A Violin from the Other Riverside

Dmytro Kremin (1953-2017) was an award-winning poet, journalist, essayist, translator, songwriter, civil activist, scholar, and one of the most prominent contemporary literary personalities of the post-World War II generation in Ukraine. Born and raised in a picturesque Transcarpathian village, Kremin started writing poetry at an early age. His student years were marked by literary experimentation and artistic resistance to the Brezhnev regime of mediocrity and conformism. Upon graduation, Kremin moved to Mykolayiv in the south of Ukraine, where he became one of the stalwarts of Ukraine's national and cultural revival. His work is famed for uniting history and modernity as well as intertwining ardour and objectivity in the portrayal of his homeland in its joys and sufferings. In 1999, Kremin was the recipient of the Taras Shevchenko Prize, the highest literary distinction in Ukraine.