Vasyl Andreevich Symonenko is a Ukrainian poet and journalist, sixties.
Place of Birth, Education
He was born on January 8, 1935 in the village of Biivtsi, Lubensky district, Poltava region. The childhood years of the future poet passed in difficult war and post-war times.
When his father left the family, his grandfather became the main support for little Symonenko.
At one time, he studied at the Biyivska primary school, where he graduated from five grades. Then he continued his education at a school in the neighboring village of Yenkivtsi.
In 1952, he completed his studies at the Tarandievsky secondary school. In the same year, he entered the Faculty of Journalism of Kyiv University.
During his studies, he was a member of the university literary studio. Undergoing an internship in the large-circulation newspaper “For Soviet Personnel”, he led the author’s column “On literary Parnassus”. He graduated from the university in 1957.
Career
Until 1960, Symonenko worked as a journalist in the newspaper “Cherkaska Pravda”.
In the period from 1960 to 1963, he continued his journalistic activity in the publication “Youth of Cherkasy Region”, and was also his own correspondent of the “Rabochnycha Gazeta”.
In the spring of 1960, the Club of Creative Youth was founded in Kyiv, the participants of which were later called the Sixties. The circle of members included poets Vasyl Stus, Mykola Vingranovskyi, Lina Kostenko, Ivan Drach, Ivan Svitlychnyi, publicist Yevhen Sverstiuk and artist Alla Horska. Symonenko also joined the club: together with poets, he traveled to the cities of Ukraine, spoke at literary evenings and debates.
In 1962, he was admitted to the Union of Writers of Ukraine. In particular, he planned to enter graduate school at the Institute of Literature of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (Ukrainian SSR).
In the same year, Symonenko, together with Horska and the president of the Club of Creative Youth, director and professor of the Kyiv National University of Theater, Film and Television named after Karpenko-Karyi Les Tanyuk, were engaged in the search for burial places of victims of executions carried out by the NKVD. Such places were found at the Lukyanivskyi and Vasylkivskyi cemeteries, as well as near the village of Bykivnia.
Symonenko joined the collective memorandum, which demanded the publication of mass grave sites and granting them the status of national places of mourning and remembrance. The document was sent to the Kyiv City Council. After that, the poet was supervised.
In the fall, he began to keep a diary “Edges of Thoughts”, and a year later, in 1963, his fairy tale “Tsar Plaksiy and Tickle” was published.
On June 6, 1962, at the Cherkasy railway station, law enforcement officers forcibly dragged the poet into a carriage and took him to the police station named after Taras Shevchenko, where he was brutally beaten. The reason for this was a dispute with the saleswoman of the station buffet. The poet was kept in his cell all night, and his wife and friends found him only in the morning. As Symonenko said, his hands were tied, thrown face to face and beaten on the kidneys. They were released only after the intervention of the chairman of the Smila City Party Committee.
Death/Fatalities
After the beating , Symonenko’s health deteriorated significantly – he began to suffer from severe pain in the kidneys. In early September, he was admitted to the regional hospital, where he underwent surgery.
On the night of December 13-14, 1963, the poet died. He was buried in the city cemetery in Cherkasy.
According to the official version, the cause of death was kidney cancer.
Marital Status
Symonenko met his future wife Lyudmila Pivtoradnya during his pre-graduation practice at the newspaper “Cherkaska Pravda” in Cherkasy. The couple got married on April 27, 1957, six months after they met.
In 1958, the couple had a son, Oles, who later settled in Cherkasy and worked as a locksmith.
