Maik Yohansen
Ukrainian poet (1896-1937)

Maik (Mykhailo) Hervasiiovych Yohansen or Mike Johansen (Ukrainian: Майк Гервасійович Йогансен; pseudonyms Villi Vetselius [Willy Wetzelius] and M. Kramar; 16 October 1895 – 27 October 1937) was a Ukrainian poet, prose writer, dramatist, translator, critic and linguist. He was one of the founders of VAPLITE.
Biography
Maik Yohansen was born on 16 October 1895 in Kharkiv. His father, a Latvian emigrant, was a teacher of German, and made sure his son had a proper education. Maik Yohansen received his secondary education at the Kharkiv Third Gymnasium. There he studied along with Hryhoriy Petnikov and Bohdan Hordeev (pseudo: Bozhydar), who later became well-known poet-futurists, as well as with Yuriy Platonov, a geographer and prose writer. Afterwards, Maik Yohansen studied at the Kharkiv University, which he successfully graduated in 1917, specialising in Latin. At Kharkiv University Maik Yohansen's linguistics lecturers included Leonid Bulakhovskyi and Oleksa Syniavskyi.
Later, Maik Yohansen mentioned the name of Oleksa Syniavskyi in his famous novel Doctor Leonardo's Travels through the Switzerland of Slobidska Ukraine (‘Podorozh doktora Leonardo po Slobozhans’kii Shvaitsariï’, 1928):That same evening Don Jose Pereira booked train tickets for himself and Rodolfo. The next morning, he was lucky to find at Barcelona market Syniavsky's Grammar. He did not part with it until he reached the steppes.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3892924. VIAF identifies the subject as 74754215. The Library of Congress control number is nr89005167. None of the 3 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1895, 1937, 1917 and 1928.
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This entry incorporates text from “Maik Yohansen” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.