Public figure, teacher, Prosvita activist, publisher.
Her father, Hryhoriy Kalenykovych Ovdienko (1914–1998), had a fourth-grade education and could do any kind of peasant work. His keen sense of justice was passed down to his daughter. Her mother, Fedоra Andriivna Kalynchenko (1914–2001), was barely literate but was a wise woman, as they say, of the earth.
Maria loved literature and wrote from an early age. Sometimes, she would even lead Ukrainian literature lessons for her classmates in place of the teacher. At the Brovary literary and arts studio “Krynytsia” (The Well), she met the writer Volodymyr P’ianov, who was called “the godfather of the Sixtiers.”
In 1966, she graduated from Trebukhiv Secondary School. For a year, she worked as a Pioneer leader. She realized that this work was needed by no one. V. P’ianov helped her get a job as a laborer at the Botanical Garden of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR in Kyiv. The young poet Nadiia KYR’IAN, who had been expelled from the university, was already working there. They lived in a nun’s cell. Maria was in love with the Botanical Garden, did all sorts of work, voluntarily guarded the magnolias during their bloom, and found and tended the grave of the prominent educator K. Ushynsky near the Vydubychi Monastery. She was deeply affected by the fire at the Vydubychi Monastery in the fall of 1968, during which the monastery library and countless exhibits from the Institute of Archeology were burned. She salvaged four books from that fire and gave them to the historian Serhiy Bilokin. She met the best people of her time: Yevhen SVERSTIUK, Lina KOSTENKO, Ivan DZIUBA, Vasyl STUS, Oles BERDNYK, Oksana MESHKO, and others.
From 1968-69, she worked at the Society for the Protection of Cultural Monuments.
In May 1968, Oles NAZARENKO, a worker at the construction of the Kyiv Hydroelectric Power Station, wrote “An Appeal to the People of Kyiv” in connection with the upcoming May 22 anniversary of T. Shevchenko’s reburial in Ukraine. The leaflet aptly quoted V. Lenin about the tsarist government’s ban on commemorating T. Shevchenko in 1914: “After this measure, millions and millions of ‘common people’ began to transform into conscious citizens and became convinced of the correctness of the conclusion that Russia is a ‘prison of nations.’” At the author’s request, Maria typed up to 120 copies of the leaflet. NAZARENKO and Mykola Ponomarenko mailed them to higher educational institutions in Ukraine and to trade union organizations at Kyiv factories. On June 26, O. NAZARENKO and his friend V. KARPENKO were arrested, and Vasyl KONDRIUKOV on September 17, 1968. They were accused of conducting anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda. In the summer of 1968, KGB officers conducted the first search of Maria and N. KYR’IAN’s cell. They seized Milovan Djilas’s book “The New Class,” the article “Regarding the Trial of Pohruzhalsky,” and a photocopy of I. DZIUBA’s work “Internationalism or Russification?” They detained Maria for three days, which she spent at the regional KGB directorate at 16 Rozy Liuksemburh Street (now Lypska Street). They took her fingerprints. She did not deny typing the leaflets. They threatened her with arrest. They brought her father, who had just been released from the hospital, for a confrontation. But her father said: “I am not a very literate man; I only have a fourth-grade education. But when the earthquake happened in Tashkent, people collected aid, and my daughter brought clothes and blankets. And I was lying by the fence during the famine of ’33, my legs were swollen, they were cracking and water was leaking out. If not for the neighbors, who had hidden a small bag of flour, dug it up at night, cooked it, and fed me, I would have long been in the damp earth.” Her father was taken back to the village, there was no confrontation, and the investigator, Koval, said: “Now it’s clear why you are the way you are: the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.” Her mother had already prepared a quilted jacket, felt boots, and a woolen dress: “This is for you in prison, my child, I bought it.”
In the summer of 1968, Maria received an admissions notice for exams from the Agricultural Academy: the KGB had “arranged” it as a way to separate her from the “harmful environment.” Ye. SVERSTIUK said: “They won’t let you study anyway.” And he advised her to apply to Odesa University, writing a letter of recommendation to Nina STROKATA-KARAVANSKA, with whom Maria lived while taking her exams in 1969 and for a while after enrolling in the Ukrainian philology program. They developed a very warm relationship. Maria was able to read books from the library of Nina’s imprisoned husband, Sviatoslav KARAVANSKY: M. Hrushevsky’s “History of Ukraine-Rus’,” works by V. Vynnychenko—literature that graduates of Soviet schools had never even heard of.
