Pavel Arsenevich Grabovskii

Born Aug. 30 (Sept. 11), 1864. in the village of Pushkarnoe, in present-day Kharkov Oblast; died Nov. 29 (Dec. 12), 1912, in Tobol’sk. Ukrainian poet and revolutionary. Born into the family of a village sexton.

Grabovskii studied at the Kharkov Theological Seminary. He participated in the Kharkov Black Repartition group and was expelled from the seminary for his revolutionary activity in 1882. He spent about 20 years in prisons and in exile. Grabovskii is an outstanding representative of Ukrainian democratic-revolutionary poetry of the I880’s and 1890’s. in the tradition of T. G. Shevchenko. His verse collections are Snowdrop (1894), From Another’s Field (1895). From the North (1896), A Lot (1897), and The Kobza (1898). Grabovskii considered literature as a weapon in the struggle with injustice and social evil. His poems about the hard life of working people are imbued with revolutionary ardor (“To a Worker,” “The seamstress,” “To an Orphan”). Grabovskii glorified the heroism of the struggle against tsarism and wrote about the thorny path of revolutionaries (“In Prison,” “Prison Ballad.” “To Friends,” “More Than Once We’ve Set Out on the Road.” and “Forward”). Grabovskii’s poetic language is simple and emotional.

Grabovskii wrote articles on T. G. Shevchenko, N. G. Chernyshevskii, A. S. Pushkin, I. Z. Surikov, and F. M. Re-shetnikov and translated many world classics into Ukrainian. His letters are passionate polemics against bourgeois liberalism and nationalism. His letters of 1900–02, which contain his polemic with B. Grinchenko and his ideas of culture-specificity, advocate Marxist ideas.