Aleksandr Oles

Oles’, Aleksandr 

(pen name of Aleksandr Ivanovich Kan-dyba). Born Nov. 23 (Dec. 5), 1878, in the village of Kandybino, present-day Belopol’e Raion, Sumy Oblast, the Ukrainian SSR; died July 22, 1944, in Prague, Czechoslovakia. Ukrainian poet.

Oles’ graduated from the Kharkov Veterinary Institute in 1902. The best poems from his first collections Gladness and Grief Embraced (1907) and Poems (1909) reflect the mood of the democratic members of the Ukrainian intelligentsia in 1905–07. His later works, including Poems (3 books; 1911) and the poetry cycle Each Year (1914), were influenced by decadent poetry, aestheticism, and national narrow-mindedness.

Oles’ emigrated in 1919. The collections In a Foreign Land (1920), Chimes (1921), and To Whom Shall I Tell My Grief (1931) strongly express his homesickness. He translated Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha and stories by Wilhelm Hauff into Ukrainian.

WORKS

Vybrani tvory, 3rd ed. Kharkov, 1930.
Poezii. [Introductory article by M. Ryl’skii.] Kiev, 1964.
In Russian translation:
Lirika. [Introductory article by M. Ryl’skii.] Moscow, 1962.

REFERENCE

Shamota, N. Z. “Za konkretno-istoricheskoe otrazhenie zhizni v literature.” Kommunist Ukrainy, 1973, no. 5, pp. 93–94.

A. E. ZASENKO