Born January 13, 1919 (according to documents, December 31, 1918), in the village of Letsky, Pereiaslav-Khmelnytskyi raion, Kyiv oblast. - Died July 18, 2001, in the town of Boyarka, Kyiv-Sviatoshyn raion, Kyiv region.
Teacher, poet.
From a peasant family. His father was a talented farmer, known for getting good harvests from a small plot of land. He was forced to join the commune “Mayak Batrakiv” (Lighthouse of the Farmhands) but was later repressed. Half of the village died during the famine of 1932–33. From the age of 7 to 16, K. worked in the commune during the summer and studied at School No. 1 in Pereiaslav during the winter. He was expelled from school three times for insubordination but eventually graduated with only one B—in Russian language. He never joined the Pioneers or the Komsomol. Due to tuberculosis, he was not admitted to the university. He worked for two years in construction in Kyiv.
In 1938, he enrolled in the Faculty of Romano-Germanic Philology at Kyiv University. He married a fellow student, Iryna Pavlivna Pustosmikh, who came from an old Chernihiv family of Ukrainian intelligentsia. They had completed three years of university before the war. They worked digging trenches near Kyiv. They moved to war-torn Chernihiv. They tried to evacuate but were encircled. They survived the occupation in Chernihiv, getting by on odd jobs (K. painted icons and traded them for food in the villages). They communicated with French prisoners of war who were working in Chernihiv. With the return of the Red Army, he was appointed director of the only surviving school, No. 4, but had to yield to “party” cadres who returned from evacuation. To avoid repression, they moved to Boyarka in 1947, where they taught English, French, German, and Russian. They received their diplomas in 1950. They were engaged in educational work: they collected a large library, organized an amateur theater, staged plays, and arranged excursions. In 1966, they held a literary evening featuring the Sixtiers Ye. Sverstiuk, V. Stus, and N. Svitlychna, after which K. was placed under informal surveillance. The Kovalenkos were respected and loved by their students and their parents, but they did not join the Party and exposed lies and unprofessionalism, for which they were constantly harassed. For some time, K. was jobless, except for work in an evening school and a military sanatorium.
From childhood, he wrote lyric poetry, which he did not deem necessary to publish. However, from time to time, he wrote so-called “furious poems” directed against communist deceit and its servants. In 1965, he met the historian and culturologist Mykhailo Kutynskyi, a former political prisoner, who compiled a multi-volume collection of information on the burial places of Ukrainian cultural figures titled “Necropolis.” M. Kutynskyi compiled and printed K.’s samizdat collection “Chervona Kalyna” (Red Viburnum) in 1966, followed by the collections “Perlyny” (Pearls) and “Nedokoshenyi Luh” (The Unmown Meadow). K.’s poems and articles about St. Michael's Cathedral and the Ivan Honchar Museum were published in the newspaper “Nove Zhyttia” (New Life) in Prešov, Slovakia; in Canada, they were issued as a small booklet. K.'s home housed practically all the literature of Ukrainian, and partly Moscow, samizdat of the 1960s, stored right in a bookcase. M. Kutynskyi mostly brought it. K. retyped the samizdat and gave it to dozens of people to read, including his students.
On January 13, 1972, K. was arrested. The pretext was the renewal, at the KGB's demand, of old denunciations by the school director, the head teacher, the party organizer, and one teacher, stating that K. had publicly, in the teachers' room, called the 1968 occupation of Czechoslovakia a “fascist action.” 140 of K.'s students were interrogated—not a single one testified against their teacher. Moreover, at the 1972 graduation ceremony, his wife, who had already been effectively dismissed from her job, was given an ovation by the students and parents.
He was incriminated with the distribution of samizdat literature and a number of poems. The poems not incriminated were simply burned. Only a small part of them was preserved in the memory of the author and his wife.
At the closed trial, his lawyer, Yezhov, being distant from Ukrainian affairs but a good professional, managed to “knock down” the prison term to 5 years (Part 1 of Art. 62 of the Criminal Code of the UkrSSR). The trial took place on July 6-11, 1972. K. did not plead guilty to the crime.
