KOVALENKO (née KYKOT), NADIYA DMYTRIVNA (b. December 27, 1927, in the village of Pereselennya, Kaharlyk Raion, Kyiv Oblast)
Educator, methodologist, “Prosvita” activist.
From a family of teachers, Dmytro Martynovych and Nina Mykolaivna Kykot. In 1930, they moved to Kyiv. Her father was imprisoned from 1933 to 1941 for his participation in the army of the Ukrainian People's Republic (UNR).
Before the war, Nadiya had completed eight grades. She survived the occupation and the destruction of Kyiv's city center by Soviet saboteurs. She and her mother endured great hardship. In the spring of 1942, she was seized during a roundup and deported to Germany. She was held in a prisoner-of-war camp in the city of Saaz, in the Sudetenland. She worked hard for her German masters. For her contacts with the Czech underground, she was arrested by the Gestapo.
After her liberation, she was forced to work in an motor battalion for over a year. In the spring of 1946, she returned to her mother in Kyiv. She helped clear the ruins of Khreshchatyk and enrolled in a technical school for cultural and educational work. Within a year, she passed the exams for the 10th grade and entered the Faculty of Philology at the Gorky Pedagogical Institute in Kyiv, graduating in 1951. She was assigned to Kyiv School No. 153, a Pushkin-named school where instruction was in Russian, and worked there for nearly 10 years. Her lessons were true works of art, and her students loved them: no one was exempted from studying the Ukrainian language and literature.
In 1946, she married Yuriy Mykolayovych Kovalenko, a war hero (who later became a talented scientist, architect, and artist). Their son, Andriy, was born in 1955, and their daughter, Oksana, in 1959.
From 1956 to 1968, Kovalenko served as a deputy of the Kyiv City Council, working in the education commission. In 1960, the then-Minister of Education of the Ukrainian SSR, I. K. Bilodid, unexpectedly offered Kovalenko the position of inspector-methodologist for the Ukrainian language and literature. After some hesitation, she accepted. Her national awakening began with a flood of letters from parents demanding that their children be exempted from studying the “useless Ukrainian language.”
Kovalenko actively collaborated with patriotically inclined writers, leading scholars, and the best teachers. She managed to bring some of them onto the Scientific and Methodological Council of the Ministry of Education, which approved new textbooks. Taking advantage of the fact that the curricula for Ukrainian language and literature were created in Ukraine (while curricula for other subjects were simply adopted from the Russian Federation), the Scientific and Methodological Council and a group of active teachers under Kovalenko's leadership significantly expanded the circle of writers studied in school. The 9th-grade curriculum now included Panko Kulish, Olha Kobylyanska, Les Martovych, and Marko Cheremshyna, with an increased number of works by Vasyl Stefanyk. The 10th and 11th grades included Yu. Yanovsky, O. Dovzhenko, M. Kulish, Ostap Vyshnya, and I. Kocherha. With great difficulty, the program was approved by the Board of the Ministry of Education. Later, works by L. KOSTENKO, V. SYMONENKO, M. Vinhranovsky, and I. DRACH were added.
School libraries, especially in rural areas, were poorly stocked. At the initiative of the Scientific and Methodological Council, Minister A. H. Bondar proposed to the government the publication of a “School Library” series. P. Yu. Shelest, the First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, supported this initiative and supplied the publishing houses with paper. The series began to be published in millions of copies by the “Molod” (Youth), “Veselka” (Rainbow), and “Dnipro” publishing houses, where editorial boards were established. Prominent figures were invited to write forewords, including B. ANTONENKO-DAVYDOVYCH, M. Shumylo, V. CHORNOVIL, M. KOTSYUBYNSKA, V. Yaremenko, V. Nedilko, and others. Kovalenko herself wrote forewords for the works of O. Kobylyanska, P. Hrabovsky, and B. Hrinchenko. This truly helped teachers in developing new topics.
In addition, the Scientific and Methodological Council managed to secure the production of educational films and filmstrips for each topic in the curriculum. Kovalenko herself wrote several filmstrip scripts. A phono-anthology of Ukrainian literature for grades 5–11 was also created. The announcer for Ukrainian Radio, Petro Boiko, unearthed true masterpieces from the archives, and the voices of the luminaries of Ukrainian art began to be heard in schools. In this way, schools across Ukraine were provided with high-quality teaching aids.
Kovalenko’s work in organizing this process was recognized with a “Certificate of Honor of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR,” the medal “For Labor Valor,” and the title “Outstanding Educator.”
While working at the ministry, Kovalenko lectured at the Faculty of Philology of the Taras Shevchenko Kyiv State University and taught one class at School No. 117, where philology students did their practical training.
