Ukrainian poet, screenwriter, and political activist Ivan Drach has died at the age of 81 in Kyiv hospital after an illness.
Drach’s death was announced by Serhiy Trymbach, the Ukrainian film critic, on his page on Facebook on June 19.
Drach first came to prominence during Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s political “thaw” with a poem titled “Knife in the Sun” that was published in Kyiv’s Literaturna Gazeta in 1961.
He was a long-time member of the Writers’ Union of Ukraine and head of the committee for the Ukrainian Book of the Year presidential award. During his literary career, he authored 20 poetry collections. Many of his poems originally written in Ukrainian were translated into other languages.
Known as a poet in Soviet times, Drach gained prominence as a political activist during the Soviet Union’s late Perestroika period in the 1980s, and during the first years of Ukraine’s independence. In 1989, Drach and some other Ukrainian political dissidents such as Vyacheslav Chornovil and Mykhailo Horyn established Rukh, the first nationalist, anti-Soviet movement in sovereign Ukraine.
Drach was the first chairman of the organization and went on becoming a member of the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine’s parliament.
Drach will be buried in his native village of Telizhentsi in Kyiv Oblast next to his son Maksym. He is survived by his wife Mariya and daughter Maryana, who is a journalist for the Ukrainian service of Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty.
