Alexandra Doren-Podverbnaya was born on August 12, 1920, in the Ukrainian village of Yanovka in the Chernigov region.  Her father, Denis Podverbnyi, served as village headman for fifteen years, until October of 1917. He devoted much effort to the improvement of his neighbors’ lives, and they valued him very much. Her mother Tatyana Pakhilko took care of the house, bringing up four children. Thanks to her care, the whole family was spared from the famine, which raged across Ukraine from 1932-1933. Inquisitive since her childhood, Alexandra unmistakably inherited her love of folk songs, music, and poetry from her mother.

Although the industrious and close-knit Podverbnaya family wanted to provide their children with an education, as the daughter of the village headman Alexandra had no access to university studies. The young singer had to attend a technical college for agricultural studies, from which she successfully graduated. But it was not Alexandra’s fate to work as a tractor mechanic. Her nature yearned for contact with people, with literature and art. She subsequently attended the Northern Novgorod Technical College for Pedagogy. Her studies went by quickly: we can already imagine Alexandra Podverbnaya-Doren as a young teacher, entering her classroom for the first time.  For three years she taught her pupils grammar, the common good, and love for the motherland while singing songs and reading her favorite poetry with them. The children responded with earnest smiles and respect. Alexandra shares her feelings and memories of this time in her life in the poem “Schoolteacher,” which can be found in this collection.

But this is when the storm-clouds of war come over the country.  With their convoys of tanks German troops rapidly advanced into the east, crushing the Red Army’s weak defenses. Three months after the war had begun German motorcyclists took the village of Yanovka.

In 1942, the invaders began sending young Ukrainians to Germany to perform compulsory labor. Hundreds of young men and women were forced to abandon their homeland and were sent abroad in cattle cars packed with hay and without even the most rudimentary comfort. The young teacher Alexandra Podverbnaya was among them.

She survived so much: hunger, fear, humiliation. Alexandra fiercely rebelled against her taunting overseers and the slave-like labor they imposed.  She almost had to pay for her courageous resistance with her life. Oftentimes, late in the evening, when everyone else in the barracks had fallen asleep, Alexandra would write poems in the dim candlelight. They were poems about her distant homeland and about the hope for a dignified life, but more often than not they expressed hate for the fascists. She would choose music to accompany some of the poems and would sing along to herself. It was both difficult and dangerous to write poems, and that is why almost all of her verse was lost during forced displacements from city to city and from country to country. Only by miracle did one such poem survive. Written in 1943, the poem can be found in this collection under the title “We will not give in.”

After the war, Alexandra Denisovna spent five years in political refugee camps with other eastern Europeans. There was no sense in returning to her homeland since that would simply mean moving from one concentration camp to another, albeit Soviet-style, one. In 1950, Podverbnaya immigrated to the United States along with her children after a receiving a long-awaited visa. She subsequently spent some time in Canada, where she met Vladimir Tkachenko-Doren, a Donskoy Cossack from the city of Taganrog. During the Russian Civil War, he had bravely fought the Bolsheviks at the battles of the Kuban and the Don rivers. For his heroism, he received a medal of distinction from the first Kuban campaign. Vladimir Tkachenko was a highly educated man, the offspring of aristocratic culture. His academic works have been published in many European countries, Asia, the United States, and Canada.

Alexandra and Vladimir lived together in love and in friendship for thirty years, helping one another in ways large and small. Indeed, it is not surprising that the poet has dedicated a series of touching poems to her spouse.

Podverbnaya-Doren has lived in California since 1960. She continues to write poems and to do much work within the Russian community. Local newspapers such as “Russian Life” have printed collections of her poetry as well as articles on the hot topics of the day in both the Bay Area and Los Angeles.

At the same time, Alexandra Denisovna was emerging as a chamber singer with a high, beautiful voice. Her repertoire includes operatic arias, Russian romances, folk songs, and popular American music. She has successfully performed at the Russian Center in San Francisco, on the stage of the Oakland Opera, on the air for a Los Angeles radio station, and in the theaters of California and New York. In the nineties she released a compact disc entitled “Best Songs of Russia”.

In both 1976 and 1991, Alexandra returned to Eastern Europe, visiting Moscow and her native village of Yanoka in the Ukraine, where she paid her respects to her deceased parents and to those who were close to her.

Podverbnaya’s daughter Vera Breheda received her Doctor’s degree in music and has become a well-known pianist. She performs in the best music halls of the United States and Europe.

Alexandra speaks Ukrainian, Russian, Polish, German, and English. She performs arias in Italian, and at every point in her life, she tirelessly strove to sharpen her education. She loves Russian poetry, especially the works of Alexander Pushkin and Sergei Esenin.