The KGB closely monitored this work. She began to be summoned for interrogations. Sometimes these interrogations—conducted by three investigators at once—lasted from morning until evening. She was afraid even to drink water, fearing they might slip psychotropic substances into it that paralyze the will. She was accused of organizing a conference on the culture of language, where Matviy Shestopal, Lidiya Orel, and Petro Boiko spoke openly about the status of the Ukrainian language; of giving a speech at a meeting of language and literature teachers in Lviv; of exposing the refusal of schools in Crimea to teach Ukrainian; of objecting to the translation of Ukrainian literature textbooks into Russian; of hosting student carolers in her home on New Year's Day 1967; of standing up at the premiere of S. Paradzhanov’s film *Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors*; and of attending the funeral of Alla HORSKA...
In 1968, Kovalenko was forced to resign “of her own volition” from the Ministry of Education and was transferred to School No. 117. But there was no peace for her there either. For Cosmonautics Day, Kovalenko invited Serhiy Plachynda, the author of a book about S. Korolyov, to a lesson, and for the anniversary of Ivan Franko, she invited Zinovia Franko. She was then summoned by the KGB, and commissions came to inspect student essays, searching for “anti-Sovietism.” Kovalenko noticed secret searches of her desk, blatant surveillance, and the appearance of *samizdat* works she had not brought home, as well as foreign publications slipped to her by “friends.” On one occasion, someone even slipped *samizdat* into her bag on a tram. However, *samizdat* did find its way to her. For example, the Deputy Minister Myrgorodsky “caught” her reading Ivan Koshelivets’s book *Contemporary Literature in the Ukrainian SSR*, published abroad.
Kovalenko’s candidate dissertation was withdrawn from its defense. The repression extended to her entire family: her son Andriy, a graduate of School No. 117, was denied the gold medal he deserved; her husband's doctoral dissertation on urban planning was rejected. To continue his scientific work, he was forced to move to Kazakhstan for several years.
The pressure intensified after the arrests of the Ukrainian intelligentsia in 1972. She was interrogated about her connections with B. ANTONENKO-DAVYDOVYCH, I. Honchar, I. and N. SVITLYCHNY, I. DZIUBA, P. ZALYVAKHA, Matviy Shestopal, Y. SVERSTYUK, and former political prisoner Vira Cherednychenko, whom she had recommended for the position of department head at the journal *Ukrainian Language and Literature at School*, where she was a member of the editorial board, as well as many other Ukrainian intellectuals with whom the Kovalenkos were friends. The KGB urged her to think about her family, her children, her husband. When Kovalenko demanded that the interrogation be conducted in Ukrainian, the KGB captain retorted angrily, “People like you should be put up against a wall.” She refused to sign a penitent statement in which her friends were labeled as enemies.
Threats began, followed by an endless series of commissions demanding that she “admit her guilt.” In response to her question, “What am I guilty of? Of working honestly, of giving all my strength to the children, of bringing them the beauty of our native language?!” they would reply: “Why do so many of your students rush to apply to the Ukrainian department of the philology faculty? Why do you speak Ukrainian at home, why are there rushnyky and Cossacks on the walls, but no Lenin? You have dubious friends.” (These “friends” included writer Mykhailo Stelmakh, ethnographer Ivan Honchar, journalist Mykyta Shumylo, composer Vitaliy Kyreiko, singer Oleksandr Taranets, announcer Petro Boiko, and especially B. ANTONENKO-DAVYDOVYCH, whose adopted daughter, Yaryna, a student at School No. 117, Kovalenko had taken into her home).
In the spring of 1972, the school’s party meeting considered the issue of expelling Kovalenko from the CPSU. The majority voted against it. This caused Kovalenko to have a heart attack; she was unable to work for a long time and could not even attend her son's last-day-of-school ceremony. But the entire class came to congratulate her at home. This too was held against her as “disruption of a state event.”
On November 15, 1972, on her son Andriy's 17th birthday, the issue of her expulsion was raised at the bureau of the Leninsky district party committee. The chairman of the party commission, Denysenko, reported that Kovalenko had only positive references from all her places of work and there was no reason to expel her. But the district committee secretary, Lenets, accused her of losing political vigilance, of surrounding herself with unreliable people, and of befriending writers who had a “hypertrophied sense of national dignity.” She suffered another heart attack and was released from the hospital in the spring of 1973.
Kovalenko sought help from M. Stelmakh, a Lenin Prize laureate, deputy of the USSR Supreme Soviet, and Hero of Socialist Labor. He took all her awards, references, and articles about her and went to the Central Committee. This was also held against Kovalenko—that she had turned to the non-party member Stelmakh, who in his works had “rehabilitated Petliurism.” Incidentally, Kovalenko had on several occasions passed along letters from political prisoners addressed to Stelmakh, which he then forwarded to the USSR Prosecutor General Rudenko, though this had no positive outcome.
