Poet and translator Mykola Bazhan (1904-83) was one of the most complex and highly intellectual Ukrainian writers of the modern period. After 1930 Bazhan acquiesced to the Stalinist regime and became a prominent spokesperson and apologist for it, thus surviving the fate of the many of his colleagues who perished prematurely during the purges. His early works, however, still attest to his reputation as one of Ukraine’s finest Modernist poets and compare favorably with the mature poetry of his Russian contemporary Osip Mandelstam.