As early as October, a KGB major summoned her to the first department of the rector’s office and made it clear that they had compromising materials on her. “So, are you going to expel me?” “If we get the order, we will.”
Initially, she lived in a dormitory but realized they could set up a provocation for her there, so she left with a few other girls, and later with her friend Nina Malanko, to rent an apartment. But she always maintained close contact with N. STROKATA, who taught her worldly wisdom and how to behave with the KGB. There, she met with Iryna KALYNETS, Stefaniia Hulyk, Leonid PLIUSHCH, and was friends with Halyna MOHYLNYTSKA, Oleksa RIZNYKIV, and Vasyl BARLADIANU.
Anticipating her inevitable arrest, N. STROKATA found a job in 1971 as a teacher at a medical college in the city of Nalchik and put her apartment up for exchange so that it would go to Yuriy SHUKHEVYCH and his wife, Valentyna Trotsenko, and their children. Maria lived in the apartment temporarily.
On August 9, 1971, the doctor Oleksa Prytyka was arrested in Odesa, and on October 11, Oleksa RIZNYKIV. In late November–early December, Maria, along with Leonid TYMCHUK and her future husband Dmytro Obukhov, was packing N. STROKATA’s belongings to send them by container to Nalchik. On December 6, 1971, a phone call came demanding to know how the packing was going. Maria refused to answer the stranger and insisted on speaking to N. STROKATA, who had been arrested that day and was already speaking from the Odesa KGB directorate.
Numerous summonses and interrogations about the arrested individuals began. Surprisingly, the interrogations by Captain V.I. Prystaiko (later a general in the SBU) were dispassionate. Until the trial in May 1972, she brought packages for N. STROKATA.
In Odesa, Maria tried to join an amateur choir but decided it would be a waste of time, as she was an active person by nature and wanted to do something concrete. She protested against lectures being given to Ukrainian philology students in Russian, wrote petitions, went to the dean’s office, organized student votes, and eventually gathered a group of nationally conscious students who “set the tone” for the course. But she also graciously helped teachers who wanted to switch to Ukrainian.
The KGB demanded that she be given failing grades as early as the first semester. But Dean Anatoliy Zhaboriuk would come to the exams and tests precisely when O. was answering, and the teachers did not dare to give her failing marks. At the end of 1971, Zhaboriuk was dismissed from his post. The infamous literary hatchet man Ivan Duz became the dean. Zhaboriuk arranged a meeting with the student on the outskirts of Odesa and tearfully begged her to be careful so that she could get her higher education. But expulsion during the 1972 winter session was already inevitable. So she decided to “go out with a bang”: she planned an evening for Vasyl SYMONENKO on his birthday, January 8, 1972.
Neither the Faculty of Philology nor the main university building would allow the event. So Ovdienko sent boys to collect 50 kopecks from each student and rented the Lesia Ukrainka cinema. She traveled to Kyiv and, on receipt, borrowed a film made by a student from the film faculty of the Theater Institute based on SYMONENKO’s short story “Roosters Were Crowing on the Towels.” She wrote a script, distributed the roles; even the deputy dean, Volodymyr Drozdovsky, read SYMONENKO’s poems. Maria and Sashko Pylypenko hosted the evening—in embroidered shirts. The curtains were yellow, and the podium was draped in blue crepe paper. The hall was full. Pylypenko read: “For your sake, I sow pearls in my soul, for your sake, I think and create, let America and Russia be silent when I speak with you.” This was something unheard of in Odesa.
When they returned to the dormitory, it was buzzing like a beehive. The boys tossed Maria in the air. It was a great joy. But her final semester had already begun. The Russian language teacher, Shvets, guiltily asked her to come and retake the test; the Russian literature teacher, Tsukerman, said in the first minute: “You know nothing.” Yevhen Prisovsky, defying Dean Duz’s order, gave her a top grade, for which he received a party reprimand. Thus, in the pogrom month of January 1972, student O. was expelled for “academic deficiency.”
O. was only present on the first day of the trial of N. STROKATA, O. RIZNYKIV, and O. Prytyka, on May 4, 1972. She was not allowed back due to her “improper behavior,” which was evident in her facial expressions and remarks.
At that time, she married Dmytro Obukhov. They lived for a while with his parents in the village of Akulynivka, Balta Raion, Odesa Oblast, and for a while with Maria’s parents in Trebukhiv. Then Maria got a job as a painter at a construction site in Brovary, where she worked hard for 8 years. They received a small room of 10.5 square meters in a dormitory. Their son, Roman, was born on October 30, 1972.
