He moved to Kharkiv in 1921 and involved himself with writers connected to Vasyl Blakytny and the paper Visti VUTsVK (news from All-Ukrainian Central Executive Committee). In 1921, with Volodymyr Sosiura and Maik Yohansen, he signed the literary manifesto ‘Our Universal to the Ukrainian Workers and Ukrainian Proletarian Artists’ (published in the collection Zhovten’). In the same year his poem ‘V elektrychnyi vik’ (In the Electrical Age) and his poetry collection Molodist’ (Youth) were published.