Maik (Mykhailo) Hervasiiovych Yohansen or Mike Johansen (Ukrainian: Майк Гервасійович Йогансен; pseudonyms Villi Vetselius [Willy Wetzelius] and M. Kramar; 16 October 1895, Kharkiv, Ukraine – 27 October 1937, Kyiv, Ukraine) – was a Ukrainian poet, prose writer, dramatist, translator, critic and linguist. Source: Wikipedia

Poet, writer, translator, literary theorist, and linguist of German and Ukrainian parentage. Until 1917 he studied philology at Kharkiv University, graduating with a master’s degree. Yohansen wrote in German and Russian until 1917, but only in Ukrainian after 1919. In 1921, with Mykola Khvylovy and Volodymyr Sosiura, he wrote a landmark Ukrainian literary manifesto, ‘Our Universal to the Ukrainian Workers and Ukrainian Proletarian Artists,’ published in the anthology Zhovten’. Originally a member of the Soviet Ukrainian proletarian writers' organization Hart, in 1925 Yohansen became a founding member of the literary group Vaplite. After the forced dissolution of Vaplite in 1928 by the Soviet authorities, he cofounded and actively contributed to the literary and art periodicals Literaturnyi iarmarok and Universal’nyi zhurnal. He was the only former Vaplite member to question publically the formation of the more populist literary organization Prolitfront, which he refused to join. Instead he founded the apolitical Techno-Artistic Group A, which was officially banned in 1930. Yohansen’s poetic oeuvre can be divided into three distinct periods. His early poetry, including the collections D'hori (To the Peak, 1921), Revoliutsiia (Revolution, 1923), Krokoveie kolo (The Dancing Circle, 1923), Proloh do komuny (Prologue to the Commune, 1924), and Dorobok (Works Thus Far, 1924, which includes many poems from his earlier collections), represents the first, experimental, period of his creativity. During his second period Yohansen produced formally mature and sophisticated verse, gathered in the collection Iasen (The Ash Tree, 1930). His poetry after 1930 represented an attempt at seeking a compromise between his high artistic standards and the Party’s mounting pressure to produce socialist-realist works. But Yohansen did not capitulate to the Soviet authorities. Instead, he produced the toned down, artistically accomplished collection Baliady pro viinu i vidbudovu (Ballads about War and Reconstruction, 1933). Yohansen wrote masterful experimental prose using the technique of uchudnennia, or estrangement (that is, of making the ordinary appear strange or miraculous) and rendering his subject with a humorous edge. He also frequently devised sophisticated literary mystifications. In 1925 his first collection of short stories, 17 khvylyn (Seventeen Minutes), and a novel, Pryhody Mak-Leistona, Harri Ruperta ta inshykh (The Adventures of MacLayston, Harry Rupert, and Others), were published.. His most interesting prose work is his experimental novel Podorozh doktora Leonardo po Slobozhans’kii Shvaitsariï (Doctor Leonardo's Travels through the Switzerland of Slobidska Ukraine, 1928), in which he attempted to make landscape his text’s main protagonist, giving his human characters secondary roles. In 1931 two other story collections by Yohansen were published—Zhyttia Haia Serhiievycha Shaiby (The Life of Hai Serhiievych Shaiba, 1931) and Opovidannia pro Maikla Parkera (Stories about Michael Parker, 1931). To avoid conforming to the by then only officially allowed style of socialist realism, Yohansen turned to writing several books of children’s literature or anecdotes and humorous sketches in the 1930s. After visiting remote locations in Ukraine and other parts of the USSR, he also produced several books of travel sketches, including Podorozh liudyny pid kepom (The Journey of a Man Wearing a Cap, 1932), Podorozh u Dagestan (A Trip to Dagestan, 1933), and Kos-Chahyl na Embi (Kos-Chagil on the Emba River, 1936). Yohansen was an accomplished screenwriter and author of several scripts for theatrical productions. He cowrote (with Yurii Tiutiunnyk) the screenplay for Oleksander Dovzhenko’s classic Zvenyhora (1927), the silent film many consider the beginning of Ukrainian national cinema. Yohansen also collaborated with Les Kurbas and his influential Berezil theater on several of their productions.