Meanwhile, friends sent Maria her grade book. H. MOHYLNYTSKA, whom Dean I. Duz favored, managed to get O. reinstated at the university in 1976, on the condition that she transfer to another institution. Maria enrolled in the 3rd year of the correspondence department at Kyiv University and attended lectures in the evenings. She wrote her thesis under the dialectology professor Petro Mohyla on the topic “Onomastics in the Dramaturgy of Lesia Ukrainka.”
O. helped O. MESHKO in the activities of the UHG and supported prisoners, including visiting V. BARLADIANU for short visits.
In 1980, she graduated from the university and for almost 10 years worked as a teacher of Ukrainian language and literature at Brovary Secondary School No. 3. She brought her native language to the children, awakened their national consciousness, took them to theaters, and staged plays with them (including works by Leonid Kyselyov). She conducted Ukrainian studies work, created the Minor Academy of Folk Arts, where they taught pysanka (Easter egg) painting, straw weaving, embroidery, and sewing traditional Ukrainian clothing, and operated a folklore section. The students went on expeditions, recreating the recorded folklore on the school stage and at the October Palace. They were the first in Kyiv, at the turn of 1986-87, to perform a vertep (Christmas puppet show) at the Union of Writers. Ivan HONCHAR wept: “I never thought I would live to see such a thing in Kyiv.” Despite the ideological blinders she had to work under, this period of “underground pedagogy” was a truly happy time in her life.
During the “perestroika” era, a film was made about O. and her like-minded colleagues titled “Your Views on Life,” in which she was portrayed as a “bourgeois nationalist.” The film was shown in factories and institutions, which made her popular in the city. She was the first in Brovary to start wearing a homemade blue-and-yellow pin, and the schoolchildren followed her lead. She told the children about Ukrainian symbols and the history of Ukraine.
In 1989, primarily through her efforts, a branch of the Society of the Ukrainian Language was established in Brovary, and on March 24, she was elected its chair. Opposition from the authorities arose immediately. On May 18, the Society held its first Shevchenko festival—defying the authorities—at the monument in Brovary, where his body had spent the night on May 18, 1861, on its way from St. Petersburg to Kaniv. They organized a procession of the cross and a panakhyda (memorial service) at the Holy Trinity Church. For a long time, they fought for Shevchenko Square. Her apartment was the headquarters: here, slogans were written, stands for them were built, and flags were sewn.
In November 1989, the chairman of the TUM, Dmytro Pavlychko, invited O. to the position of deputy executive secretary and head of the education department. It was a time of turbulent work with complete dedication.
In 1990, she ran for the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine in Brovary under the banner of independence and came in third. After the GKChP putsch, she shut down the raion committee of the CPU.
From May 1992 to November 1994, she worked as the first deputy head of the Kyiv Oblast education department, and in fact, managed the department. She immediately held a regional conference of school principals and implemented progressive, patriotic educational projects.
In 1994, she was again a candidate for the Verkhovna Rada. But in November 1994, with the rise of L. Kuchma to power, she was dismissed from her post. She registered at the employment office and, for the first time in her life, was officially unemployed for a year. During this time, she began her publishing activities. First, she published a book by members of the Brovary literary and arts studio “Krynytsia,” which had existed since 1955. She established the Hrytsko Chuprynka literary prize. She prepared dozens of books, signing them “Krynytsia” and borrowing an ISBN from somewhere. In 1997, she officially registered the publishing house “Ukrainian Idea.” Behind every book was meticulous work, through which she extinguished her sorrows: the deaths of her father, mother, brother, and her husband Dmytro, who died on September 17, 2003.
She was a laureate of the Vasyl Stus Prize in 2011 for her publishing activities.
She lives in the city of Brovary, Kyiv Oblast.
Bibliography:
M. Ovdienko. The Godmother of My Son Roman // Oleksa Riznychenko. A Ray from Odesa: A Poem. Documents. Memoirs of the Sixties in Odesa and of Nina Strokata-Karavanska. – Odesa, 2000. – pp. 218–231.
KhPG Archive: Interview with M.H. Ovdienko, April 15, 2005; published in: The Odesa Wave-4: Documents, Works, and Memoirs of Prisoners of Conscience / Comp. P. Otchenashenko, O. Riznykiv, D. Shupta. – Odesa: Druk, 2009. – pp. 176-233.
OVDIENKO MARIA HRYHORIVNA