TYMENKO, Hryhoriy Trokhymovych (born February 8, 1945, in the village of Protsiv, Boryspil Raion, Kyiv Oblast—disappeared in November 1968) was a poet and printer. He produced and distributed samvydav.
His father, Trokhym Tymenko, survived the German occupation, was conscripted into the active army, and never returned from the front. His mother, Pelahia Andriivna Hrushko (October 12, 1905–October 4, 1989), was a peasant. In 1959, Tymenko completed seven grades of village school. He finished a ten-year evening school in Kyiv while living with his sister Pasha in Sviatoshyn. He studied at the Kyiv Polygraphic College No. 20. He enrolled at Kyiv University but soon left, likely due to financial difficulties. He worked as a printer at the “Radyanska Ukraina” (Soviet Ukraine) printing plant. He injured a finger there and left the job.
He began to write poetry. In 1962, he was invited to the republican seminar for young poets and prose writers. He attended the literary studio at Kyiv University. Beginning in 1964, he was occasionally published in the youth press. His creative development was so rapid and took such an unexpected direction that they stopped publishing him. Together with his friends, the brothers Mykola and Andriy Kabaliuk, he produced typewritten collections of his poetry. In 1967, he submitted the manuscript for his collection “Holos nevydnoho” (“The Voice of the Unseen”) to “Molod” (Youth), the publishing house of the Central Committee of the Komsomol of Ukraine, but it was rejected. The editorial criticisms pointed to a “tendentious weakness,” alleging that the author “wants to be original at all costs” and that “he wants to comprehend natural phenomena, the essence of things, and the meaning of human existence like a philosopher.” He was also accused of not knowing the language, although it was more a case of his poetic language being rejected by people accustomed to versified rhetoric. Tymenko never approached Kyiv publishing houses again.
He grew close to the creative youth who had become oppositional to the totalitarian regime and the policy of Russification. He participated in the replication of samvydav materials, specifically through photocopying in a clandestine, makeshift photo lab that was never discovered by the KGB.
He briefly worked as a technical editor at the publishing house of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR and at the “Radyanska Shkola” (Soviet School) publishing house.
The death of his sister Pasha, whom he loved and who was his domestic support, and the death of his closest friend, the poet Oleksiy Bulyha, became unhealing wounds for Tymenko. In the spring of 1965, his sister’s apartment was taken from him. He was left without a place to live.
In November 1968, Tymenko vanished without a trace. Appeals by relatives and close friends to the militsiya and the KGB yielded no results. There were various theories, including that he had been “eliminated” by the KGB for his involvement in samvydav.
Several selections of his mystically spirited poems remained in the hands of his friends, with themes of loneliness, the inevitability of death, and a sharp sense of Ukraine’s social and national troubles.
“If Hryhoriy Tymenko had become a ‘public’ fact of our literary life back in those years, the potential of Ukrainian poetry and the lines of its development might have been slightly different (the same can be assumed regarding the so-called Kyiv school, as well as Vasyl HOLOBORODKO, Vasyl STUS, Taras MELNYCHUK, and others),” believes Ivan DZIUBA. “This is high poetry. This is poetry that was ahead of its time and is ahead of ours. But the reader does not know it.”
Bibliography
Tymenko, Hryhoriy. Na vulytsi mertvoho sontsia: poezii [On the Street of the Dead Sun: Poems]. – Chernivtsi: Bukrek, 2015. – 178 pp.
Dziuba, Ivan. “Apokalipsys Hryhoriya Tymenka” [“The Apocalypse of Hryhoriy Tymenko”]. In Dziuba, Ivan. Z krynytsi lit [From the Well of Years]: in 3 vols. Vol. 1. – Kyiv: Kyievo-Mohylianska akad., 2006. – pp. 643-662. [Reprinted from the journal “Suchasnist”—1997. – No. 2.]
Dziuba, Ivan. “Apokalipsys Hryhoriya Tymenka” [“The Apocalypse of Hryhoriy Tymenko”]. In Tymenko, Hryhoriy. Na vulytsi mertvoho sontsia [On the Street of the Dead Sun]. – Chernivtsi: Bukrek, 2015. – pp. 10-11, 12-13. [With updated biographical information]
Shapoval, Yuriy. Sprava Ivana Dziuby [The Case of Ivan Dziuba]. – p. 271.
Baran, Yevhen. Holos nevydymoho [The Voice of the Unseen].
Koverzniev, Kostiantyn. “Holos nevydnoho” [“The Voice of the Unseen”]. // Robitnycha hazeta. – 1997. – No. 9. – p. 4.
Rachuk, Mykola. Refren po spirali (Rozdumy pro knyhu Hryhoriya Tymenka “Na vulytsi mertvoho sontsia”) [Refrain in a Spiral (Reflections on Hryhoriy Tymenko’s book “On the Street of the Dead Sun”)].
Tsera, Yevhenia, and Maria Matsiopa. “Z prakhu povstane nechytanyi napys…” [“From the dust an unread inscription will arise…”].