Mykhaylo Semenko (Ukrainian: Миха́йло Семе́нко) was a Ukrainian poet, the prominent representative of the Ukrainian futuristic poetry of the 1920s. He is considered to be one of the lead figures of Executed Renaissance. He was a founder of futuristic groups Aspanfut, Komunkult, Nova Generatsiya. He was an editor in couple of almanacs and the journal "Nova generatsiya". As a poet Semenko wrote primarily for urban audiences. Semenko was arrested in 1937 and executed by NKVD during the Great Purge. In the mid-1960s he was rehabilitated.

Микола Куліш - the most famous Ukrainian playwright of the twentieth century. After his mother’s early death, Kulish spent most of his childhood in orphanages and charity homes. He finished his early education thanks to the financial support of distant acquaintances. He began writing satirical poems and plays as a gymnasium student in Oleshky. After graduating from the gymnasium in Poti (now in Georgia) in 1914, he studied history and philology at Odesa University. Kulish’s university education was interrupted by the outbreak of the First World War. He was conscripted into the Russian Army, took part in military campaigns as an infantry officer in Galicia, Volhynia, and Belarus, and thus came into contact with the Ukrainian national movement. In 1917 Kulish was wounded at the front and discharged. Later that year he served as head of the town council in Oleshky. He participated in the Ukrainian Struggle for Independence (1917–20), organizing a guerrilla regiment to fight the Russian Volunteer Army in Southern Ukraine and distinguishing himself as its commanding officer. Kulish wrote fourteen plays. Six of them were published during his lifetime. He became famous after the stage success in 1924 of his first play, 97, which is generally considered the beginning of Soviet Ukrainian drama and the first major play written in the USSR as a whole. It was, however, not staged as Kulish had written it, but was censored by first production’s director, Hnat Yura, who changed Kulish’s tragic finale to an ideologically correct, optimistic one. Kulish’s subsequent plays shared similar fates and were heavily censored or banned outright by the Soviet authorities. As a dramatist, Kulish initially devoted his efforts to portraying the postrevolutionary struggle among the peasantry of Southern Ukraine. Besides 97, the plays on that subject included Komuna v stepakh (A Commune in the Steppes, 1925) and, several years later, the final work in his ‘village trilogy’—Proshchai, selo (Farewell, Village, 1933). The Soviet censors forced him not only to revise the latter, but even to rename it Povorot Marka (Marko's Return, 1934), deeming the original title an allusion to the destruction of the traditional Ukrainian village by Soviet collectivization and the Famine-Genocide of 1932–3. During the second phase of his dramaturgy, Kulish turned to writing comedy and satire. In Otak zahynuv Huska (That’s How Huska Perished, 1925) and Khulii Khuryna (1926), which harked back to Nikolai Gogol’s themes and motifs, he ridiculed the attitudes and prejudices of both prerevolutionary Russian imperial society and of the new Soviet bureaucracy. The culmination of his of demythologization of the Bolshevik revolution was his melodrama Zona (Ergot, 1926), which Kulish later reworked and renamed Zakut (Dead End, 1929). He also wrote a ‘linguistic comedy,’ Myna Mazailo (1929), where, in a manner akin to Molière, he satirized the political and social impact of the Soviet policy of Ukrainization. During his most productive and creative period as a playwright and close collaborator of Les Kurbas and the Berezil theater, Kulish abandoned the style and tools of traditional, realist dramaturgy. Instead, he experimented with expressionist and avant-garde writing, often combining it with elements of the Ukrainian puppet theater (vertep) and school dramas popular of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. His most important trilogy of that period—Narodnii Malakhii (The People's Malakhii, 1927), Patetychna sonata (Sonata pathétique, 1930), and Vichnyi bunt (Eternal Rebellion, 1932)—addresses the stark contradictions between Ukrainian national aspirations and Soviet reality and deals with the inherent conflict between an individual’s aspirations and a society’s principles. http://www.encyclopediaofukraine.com/...