Maksym Rylsky

Maksym Tadeyovych Rylsky (Максим Тадейович Рильський); 19 March 1895 in Kyiv – 24 July 1964 id.) was a Ukrainian poet, translator, academician, and doctor of philological sciences.

Biography
Rylsky was born in Kyiv in 1895 to Tadei Rozeslavovych Rylsky and Melania Fedorivna. His father was a public activist, ethnographer, publicist, and member of the "Kyiv Stara Hromada" (Old Community), while his mother was a peasant from the village of Romanivka, Zhytomyr Oblast. Rylsky received his early education at home and later attended the 3rd grade of the Kyiv Private Gymnasium of Volodymyr Naumenko in 1908. During his time in gymnasium, Rylsky became friends with the families of Mykola Lysenko and Oleksandr Rusov. From 1915 to 1917, he studied at the medical faculty of Kyiv University. When the Ukrainian People's University was established in October 1917, Rylsky transferred to its history and philology faculty.

Due to the Ukrainian–Soviet War, Rylsky left Kyiv in late 1917. He and his brother Ivan worked at the food administration in the city of Skvyra and later as rural teachers in nearby villages. In 1918, Bolshevik sympathizers in Romanivka forced Rylsky to flee his family home, robbed it, and destroyed his father's invaluable archive and library.

Rylsky did not return to Kyiv until 1923, where he initially worked as a teacher.

Works
Rylsky began writing poetry at a young age. His debut poem was published in 1907 in the newspaper "Rada", and his first collection, "At White Isles" (На білих островах), was released in 1910. By 1918, his poems "Tsarevna", and "On the Edge of the Forest", as well as his collection "Beneath Autumn Stars", demonstrated that his period of apprenticeship and "voice sampling" had passed. His 1922 collection, "Blue Distance", confirmed this.

Throughout the 1920s, he continued to write numerous poems. During this time, Rylsky published several collections of poetry, including "Through Storm and Snow" (1925), "The 13th Spring" (1926), "Where Roads Meet", and "Hum and Rumbling" (both 1929). In the latter collection, Rylsky also demonstrated his skill as a translator of world poetry, including works by Paul Verlaine, Valery Bryusov, Stéphane Mallarmé, Maurice Maeterlinck, and others. One notable translation was of Adam Mickiewicz's "Pan Tadeusz".

As a representative of the "pure art" doctrine, Maksym Rylsky was active during the years when the Stalinists adopted the official doctrine of "socialist realism". In 1937, he was involved in rewriting the libretto of Mykola Lysenko's opera Taras Bulba, and later returned to neo-classical forms. Rylsky is one of the most outstanding Ukrainian poets of the 20th century and a master of the modern sonnet and the long narrative poem. He was closely associated with the Neoclassicist group of Ukrainian poets. They employed traditional poetic forms with rhyme and meter, wrote in a clear and accessible contemporary idiom, and often referenced Ancient Greek and Roman mythology, as well as numerous other authors from world literature, in their poetry.

During the wartime period, he wrote two masterful long poems that deviated from socialist realism: "Thirst" (1942) and "Journey to Youth" (1941-4), for which he was again publicly chastised. In 1942, he became the Director of the Institute of Fine Arts, Folklore, and Ethnography in Kyiv, a post he held until his death in 1964. The Institute now bears his name. He published about 30 collections of original poetry during his lifetime, as well as numerous translations and scholarly works. By 1974, almost five million copies of his works, in the original or in translation, had been published in the USSR.

Rylsky became a member of the Communist Party in 1943 and was elected to the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union in 1946.

Language skills and translation
Rylsky was a translator with knowledge of 13 languages and the ability to translate from 30 languages. He specialized in translating from French, Polish and Russian.

Prizes

 * Lenin Prize, 1960 – for his collections of poems "Daleki neboskhyly" (1959) and "Troyandy j vynohrad" (1957)
 * Stalin Prize, 1943 – for his collections of poems "Slovo pro ridnu matir", "Svitova zorya", "Svitla zbroya", "Mandrivka v molodist"
 * Stalin Prize, 1950 – translation into Ukrainian of the poem "Pan Tadeusz" by Adam Mickiewicz