Vasyl Stefanyk - Political Career

Political Career

In 1901 Stefanyk was at the height of his literary career, but for the next 15 years he wrote nothing. Upon the arrival to Poltava on the opening of the monument to Ivan Kotliarevsky in 1903 he was met by the members of Ukrainian intelligentsia as the accomplished national writer. From 1908 until the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918, Stefanyk was a member of the Austrian parliament, elected as a substitute for Volodmyr Okhrymovych in 1907 from the Ukrainian Radical party in Galicia. The horror of the First World War jolted him back into writing in 1916, and he produced one more collection, Zemlia (Earth, 1926). During the period of the Western Ukrainian National Republic, as a former member of parliament, Stefanyk became the vice-president of the Ukrainian National Rada, and in 1919 he went to Kiev for the signing of the agreement with the Ukrainian National Republic on the unification of Ukraine. In 1922 he became the district head of the Ukrainian Radical party. Recognizing him as the greatest living writer in western Ukraine, the government of Soviet Ukraine decreed a life pension for Stefanyk, which he turned down in protest against the repressions in Ukraine. In addition to his five collections of novellas, Stefanyk published stories, in several editions of collected works: an edition in 1927 in Soviet Ukraine; a jubilee edition (Lviv 1933); an émigré edition edited by his son, Yurii Stefanyk (Regensburg 1948); and the three-volume academic edition, published in Ukrainian SSR (1949–54). The 1964 edition of Stefanyk's selected works, edited by Vasyl Lesyn and Fedir Pohrebennyk, complemented and corrected some of the lacunae and faults of the academic edition. The "Blue Book" was republished in Ukraine in 1966 in an edition lavishly illustrated by Mykhaylo Turovsky.