Gavriliuk, Aleksandr

Born Apr. 10 (23), 1911, in the village of Zabolot’e, Bel’sk District, Sedlets Province, presently in Poland; died June 22, 1941, in L’vov. Soviet Ukrainian writer.

Gavriliuk was born into a peasant family. He joined the Communist Party of Western Byelorussia in 1929. His verses “Memoirs of a Prisoner” (1929) became the song of political prisoners in Poland. In the period 1929-39, Gavriliuk was arrested 14 times and was twice in the Bereza-Kartuskaia fascist concentration camp, from which the Red Army freed him in September 1939. In the narrative poem L’vov (1939), Gavriliuk, recreated a picture of the revolutionary events that took place in L’vov in 1936. In his lampoon Misters and Masters Over the “Kobzar’” (published 1936), he exposed the bourgeois Ukrainian nationalists. In his narrative poem Song From Bereza (1937, published 1941) and in the short novel Bereza (1941, published 1946) he described the struggle against the police regime in the concentration camps. He died in the German bombing of L’vov.