Vasilii Petrovich Bobinskii

Born Mar. 11, 1898; died Jan. 2, 1938. Soviet Ukrainian poet.

Bobinskii was born in Kristinopol’, Sokal’sk District, Galicia, into the family of a railroad guard. He studied in L’vov and Vienna. He began working with the Communist press in 1923 and published the weekly Svitlo (The Light, 1925–27) in L’vov, for which he was subjected to persecution by the Polish authorities. From 1927 to 1930 Bobinskii edited the journal Vikna (Windows), which united the proletarian writers and played a large role in the growth of the revolutionary movement in the Western Ukraine. Bobinskii’s narrative poem The Death of Franko (1926) recreated the remarkable character of the poet-fighter; it won the prize at the competition on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution. In 1930, Bobinskii adopted Soviet citizenship and moved to Khar’kov, where he created his best works, unmasking the world of capitalist arbitrary rule (Poems and Pamphlets, 1933, and others).