Valerian Petrovych Pidmohylny was a Ukrainian modernist, most famous for his novel The City. Like a number of Ukrainian writers, he flourished in 1920s Ukraine, but in 1930s, he was constrained and eventually arrested by the NKVD on fabricated charges of terrorism. He was executed in Sandarmokh in 1937, during the Great Purge. He is one of the leading figures of the Executed Renaissance.

The Executed Renaissance is a term used to describe the generation of Ukrainian language poets, writers, and artists of the 1920s and early 1930s who lived in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.