The Mote (Extract)

Abstract

Mykhaylo Osadchy was born on 22 March 1936 into a collective farmer's family in the NE Ukraine and graduated from the faculty of journalism, Lvov University, in 1958. He started as an editor, then senior editor, with Lvov television, and after 1960 taught journalism at Lvov University until his arrest in August 1965. He was also a deputy secretary of the journalism department's Party organisation and in charge of ideological education. On 18 April 1966 Osadchy was sentenced in camera for ‘anti-Soviet propaganda, nationalism and participation in a conspiracy’ to two years’ labour camp. In December 1966, a notebook with his translations from Garcia Lorca, from the work of some Baltic poets and his own poetry was confiscated. Meanwhile his first book of poetry, Misyachne pole (‘ Moonlit Field’), published by the Lvov publishing house Kamenyar, had been pulped as a result of his arrest. After his release in August 1968 Osadchy was not restored to his post and went through several manual and clerical jobs. He continued to write poetry and in April-May 1969 completed Bil'mo (‘ The Mote’), a fictionalised memoir of his arrest, trial, and life in the labour camp. He was arrested again in January 1972 (see INDEX no. 1, p. 87) and was sentenced in September to seven years’ imprisonment and five years’ exile for ‘anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda’. Although the investigation at his trial, held in camera in Lvov, failed to prove Osadchy's authorship of this work or its dissemination in samizdat, he was tried under article 62 of the Ukrainian Criminal Code for poems which were allegedly anti-Soviet and said to have been found in his flat at the time of his arrest.