Golovanivskii, Savva

Born May 16 (29), 1910. in the village of Elizavetgradka, in present-day Kirovograd Oblast. Soviet Ukrainian writer. Member of the CPSU since 1942. Son of a civil servant.

Golovanivskii studied at the Odessa and Kharkov agricultural institutes. He is the author of poems, sketches, plays, short stories, and novels. He was first published in 1927. His works deal mainly with the life and labor of the Soviet people and the exploits of Soviet soldiers in the Great Patriotic War (1941–45). His plays The Death of Lady Grey (1934), A Poet’s Fate (1939), The Sunny Side (1952), and First Thunder (1957) have been staged in Russian and Ukrainian theaters. Golovanivskii’s novel The Poplar on the Other Bank (1965; Russian translation, 1967) describes the dramatic days of December 1943 and the efforts of Soviet soldiers to prevent the fascist German occupation forces from blowing up the Dnieper Hydroelectric Power Plant. Golovanivskii has translated A. S. Pushkin’s narrative poem Poltava and V. V. Mayakovsky’s Vladimir Il’ich Lenin into Ukrainian.