A Ukrainian poet who was imprisoned and sent into exile for his opposition to Soviet totalitarianism has died aged 86.
Ihor Kalynets was a native of the western Lviv region and won the country’s most prestigious literary prize for his poetry, while also writing prose and stories for children.
Lviv Mayor Andriy Sadovyi said Kalynets and his late wife Iryna—a fellow poet and political prisoner—became “the voice of Ukrainian dignity in the darkest times,” adding that the city was in mourning after his passing.
Born in 1939, Kalynets studied at Lviv University, publishing his first volumes of poetry—some of which were immediately banned—during a flurry of cultural activity in the 1960s.
A modernist poet, he was linked to the “Shistdesiatnyky” or “Sixtiers” generation of Ukrainian intellectuals who drew inspiration, to varying degrees, from liberal values, humanism and Ukrainian patriotism.
Jail and exile
In 1972 Kalynets was jailed by the communist authorities over accusations of anti-Soviet agitation and spent six years in a harsh prison camp in the Ural mountains, followed by three years exiled in Siberia.
Upon his release in 1981, he returned to Lviv, taking up a post with the city’s Academy of Sciences and writing books for children. In 1987 he became the editor of an influential periodical and started publishing his poems once more after Ukraine’s independence in 1991. He also translated poetry from Polish into Ukrainian.I
n an interview with the New York Times after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, he said he was encouraged to see Ukrainians unite in defense of their country, saying the conflict made people “conscious” of who they are.
Lviv’s mayor said that Kalynets’s funeral would take place at the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Cathedral of St. George on Tuesday.