades of his life, he would work in the script workshop of the Kyiv Film Studio named after Alexander Dovzhenko and in the publishing houses "Youth" and "Veselka".^[8] After completely devoting himself to solely his literary work, in 1966 he became a member of the Writers' Union of Ukraine.^[8] In 1968, in Nizhyn, Tiutiunnyk led a reading of "Medal", which was a story about a starving collective farm worker receiving a labour medal.^[15] This would have long-lasting consequences on Tiutiunnyk, as it was treated by party officials as anti-Soviet provocation.^[15] In 1969, alongside Ivan Chendei, he was extensively criticized in a Soviet newspaper for not incorporating socialist realism into his works and instead focusing on Ukrainian life and for the earlier Nizhyn incident.^[16] However, during the 1972–1973 Ukrainian purge, he was blacklisted from all publishing houses in the Soviet Union. His existing works were also subject to very strict censorship, which he extensively lamented about privately.^[8]

Most of Tiutiunnyk's works were a reflection of his own life through characters, such as in "A Little Light Far in the Steppe" and "Three Cuckoos with a Bow". All touched on Soviet repression and his criticism of how Ukrainians were treated by the government, with a defining characteristic of his short stories being emotional depth. A frequent setting in his works was the rural post-World War II landscape of Ukraine, which he marked with material deprivation and fractured families.^[17] Also in extensive use in his stories is irony - which he explored in a full range from gentle humour to bitter sarcasm to tragic irony - which he used as a central artistic instrument.^[18] This was mostly due to what a scholar, Moroz, calls his care for ordinary Ukrainians while watching the Soviet system deform and diminish them, which Moroz argued made Tiutiunnyk feel irony.^[18] His contemporaries, such as Mochvan and Mushketyk, noted that irony was one of his most recognizable literary traits.^[18] He would extensively use irony as a survival strategy under censorship, writing political critique in forms that employed irony so that censors could not reform the works completely.^[18]

V.O. Kuzhmenko generally characterized Tiutiunnyk's style as "realistically psychological" with elements of impressionism, existentialism, and a look into irrational human behavior.^[19] Kuzhmenko attempted to describe him as such to push back against the common tendency to view Tiutiunnyk as a purely social realist or ethnographic chronicler, as is common, and instead focused on his philosophy.^[19]

Three Cuckoos with a Bow was a short story he published in 1976. It was one of his most charged workers.^[20] The father figure at the center of the story is Mykhailo, who was arrested and sent to a Siberian labour camp, mirroring Tiutiunnyk's own father, also named Mykhailo who was repressed.^[20] The story details absence, longing, and comments on human connections under a totalitarian system.^[20] The father in the story writes a letter from the camp, which is written in an anguished tone, that reflects Tiutiunnyk's own feelings about what he felt was taken from his generation by the Soviets - that is, to grieve openly.^[20] The story is also a reflection of the themes of ethical sensitivity and the refusal to cast people into roles or stark opinions that were present throughout most of Tiutiunnyk's works.^[20]

Later that year, he published the story "Klymko".^[21] The story, although fictional, draws on Tiutiunnyk's own experience walking from the Donbas back to Poltava Oblast through German-occupied territory in 1942 when he was 12.^[21] While it is not an autobiographical experience, it was mostly aimed at showing that ordinary people have a capacity for goodness, even under impossible conditions like occupation.^[21] "A Little Light Far in the Steppe" was published a few years later in 1979.^[17] Drawing on his own life, the protagonist, Pavlo, also has a difficult adolescence during World War II and attempts to practice emotional restraint even while in severe poverty like Tiutiunnyk did.^[17]

At the university in Kharkiv, he met his wife, Lyudmila Koretska, who was a student in the Ukrainian department.^[8] Together they had two children: Mikhail and Vasily.^[8]

In Hryhorii Avrakhov's memoirs, who was a friend of Tiutiunnyk, he was described as "tall, dark with an unruly forelock and an energy that commanded rooms."^[15] Avrakhov noted that while outwardly Tiutiunnyk seemed powerful, he was deeply fragile and vulnerable.^[15] Avrakhov and Tiutiunnyk's friendship was long-lasting after they first met at a "Literaturna Ukraina" editorial office in Cherkasy in 1964.^[22]

On 6 March 1980, after feeling frustration over his ability to write in an atmosphere of bureaucratic control over his literature, he committed suicide on 6 March 1980 in his home in Kyiv.^[23] His final note wrote, "Torment someone else, and burn what belongs to me".^[23] Afterwords, he was buried at Baikove Cemetery in Kyiv.^[23]