Olena Teliha was a Ukrainian poet and Ukrainian activist of Ukrainian and Belarusian ethnicity Olena Teliha was born in the village of Ilyinskoe, near Moscow in Russia where her parents spent summer vacation. Her father was a civil engineer while her mother came from a family of Russian Orthodox priests. In 1918, she moved to Kiev with her family, when her father became a minister in the new UNR government. There they lived through the years of Ukrainian Civil War. When the Bolsheviks took over, her father moved to Czechoslovakia, and the rest of the family followed him in 1923. After living through the rise and fall of Ukrainian National Republic, Olena took an avid interest in Ukrainian language and literature. In Prague, she attended a Ukrainian teacher's college where she studied history and philology. She met a group of young Ukrainian poets in Prague and started writing poetry herself. After her marriage, she moved to Warsaw, During these years she is actively published in “Visnyk” and other journals, where were not just her own poems, but also prose and publicist works. So in 1933 was shown the fragment of short-story “Abo-abo”, responds to appearance of other writers works, tries to interpret common objects and figures in her own way. Although her life in Poland was really blusterous, she had something in her soul that was magnetizing her to Ukraine. She couldn’t resist it so in July 1941 Olena with one hiking crossed Sian and moved to Lviv, in Kyiv she was the 22 of October. That was a realization of her dream. Olena started editing the weekly publication “Lytavry”. The newspaper concerned about different questions and had a bright anti-imperial color. It was difficult to work for a poetess, as there were few veterans of pen alive, young people had already the soviet mentoring, and the articles Olena Teliha refused to publish. The poetess made the choice herself, and so did her husband Myhaylo. While being arrested he named himself a writer to be with her. The 21 of February in Babyn Yar Olena Teliha with other OUN figures were shot by fascists in Gestapo. Teliha was in the jail ward №34, where soon was found a sign, made with her hand: “There was and from here went for an execution Olena Teliha”. Upper was scratched a national symbolically shown as a sword trident. And one of the German officers after her death admitted: “I have never seen a man who died as heroic, as this beautiful woman”. Dozens of years we knew nothing about a figure of our poetess and patriot Olena Teliha. Her name arose from oblivion only 50 years after her death, when in February 1992, in Kyiv in Babyn Yar was built a memorial cross in her honor, the street and Ukrainian Woman Community were named after her, founded International art and literature award. Nowadays we know only 41 poems by the poetess. During her life she couldn’t publish any of her collections. Though she hasn’t left a huge artistic legacy, her life was short, but bright and full of great deals, so it must be in our memory forever.

click here