Alexander Dovzhenko

1894 - 1956

Alexander Dovzhenko was born on 29 August 1894 in a small town of Sosnytsia near Chernihiv (Ukraine), in a poor family, which was famous for its longevity: writer's great-grandmother lived to be more than a hundred years old, and his grandfather died soon after his centennial anniversary. His parents were illiterate, but they wanted all their children to become educated people. There were 14 children in the family, but only Aleksander and his sister Polina survived. All Dovzhenko's works have a picture of a long-suffering mother, whose prototype was his own mother, "born for songs, she cried all her life". Little Sasha loved singing sad Ukrainian songs; he loved animals, trees in blossom and the sweet-scented grass found in meadows near the Desna; he loved listening to his grandfather's stories about the Ukrainian past. He would say later that he owed everything best in himself to his family, fellow-villagers and fantastic enchanted nature of his home countryside.

Sasha went to the elementary school in Sosnytsia. There he loved drawing: he drew horses, huts, apples, his friends and himself. In 1911 he entered the Teachers' Institute in Hlukhiv. After graduating in 1914 he worked as a teacher in high school in Zhytomyr. His interest in drawing and painting was still very strong, he drew a lot, especially portraits; and in 1922 he became a student at School of Arts in Berlin, where he worked at that time in the Soviet Consulate as a secretary.

In 1923 he came back to Ukraine, to Kharkiv, and soon became the most famous Ukrainian caricaturist and illustrator. His first known literary work wasn't created till September, 1926. It was a film-script "Heroes". After that he wrote several more and made his first film "Diplomatic Courier's Bag" (about Theodor Nette), which was a success. His later films "Earth", "Arsenal", "Shchors" strengthened his position as a leading Ukrainian script writer and film director.

When the Great Patriotic War started he went to the front and his war experience were reflected in numerous articles, stories and film-scripts ("Mother", "Night before Battle", "Ukraine on Fire", "The Story of Flaming Years"). He joked: "In my old age I decided to train as a writer". He started to write more prose, trying to respond to the most significant events of the war. He wrote in his notebook: "The war became as big as life, as death". War as a national tragedy became the main subject of his works."Enchanted Desna" is an encyclopedia of the Ukrainian country-life at the end of the 19^th - beginning of the 20^th century. The pictures of the writer's childhood, full of misery, tragedy and humor, are intertwined with his philosophical meditations on the meaning of human life.There's also "A Poem about the Sea", where he tells us how the artificial Kakhov Sea on the Dnieper was created.

In post-war years Dovzhenko was more and more attracted by the mysteries of the outer space as an object of his reflections upon the questions: "What are our life and death and what is existence?" His death in 1956 interrupted his work in the film-script "In the Depths of Outer Space", whose unearthly details he already saw in his imagination. He wanted so much to know the thoughts and feelings of a man who would be the first to see our planet from above. When Yurie Gagarin came back to Earth, he said that Aleksander Dovzhenko had been in space before him. Dovzhenko had the full right to say these prophetic words about himself: "I belong to mankind as an artist".

Dovzhenko died of a heart attack on November 25, 1956 in Russia. The Dovzhenko Film Studios in Kiev (the capital of Ukraine) were named after him in his honour following his death.