As a writer, Vynnychenko is recognized in Ukrainian literature as a leading modernist writer in prerevolutionary Ukraine, who wrote short stories, novels, and plays, but in Soviet Ukraine his works were forbidden, like that of many other Ukrainian writers, from the 1930s until the mid-1980s. Prior to his entry onto the stage of Ukrainian politics, he was a long-time political activist, who lived abroad in Western Europe from 1906 to 1914. His works reflect his immersion in the Ukrainian revolutionary milieu, among impoverished and working-class people, and among émigrés from the Russian Empire living in Western Europe.