Malyshko, Andrei Samoilovich

Born Nov. 1 (14), 1912, in the village of Obukhov, present-day Kiev Oblast; died Feb. 17, 1970, in Kiev. Soviet Ukrainian poet. Member of the CPSU (1943).

Malyshko was the son of a village shoemaker. In 1932 he graduated from the department of literature at the Kiev Institute of People’s Education. He fought in the Great Patriotic War of 1941-45. He began publishing his works in 1930. In his collections dating from the prewar period, The Motherland (1936), Lyrics (1938), The Birth of Sons (1939), and The Larks (1940), Malyshko depicted the inner world of his contemporaries—the builders and defenders of socialism. Narrative poems written during these years, “larina” (1938), “Karmaliuk” (1940), and “The Ballad of the Cossack Danilo” (1941), are devoted to the Ukrainian past. Soviet patriotism permeates Malyshko’s wartime works, for example, the collections My Ukraine! (1942), The Tale of the Regiment (1943), The Battle (1943), and laroslavna (1946) and his publicistic works. The narrative poems “Sons,” “Love,” “Maria,” and “Prometheus,” written during the years 1945-47, are linked with Malyshko’s lyrical poetry from the front.

The collection Lyrics and the narrative poem “Prometheus” were awarded the State Prize of the USSR in 1947. In his narrative poem “It Was at Dawn” (1948), Malyshko created the figure of a Ukrainian woman kolkhoz worker. His lyrical works of the 1950’s and 1960’s are rich in thematic material and are highly philosophical, for example, the collections Beyond the Blue Sea (1950; USSR State Prize, 1951), What I Have Written (1956), Noontime of the Century (1960), Transparency (1962), Road Under the Sycamores (1964; the cycle of poems with this name, drawn from this book, was awarded the State Prize of the USSR, 1969), The Blue Chronicle (1968), and The August of My Soul (1970).

Malyshko’s poetry is closely linked to Ukrainian folklore; it is romantically elevated and musical. Malyshko translated works by A. S. Pushkin, A. T. Tvardovskii, and Janko Kupala. Malyshko also wrote criticism, for example, his collection Thoughts About Poetry (1959). Malyshko’s works have been translated into many of the world’s languages. Malyshko served as a deputy to the third, fourth, and fifth convocations of the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR. In 1964 he won the T. G. Shevchenko State Prize of the Ukrainian SSR. Malyshko was awarded two Orders of Lenin, three other orders, and a number of medals.