Volodymyr Kubiyovych - Early Life

Early Life

From 1918, Kubiyovych was educated at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow. After the collapse of Austria-Hungary, he served in the ranks of the Ukrainian Galician Army which unsuccessfully fought the Poles for control of the eastern part of the former Austrian province of Galicia. At the end of the Ukrainian-Polish war, he returned to his studies in geography at the Jagiellonian University. During the years 1928 to 1939, Kubiyovych taught at this institution as a lecturer (docent) but in 1939, was denied further tenure under political pressure from the Polish Ministry of War. In 1940, he was appointed professor of the Ukrainian Free University in Prague which managed to preserve a precarious existence in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia. From 1931, Kubiyovych had been a full member of the Galician-based Shevchenko Scientific Society, which had with some difficulty carried on its scholarly work under Polish rule; Kubiyovych headed its geography commission.

Before 1939, Kubiyovych's scholarly works concentrated on the geography and demography of the Carpathian Mountains, especially the eastern Beskids, populated largely by the Ukrainian-speaking minority. At this time, he questioned official Polish statistics concerning the ethnic make-up of the inter-war Polish Republic and maintained that the official numbers on Ukrainians were grossly understated. He was an editor and co-author of the pioneering Ukrainian-language Atlas of Ukraine and Adjacent Lands (1937) and the equally pioneering Ukrainian-language Geography of Ukraine and Neighbouring Lands (1938, 1943).

Read more about this topic:  Volodymyr Kubiyovych

Famous quotes containing the words early life, early and/or life:

    ... goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments based on his personal acquaintance.
    George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)

    We have good reason to believe that memories of early childhood do not persist in consciousness because of the absence or fragmentary character of language covering this period. Words serve as fixatives for mental images. . . . Even at the end of the second year of life when word tags exist for a number of objects in the child’s life, these words are discrete and do not yet bind together the parts of an experience or organize them in a way that can produce a coherent memory.
    Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)

    In different hours, a man represents each of several of his ancestors, as if there were seven or eight of us rolled up in each man’s skin,—seven or eight ancestors at least, and they constitute the variety of notes for that new piece of music which his life is.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)