The Sixtiers

The Sixtiers are a generation of Ukrainian writers, artists, and public figures who came into literature at the turn of the 1950s and 1960s, in the era of the Khrushchev 'thaw', and inaugurated a spiritual and national-cultural revival after decades of Stalinist terror. The Sixtiers returned to literature sincerity, individuality, aesthetic freedom, and attention to national memory, language, and human dignity, opposing official Socialist Realism. Their leading figures are the poets Lina Kostenko, Vasyl Symonenko, Ivan Drach, Mykola Vinhranovsky, Dmytro Pavlychko, and Vasyl Stus, and the critics Ivan Dziuba, Ivan Svitlychny, and Yevhen Sverstiuk. Many of the Sixtiers became dissidents and suffered persecution, imprisonment, and exile; Vasyl Stus died in a labor camp in 1985. The movement of the Sixtiers was of decisive significance for the preservation and renewal of Ukrainian culture in the second half of the twentieth century.