Rostyslav Dotsenko

In the early 1970s, the "Dnipro" publishing house gathered a group of writers led by Ivan Dziuba, who worked with Mykola Lukash and Hryhoriy Kochur – recent prisoners of the Soviet concentration camps. Rostyslav Dotsenko was threatened with arrest again. After refusing to cooperate with the KGB he was fired from his job in publishing house and forbidden to publish. After Ukraine release from Soviet occupation, Dotsenko focused on studying of killed by communists' authors. At the same time he ordered the publication of works by Leonid Hrebinka, popularized in periodicals works by O.Teliha, O.Kurinnyi, О.Hryhorenko]], A.E. Jaworowskiy, H.Mazurenko, P. Karpenko-Krynytsya, A. Tarnavskyi, L.Lyman.

On 14 February 1953 he was arrested on charges of "Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism." In May of the same year he was judged with fellow students Hryhoriy Voloschuk and Mykola Adamenko. According to the Article 54 part 10 and part 11 of the second part of Ukrainian SSR Criminal Code he was sentenced to 8 years of corrective labour camps with confiscation of property.

From 1953 to 1956 Rostyslav Dotsenko was serving his sentence in Volga concentration camps involved in hydroelectric construction. In the spring of 1955, a dozen of political prisoners were convicted of youthful non-conformism and organized oppositional to ruling Soviet elites as "Group of revolutionary Marxists" Rostyslav Dotsenko was one of the active members of this group as he is the co-author of the program and statutory documents of the group. Communist Party interpreted these documents as "reactionary party of fascistic type" due to the GRM provocateur, the group was discovered in April 1956. In April 1956, its members (A. Sukhodolskyi, R. Dotsenko, J. Mazur, D. Pysarev, D. Slobodyan, V. Cherepanov, A. Stasishkis, A. Myroshnichenko, A. Ahbalov and others) were arrested and trialled in September of the same year. Rostyslav Dotsenko under the Articles 58–10, 58–11 RSFSR Criminal Code got another 7 years of imprisonment. The new sentence started in October 1956 and until May 1957 Rostyslav Dotsenko served in Khabarovsk; then from June 1957 to April 1960 in Irkutsk and from April 1960 to April 1963 in Mordovia.

In the concentration camps Dotsenko had met the leading figures of Ukrainian national liberation movement – Patriarch Josyf Slipyj, many of former UPA soldiers, members of the Lithuanian resistance movement, as well as many scientists, philosophers, artists and other members of intelligentsia . Rostyslav Dotsenko refers to those times as "From Mordovian cannabis, unexpectedly I entered the Sixtiers and politics in the Soviet Union in the second half of 1950) where gladly acquainted with Ivan Svitlychny Dziuba, Lina Kostenko, Alla Horska and many, many others outstanding personalities of those revival years." Then he made more than 30 translations from English, French, Polish, particularly the works of Oscar Wilde, Fennimore Cooper, William Faulkner, Dickens, Margaret Mitchell, J. Luckyj, Arthur Conan Doyle, Lewis Stevenson, J. Swift and some others. Dotsenko is also an author of "Thoughts for the night". Rostyslav Dotsenko was the originator of books by L. Hrebinka, L. Lyman, J. Litvin.

Rostyslav Dotsenko (19 April 1931 in Kyiv – 24 October 2012 in Kyiv) – Ukrainian translator, literary critic, author of aphorisms and maxims. Member of the National Writers Union of Ukraine. Political prisoner of Stalin's concentration camps (10 years).

Rostyslav Dotsenko was born in Kyiv 1931. After graduating Kiev school No. 92 entered Kiev Taras Shevchenko National University on the department of Ukrainian Philology.