Oles Honchar

Oleksandr "Oles" Terentiiovych Honchar (Оле́сь Тере́нтійович Гонча́р; 3 April 1918 – 14 July 1995) was a Soviet and Ukrainian writer and public figure.

He also was a veteran of World War II and member of the Ukrainian parliament.

It has commonly been written that Oles Honchar was born in Sukha sloboda (now Sukhe, Ukraine village) in Kobelyaky uyezd, Poltava Governorate, Russian Empire in family of factory workers Terentiy Sydorovych and Tetiana Havrylivna Bilichenko.

However more recently found documents from the regional archives of Dnipropetrovsk Region tell that he was born in a village of Lomivka that just before World War II was incorporated into the city of Dnipropetrovsk.

Since 1925, Honchar studied first in his village (Sukhe) later in the village of Khorishky (today Kozelshchyna District).

In 1933 he finished a seven-year school in the neighboring village of Breusivka.

After finishing the school Honchar found a job with a local newspaper (Kozelshchyna District) "Expanded front".

From 1933 to 1937 he studied journalism at the Kharkiv vocational school of Nikolai Ostrovsky (notorious for How the Steel Was Tempered).

After the study Honchar worked as a teacher in a village of Manuilivka (today Derhachi District) near Kharkiv as well as a journalist in Kharkiv Region newspaper "Lenin's shift".

In 1937 he started to publish his first works, mostly short stories, through various republican publishers: Literary newspaper, Pioneeria, Komsomolets of Ukraine, Young Bolshevik.

In 1938, Honchar enrolled into the Department of Philology of Kharkiv University.

During his study, he wrote such novellas as "Ivan Mostovy", "Cherries bloom", "Eaglet", a story "Stokozove field".

In 1940s and 1950s, the writer continued to develop a war theme in his several novellas as well as publishing the last book of the Guide-on Bearers trilogy "Golden Prague".

Along with his military themes, there started to sound a new one, a peaceful life of people and the moral aspects of their relationships.

His mother died when he was three, while his father perished on a job site later in 1941.

Being left parentless, he was taken by his maternal grandparents to live in the village of Sukhe.

Living with his maternal grandparents, Oleksandr took their last name and, thus, became known as Oles Honchar (Oles is diminutive of Oleksandr).

On his third year at university his study was interrupted by World War II in June 1941 when he volunteered into the Red Army as part of a student battalion of the 72nd Guards Rifle Division.

During the war, he was a staff sergeant and later the first sergeant of a mortar battery.

Being wounded twice Honchar also earned numerous awards including the Soviet Order of Glory.

The novel was noticed by Yuri Yanovsky who being a chief editor of the magazine "Fatherland" at that time published it in 1946.

He soon invited Honchar to Kyiv (Kiev) where Oles entered an aspirantura at the Shevchenko Institute of Literature of National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.

In Kyiv Honchar received an apartment (#65) in the specially designed Rolit building (68 Bohdan Khmelnytsky Street).

Yanovsky becomes a kind of a mentor for the young writer who will extract a lot of creative lessons out of the communication with the maestro.

In 1947 Oles published a story "Earth is rumbling" about the underground movement of the Poltava Region as well as the second book of the novel "Guide-on Bearers" "Blue Danube".

The novel which tells about the liberating mission of the Soviet Army in Europe was noticed by officials and critics.

The young writer received the recognition (Stalin Prize (1948)) of authorities, critics, and, the most importantly, public.

Novellas and novels in that direction ("Mykyta Bratus", 1950; "Let a light burn", 1955) prepare the future peaks of artistry for Honchar in 1960-70s.

He was conducting some traveling abroad which resulted in books of very short stories "Meeting with friends" (1950), "China up-close" (1951).

The historical-revolutionary dilogy of Honchar "Tavria" (1952) and "Perekop" (1957) commemorating to the events of the civil war in the Southern Ukraine is being left as the weakest anemic work.

Around that time Honchar was starting his public and journalistic activities.

For his literal work in 1959 Honchar was elected a chairman of the Union of Ukrainian Writers (1959–1971) and a secretary of the USSR Union of Writers.

In 1960, there was published the novel "Person and weapon" which opened a new page in the artistry of Oles Honchar.

The romantic-philosophical direction of the piece, the emphasis on intimate matters of life and death of a person, problems of indestructibility of morality of human spirit distinguish the novel that is based on the writer's recollections about the student volunteer battalion during the war times.

The novel was awarded the newly created Shevchenko Prize in 1962.

The second part of the dilogy, the novel "Cyclone" (1970) was written after a break.

The theme received a sudden continuation where the aged hero from "Person and weapon" becomes a film director and shoots a movie about war.

Later in 1975 Honchar wrote a novel dedicating to him "Blue towers of Yanovsky".

During that time, he wrote poems (collection of poetry "Frontlines poems") that were published in 1985 as well as starting to work on his important future novel "Guide-on Bearers".

After the war, he resumed his studies in the Dnipropetrovsk University at the Department of Philology where he started to write the first part of his first major work, Guide-on Bearers "Alps".