K. served his sentence in the strict-regime camp VS-398/35, in the settlement of Tsentralnyi, Perm oblast. He communicated with former UPA soldiers M. Symchych, V. Pidhorodetskyi, Ye. Verkholiak, and others, who loved to listen to his poems, as well as with Sixtiers I. Svitlychnyi, M. Kots, I. Kalynets, T. Melnychuk, Ye. Proniuk, S. Hluzman, V. Bukovsky, V. Marchenko, and others. He taught English to Jews who were planning to emigrate from the USSR. He wrote poems, which were periodically confiscated and destroyed by the administration. His poetry was highly valued by I. Svitlychnyi. Only a small portion of his poems reached his wife in letters and was preserved in his phenomenal memory. Towards the end of his term, he was transported to Kyiv and released on January 13, 1977, as a second-group invalid (hypertension).
For two years, he fought to have a note of his dismissal from work entered into his employment record in order to be granted a pension (57 rubles). He maintained contact with former political prisoners. He was rehabilitated in 1991.
In 1995, Olga Rozhmakova, a former student and friend of the Kovalenko family, published a book of his poems, “Nedokoshenyi luh” (The Unmown Meadow), at her own expense. In 1996, the SBU returned the poems that had been kept in his case file. In 1999, a larger book, “Dzherelo” (The Source), was published.
K. died on July 18, 2001, and is buried in Boyarka.
A street in the town of Boyarka is named after K. A memorial plaque has been installed on the house that the poet built with his own hands and where he lived for almost half a century. In Pereiaslav-Khmelnytskyi, a memorial plaque has been installed on School No. 1, from which K. graduated in 1936. Thirty-four songs have been written to his words. Since 2012, the Ivan Kovalenko Youth Arts Festival has been held in Boyarka every autumn.
His son Oles, born in 1945, is a well-known translator of Ukrainian classics into English; due to his father's persecution, he was deemed "non-exportable" and had to work in a translation bureau. His daughter Maria (married name Kyrylenko), born in 1957, graduated from the Kyiv State Institute of Foreign Languages but did not work in her field; she is now a librarian at the Institute of Molecular Biology and Genetics of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine; she has two children, Ivan (b. 1988) and Olga (b. 1991).
Bibliography
I.
*Nedokoshenyi luh: Virshi* (The Unmown Meadow: Poems). – Kyiv, 1995 – 128 p.
*Dzherelo: Poeziyi* (The Source: Poetry) / Foreword by Maria Kyrylenko. – Kyiv: Osvita, 1999. – 271 p.
*Perlyna* (The Pearl). – 2006.
*Uchytelʹ* (The Teacher). – 2009.
*Poryv do nebes* (A Surge to the Heavens). – 2012.
II.
KhPG Archive: Interview with I.Yu. and I.P. Kovalenko on September 12, 1999. https://museum.khpg.org/1121320562 ; https://museum.khpg.org/1120846317
*Mizhnarodnyi biohrafichnyi slovnyk dysydentiv kraiiny Tsentral'noyi ta Skhidnoyi Yevropy y kolyshnoho SRSR. T. 1. Ukrayina. Chastyna 1.* (International Biographical Dictionary of Dissidents of the Countries of Central and Eastern Europe and the former USSR. Vol. 1. Ukraine. Part 1). – Kharkiv: Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group; “Prava Lyudyny,” 2006. – pp. 306–309. https://museum.khpg.org/1132341713
*Rukh oporu v Ukrayini: 1960 – 1990. Entsyklopedychnyi dovidnyk* (The Resistance Movement in Ukraine: 1960 – 1990. An Encyclopedic Guide) / Foreword by Osyp Zinkevych, Oles Obertas. – Kyiv: Smoloskyp, 2010. – pp. 300–301; 2nd ed.: 2012. – pp. 334–335.
Serhiy Bilokin, Maria Kyrylenko. “Shistdesiatnyk Ivan Kovalenko (biohr. narys)” (Sixtier Ivan Kovalenko (biographical sketch)). http://ivan-kovalenko.info/pro-ivana-kovalenka/biografia/420-sergy-blokn-marya-kirilenko.html
Vasyl Ovsienko, Maria Kyrylenko. 2003. Last revision: August 2016.
