Draft:Leonida Svitlychna



Leonida Pavlivna Svitlychna (née Tereshchenko; Ukrainian: Леоніда Павлівна Світлична; 2 April 1924, Kyiv — 18 February 2003, Kyiv) was a Ukrainian human rights activist and dissident. She was the wife of the Ukrainian poet and writer Ivan Svitlychnyi.

Biography
Born on April 2, 1924, in Kyiv. Her father, Pavlo Tereshchenko, was an architecture student, and her mother was a housewife.

In 1940, she enrolled in the Institute of Civil Engineering, where she studied until the start of the World War II.

In 1941, in occupied Kyiv, she became a student at the Medical Institute, then at the Hydromelioration Institute —both institutions operated during the occupation. This allowed her to avoid being taken to Germany for forced labor. In 1944, she continued her studies at the Institute of Civil Engineering, graduating in 1948. She was not admitted to the postgraduate program, being accused of having been in occupied territory. Later, she was admitted to the postgraduate program at the Institute of Building Mechanics. After completing her postgraduate studies, she worked as an assistant at the Institute of Civil Engineering.

On January 30, 1956, she married Ivan Svitlychny. They lived in her mother's room in Kyiv, where her brother's family also resided. In 1960, they received a small one-room apartment. Together with her husband, she participated in the activities of the Artistic Youths' Club and joined the dissident movement.

After her husband's conviction in early 1972 to seven years in labor camps and five years in exile, she assisted the families of prisoners. Along with Vira Lisova and Mykhailyna Kotsiubynska, she managed the Solzhenitsyn Fund in Ukraine. She also cared for the one-and-a-half-year-old son of Ivan's sister, Nadiya Svitlychna. After Nadiya's arrest, her son Yarema was sent to an orphanage in Vorzel, but Leonida managed to find him and brought him to his grandmother in the Luhansk region. In 1979, she went to Gorno-Altai to join her husband during his imprisonment in a labour camp. When Ivan suffered a stroke in August 1981, she stayed with him in the hospital for nine months, working as a nurse and in the kitchen. Since Ivan was not released early, she lived with him in a dormitory for the remaining 18 months of his sentence. In January 1983, she brought her husband back to Kyiv and cared for him until his death.

In 1989, she and Ivan prepared his book "A Heart for Bullets and Rhymes" for publication (which was awarded the Shevchenko National Prize in 1994). After Ivan's death, she and Nadiya Svitlychna prepared the poetry collection "I Have Only the Word" (published in 1994) and a book of memoirs about Ivan Svitlychny titled "Dobrookyi" (published in 1998), along with a collection of letters from the labor camp.

Leonida Svitlychna passed away on February 18, 2003, at the age of 78 in Kyiv, where she was born. She is buried in the same grave as her husband at Baikove Cemetery (Plot No. 33, [geo:50.4173,30.50175 50°25′02″N 30°30′06″E]).

= Сreative work = Leonida Svitlychna wrote several memoirs, including "Dobrookyi" and "Unwritten Letters Do Not Reach" (published under the title "Ivan Svitlychny. The Voice of the Era").