Ivasiuk, Mikhail Grigorievich

Ivasyuk was born on November 25, 1917 in the small Bukovinian town of Kitsman in a family of nationally conscious Ukrainians. Father - Grigory Ivanovich. Mother, Alexandra Vasilievna, despite the fact that she was illiterate, was versed in folklore .

Ivasyuk received his education in the lyceums of Kitsman and Chernivtsi , but for all these 13 years he has not studied a day in Ukrainian. True, he brilliantly mastered Romanian , and with it - Latin , French , German , Polish . In the fall of 1939 he entered the university, but after a few months he was expelled due to the inability to pay for tuition. To avoid the threat of being in the Romanian army, Mikhail crossed the Romanian-Soviet border in the near-Prut village of Zavale, in order to continue his studies at one of the Soviet universities. Instead, he goes to prison - Stanislav , Lviv , Odessa , Kharkov , Moscow . He was serving a sentence in the Gulag barracks. But even there, Michael continued to grow intellectually. He mastered medical skills, met with intelligent people, including L. A. Zilber , a brother of Benjamin Kaverin ; Marshal Tukhachevsky’s daughter Svetlana Mikhailovna and other highly educated people. In the same period, Ivasyuk even assembled his own library of fifty books, among which were works by Taras Shevchenko , Lesya Ukrainka , Pavel Tychina .

In 1946, Ivasiuk returned to Kitsman. He taught at the local decade and agricultural technical school. At the same time he studied French philology at the University of Chernivtsi , which he graduated in 1949. In these years, his literary activity gains more weight, Ivasiuk switched to writing prose. In 1964, he began teaching at the University of Chernivtsi at the Department of Ukrainian Literature, where he transferred his philology knowledge to students for 23 years (1964-1987). At first - in the rank of senior lecturer, and after defending a dissertation on the life and work of Sylvester Yarichevsky - associate professor. The significant contribution of Mikhail Ivasyuk to the literary and artistic treasury was marked by the Dmitry Zagul Literary Prize (1992) and the Sidor Vorobkevich Literary and Art Prize (1993).

Mikhail Ivasyuk died on February 5, 1995.

In 1998, the name of Mikhail Grigoryevich Ivasyuk was assigned to the Chernivtsi Regional Scientific Library.

Like almost every Ukrainian prose writer, Mikhail Ivasiuk began with poetry. The first was composed as a child in a peculiar co-authorship with mother Alexandra Vasilievna, who could neither read nor write, but subtly felt the rhythm and figurative word, remembered many songs and fairy tales. Already becoming a real writer, he included tales, ballads, songs recorded from his mother in his folklore publications: “Tales of Bukovina. Tales of Verkhovyna ”(1968),“ The Magic Pot ”(1971).

Subsequently, he began to compose without his mother’s help, and in the mid-30s in the Chernivtsi children's magazine “Ukrainian Swallow” appeared his first publication “I Will Tell You A Tale”. In those same years, poetry about the famine in Ukraine saw the light of day. Were among the youthful creativity of a young author and poems of a different plan. Part of them was the section “Poetry of the 30s” in the collection “Elegy for the Son” (1991), the main motive was the feeling of great pain and great love.

With prose works, Mikhail Ivasyuk speaks from the early 50s. His first story, “Hear my brother” (1957), which was still blessed in the manuscript by Irina Wilde , soon transformed into the novel “Red Roses” (1960). And by the way the collection of short stories “Broken Branch” (1963) appeared, the novel “The Duel” (1967) and “Spring Thunderstorms” (1970), the novels “The Verdict” (1975) and “The Heart Is Not a Stone” (1978), she she noted that M. Ivasyuk is a writer who “has his favorite theme, his own style and artistic worldview”.

This topic was for him a long life of Northern Bukovina of the 30s - early 40s of the 20th century. Consequently, the attention of the prose writer was captured by other temporal and geographical coordinates.

In the novel “The Ballad on a White Horseback Rider” (1980) and “Knights of Great Love” (1987), the writer unfolded a wide panorama of the struggle of Bukovynians for a better fate in the second half of the 17th century and rehabilitated the national leader Miron Ditin, showing that it was not "Robber", as some Moldavian chroniclers claimed, but a real knight. Dilogy was favorably received both in Ukraine and abroad. In particular, “The Ballad of the White Horse Rider”, shortly after appearing in the original language, was published in the Russian translation in Moscow (together with “The Verdict”, called in “The Verdict to the Son of Zarathustra” in the 1984 publication), they also enthusiastically wrote about it in Canada .

Even deeper layers of Bukovinian history associated with Shipina land of the XIV century were artistically discovered by M. Ivasiuk for peace in the novel “The Royal Jester's Tournament” (“Dzvin”, 1994, No. 5-6, separate edition - 1997). But Ivasyuk did not see the novel published in a separate book.

In his late years, the writer published in the Zhovten magazine (1988, No. 9-10) the novel “The Monologue in the Face of the Son,” which holds a special place among the numerous historical and biographical works of the past decade, because it’s not just a biography, but a story a requiem with the motives of parental love, like the poetic cycle Elegy for the Son and the poem Ghosts.

In the 80s - early 90s M. Ivasyuk turned to the topic of the North, prompted by his forced stay on the banks of the Pechora . And if in the novel “Celestial Bird” (1984), written based on the materials of the hospital’s life, where the author worked, attention is focused on the moments of humanity, then in the novel “In the kingdom of the guard” (fragments were printed in periodicals), another North arises - anti-human, cruel, criminal, brought to such a state by the Bolshevik regime.

In the literary editorial office made by the writer, the plays of S. Vorobkevich and S. Yarichevsky are at stake. In the work of M. Ivasyuk, a folklorist, hundreds of recorded and ordered folk stories, from which, in particular, the books “Tales of Bukovina. Tales of Verkhovyna ”(1968),“ The Magic Pot ”(1971),“ Tales of Bukovina ”(1973) and the Golden Carriage was prepared for publication. As a literary critic, he published dozens of articles, published a large volume of the works of S. Vorobkevich (1986), and prepared a similar book by S. Yarichevsky.

• The parties of the memory of Volodimir Ivasyuk. Guess. Mikhailo Ivasiuk
• Ivasyuk Mikhaylo Grigorovich - the streets of the memory - the July of Ukraine. Peculiarities of XXI table 2007

• Gusar Yu. Litsar words / Yuhim Gusar // Bukovinske vіche. - 2010. - 3 fierce (No. 8). - S. 4.