Vladimir Sosiura

Born Dec. 25, 1897 (Jan. 6, 1898), at the station of Debal’tsevo, in what is now Donetsk Oblast; died Jan. 8, 1965, in Kiev. Soviet Ukrainian poet. Member of the CPSU from 1920.

The son of workers, Sosiura worked as a miner in his youth. He fought in the Civil War (1918–20).

Sosiura published his first works in 1917. In his early works he wrote of the heroic spirit of the Revolution and the Civil War, creative activity, the spiritual growth of Soviet man, and international proletarian solidarity. His early narrative poems include Red Winter (1921), The Year 1917 (1921), Oksana (1922), The Year 1871 (1923), The Answer (1926), Dneprel’stan (1926), and War Unto War (1930). Other early works include the epic poem The Railroad (1924), lyric poems, and several poetry collections. The themes of Soviet patriotism, friendship between peoples, and socialist construction are characteristic of Sosiura’s later collections, for example, Red Roses (1932), New Verses (1937), and I Love (1939). Sosiura published his patriotic lyric poems of the war years in the collections To the Red Army Soldiers (1941) and In Hours of Wrath (1942). During the war he also wrote the narrative poems Oleg Koshevoi (1943) and My Son (1944).

After the war, Sosiura wrote chronicles in verse of the country’s movement toward communism and its struggle for peace—the collections So That the Orchards Might Rustle (1947; State Prize of the USSR, 1948), On the Strings of the Heart (1955), Swallows in the Sun (1960, T. G. Shevchenko State Prize of the Ukrainian SSR), and The Happiness of a Working Family (1962, T. G. Shevchenko State Prize of the Ukrainian SSR).

Sosiura’s poetry is marked by intense lyricism, philosophical reflections, and classical clarity and simplicity. His works have been translated into many national languages of the USSR and into foreign languages. Sosiura translated many Russian classics, for example, works of A. S. Pushkin and M. I. Lermontov, as well as works by poets of the various Soviet republics. Sosiura was awarded two Orders of Lenin and three other orders.