For three and a half years, Kovalenko was unable to find any work. It was not until 1976 that she was allowed to work at School No. 132, but not in the senior grades. The initial caution of parents and children soon turned into affection. The Moskovsky district committee later reinstated her in the CPSU. But by then, her soul was a barren wasteland. The situation was complicated by her mother’s illness and then death.
In 1985, Kovalenko moved to the village of Stayky in the Kaharlyk Raion of Kyiv Oblast, where her husband had built a house. For a year, she worked at the Stritivka Kobzar School, and then for another 15 years, she taught Ukrainian language and literature at the Stayky School, where she also conducted “citizenship lessons” based on her own program. The school regularly hosted seminars for teachers based on Kovalenko’s teaching methodology. In 1995, she was nominated for the title of “Honored Teacher,” but her candidacy was rejected: “She's too much of a sincere Ukrainian.”
She retired in 2003, having dedicated 52 years to the school system. She has over 30 published works on literature and teaching methodology, and is the author of 15 educational filmstrips and 7 methodological guides. She frequently speaks out in the press and to teachers and students on issues of Ukrainian language and literature, as well as patriotic and moral education.
For 10 years, Kovalenko headed the Kaharlyk district “Prosvita” society. She wrote memoirs about B. ANTONENKO-DAVYDOVYCH, I. Honchar, and M. Stelmakh, and published a biographical essay *Alone with Conscience* about the life of her husband, Yuriy Kovalenko (who passed away in 2006), and an autobiographical essay *Memory in the Flames of Time* about the fate of the patriotic Ukrainian intelligentsia under communist totalitarianism. Her novels based on the experiences of her friends—*Epiphany*, *The Meeting*, *Don’t Pass By Your Fate*, and *Don’t Betray Yourself*—are awaiting publication.
Her son, Andriy, is a civil engineer, and her daughter, Oksana, is a teacher of Ukrainian language and literature.
She lives in the village of Stayky.
Bibliography:
1.
“The Eagle of Bukovyna.” Foreword in: Olha Kobylyanska. *Zemlya* [The Land]. “School Library” series. Kyiv, 1965.
“From the Far North.” Foreword in: Pavlo Hrabovsky. “School Library” series. Kyiv, 1966.
“Sower of Good.” Foreword in: Borys Hrinchenko. “School Library” series. Kyiv, 1967.
“Truth-Seeker.” Foreword in: Mykhailo Stelmakh. Kyiv, 1968.
“Like a Life-Giving Spring.” In: *Bahattia. Borys Antonenko-Davydovych ochyma suchasnykiv* [The Bonfire. Borys Antonenko-Davydovych Through the Eyes of Contemporaries]. Compiled by Borys Tymoshenko. Kyiv: Olena Teliha Publishing House, 1999, pp. 208–119.
“So, where did you begin, my path?” *Dyvoslovo: ukrainska mova y literatura v navchalnykh zakladakh* [Wonderword: Ukrainian Language and Literature in Educational Institutions]. Monthly academic and methodological journal of the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine. 2003, no. 4, pp. 64–65.
“Unforgettable.” In: *Ivan Honchar*. Kyiv, 2007.
*Naodyntsi iz sovistiu: biohrafichna povist* [Alone with Conscience: A Biographical Novel]. Kaharlyk: Prosvita, 2009, 120 pp.
*Pamiat u polumi chasu. Avtobiohrafichna povist. Spohady. Retsenzii* [Memory in the Flames of Time. An Autobiographical Novel. Memoirs. Reviews]. Myronivka: Myronivska Drukarnya, 2009, 152 pp.
2.
Harmash, M. “Many are Called, but Few are Chosen...: About the People’s Teacher Nadiya Kovalenko.” *Dyvoslovo: ukrainska mova y literatura v navchalnykh zakladakh*. 2003, no. 4, pp. 63–64.
Harmash, Mariya. “Listen to the Voice of Eternity.” *Slovo Prosvity*, June 3, 2010: http://slovoprosvity.org/2010/06/03/
Chystiak, Dmytro. “Dmytro Cherednychenko: ‘A Creative Teacher Always Fosters Creators.’” *Slovo Prosvity*, January 28, 2010: http://litakcent.com/2010/01/28/dmytro-cherednychenko-tvorchyj-uchytel-zavzhdy-vyhovuje-tvorciv.html (mentions working with N. D. Kovalenko at the Ministry of Education).
Vasyl Ovsiienko, Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group. 2010. Last reviewed on September 14, 2016.
