Yaroslav Halan participant in Lviv Anti-Fascist Congress of Cultural Workers
Creativity and political struggle in Poland
In the 1920s, Halan's creative activity also began. In 1927 he finished work on his first significant play, Don Quixote from Ettenheim. For the first time he revealed the venality of nationalistic and chauvinistic parties in his play 99% (1930). The theme of class struggle and condemning segregation were actualized in the plays Cargo (1930) and Cell (1932), calling for united actions and class solidarity of Ukrainian, Jewish and Polish proletarians.Halan's play 99% was staged by the semi-legal Lviv Workers’ Theatre. On the eve of the premiere, Polish authorities launched a campaign of mass arrest against Western Ukrainian communists, sending them to the Lutsk prison. As the theatre's director and one of the key actors were arrested, the premiere was on the verge of failure. Despite risks of being arrested, the workers continued rehearsing, so that the play was presented with a delay of only one day. About 600 workers attended the premiere; for them, it was a form of protest mobilization against repression and nationalism.Halan was one of the founders of the Ukrainian proletarian writers’ group Horno. From 1927 to 1932, along with other communist writers and members of the CPWU, he worked for the Lviv-based Ukrainian magazine Vikna, being a member of its editorial board, until it was closed by government censors.Living in the Polish-controlled city of Lviv, Halan frequently had to earn money by translating novels from German into Polish. In 1932 he moved to Nyzhniy Bereviz, the native village of his wife, located in the Carpathian mountains, close to Kolomyia, and kept working on his own plays, stories and articles there. In the village he spread communist agitation among peasants, creating cells of the International Red Aid and the Committee for Famine Relief. Without opportunities to find work, he lived in the countryside until June 1935, when he was summoned by the CPWU to return to Lviv.Halan was denied Soviet citizenship in 1935.In 1935, Halan traveled extensively around Prykarpattia, giving speeches to peasants. He became an experienced propagandist and agitator. Addressing the city workers, Halan explained to them the main points of Marxist theory. In particular, he held lectures on Friedrich Engels's Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, and Karl Marx's Wage Labour and Capital. Together with the young communist writer Olexa Havryliuk, Halan organized safe houses, wrote leaflets and proclamations, and transferred illegal literature to Lviv.Throughout his political career the writer was repeatedly persecuted, and twice imprisoned (for the first time in 1934). He was one of the organizers of the Lviv Anti-Fascist Congress of Cultural Workers in May 1936. Halan also took part in a major political demonstration on 16 April 1936 in Lviv, in which the crowd was fired on by Polish police (in total, thirty workers were killed and two hundred injured). Halan devoted his story Golden Arch to the memory of fallen comrades.Participation in the Anti-Fascist Congress forced him to escape from Lviv to Warsaw, where he eventually found work at the left-wing newspaper Dziennik Popularny, edited by Wanda Wasilewska. In 1937, the newspaper was closed by the authorities, and on 8 April Halan was accused of illegal communist activism and sent to prison in Warsaw (later transferred to Lviv). Released in December 1937, Halan lived in Lviv under strict supervision by the police, and remained unemployed until 1939.In 1937, his elder brother, a member of the CPWU, died in Lviv. After the Communist Party of Poland and the Communist Party of Western Ukraine, as its autonomous organization, were dissolved by the Comintern on trumped-up accusations of spying for Poland in 1938, Halan's first wife Anna Henyk (also a member of the CPWU), who was studying at the Kharkiv Medical Institute, USSR, was arrested by the NKVD and executed in the Great Purge.
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