Olena Ivanivna Teliha was a Ukrainian poet and Ukrainian activist of Ukrainian and Belarusian ethnicity.
Background
Olena Teliha was born Elena Ivanovna Shovgeneva (Russian: Елена Ивановна Шовгенева) in the village of Ilyinskoe, near Moscow in Russia where her parents spent summer vacations. Her father was a civil engineer while her mother came from a family of Russian Orthodox priests.
Career
There are a several villages by this name in that area, and it is unknown exactly which one of them is Olena Teliha"s birthplace. In 1918, she moved to Kiev with her family, when her father became a minister in the new University of Nevada, Reno government. There they lived through the years of Ukrainian Civil War.
When the Bolsheviks took over, her father moved to Czechoslovakia, and the rest of the family followed him in 1923.
After living through the rise and fall of Ukrainian National Republic, Olena took an avid interest in Ukrainian language and literature. In Prague, she attended a Ukrainian teacher"s college where she studied history and philology.
She met a group of young Ukrainian poets in Prague and started writing poetry herself. A lot of her activities were in open defiance of the Nazi authorities.
She watched her closest colleagues from the parent-newspaper "Ukrainian Word" ("Ukrayins"ke Slovo") get arrested and yet chose to ignore the dangers.
She refused to flee, declaring that she would never again go into exile. In the prison cell where she stayed, her last written words were scribbled on the wall: "Here was interred and from here goes to her death Olena Teliha". On July 19, 2007 the National bank of Ukraine issued a commemorative coin dedicated to Olena Teliha.
Membership
In 1939, like many of the young Ukrainians with whom she associated, Olena Teliha became a member of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, within which she became an activist in cultural and educational matters.