Tarnovskii, Nikolai

Born Dec. 20, 1894 (Jan. 1, 1895), in the village of Kotsiubintsy, in what is now Ternopol’ Oblast. Soviet Ukrainian poet.

At the age of 15, Tarnovskii went to the USA to seek employment and worked in factories there. He began writing in 1914. Between 1919 and 1958 he was a member of the Communist Party of the USA. He worked for the progressive Ukrainian press.

Tarnovskii’s first poetry collection, Patriots (1918), satirized the Ukrainian nationalists. His subsequent collections denounced the hypocrisy of bourgeois democracy and described the hard life of workers in the USA, particularly the life of Ukrainian immigrant workers; examples were On the Road of Life (1921), In the Halls of Eternity (1926), and Poem About Gary Sims (1932). Tarnovskii was subjected to persecution and was sent to prison. He returned to his homeland in 1959. He published the novel in verse The Emigrants (1958), as well as a number of poetry collections. He has been awarded two orders and several medals.