Life
Oleh Lysheha was born in 1949 to a family of teachers in Tysmenytsia, a Carpathian village in Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast, Ukraine. Twenty years later, Lysheha became a student studying foreign languages at the university in Lviv named after the renowned Ukrainian poet Ivan Franko. In 1972, Lysheha was expelled and drafted to the Soviet army for membership in Lviv Bohema, a dissident group of artists at Lviv University. After serving in the military, the poet returned to his birth place, working at a local factory.
In due time, Lysheha returned to Lviv, and soon thereafter moved to Kiev (Kyiv) where he married. In his position as a technical employee at the Kyiv Theatrical Institute of Karpenko Karyi, Lysheha continued to write poems and translate. From 1997-1998, Oleh Lysheha was a Visiting Fulbright Scholar to Penn State in Pennsylvania, United States. After his return to Ukraine, the poet dove into a prolific artistic labor of poetry, painting and sculpture, as well as resumed his seasonal alteration between the capital and his birth home in the Carpathian mountains.
Andriy Bondar describes Lysheha as the Ukrainian Henry Thoreau of the beginning of the 21st century:
| “ | The way of life of ordinary people does not seem to apply to him. He exists in a parallel universe - he likes to walk barefoot in the city, to swim in the ice-cold river in winter, he catches fish with his teeth, knows how to make paper from mushrooms, never uses public transport, and does not have a job. | ” |
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