Kozlaniuk, Petro

Kozlaniuk, Petro [Козланюк, Петро; Kozlanjuk], b 12 August 1904 in Pereriv, Kolomyia county, Galicia, d 19 March 1965 in Lviv. Galician Sovietophile writer. He began publishing political feuilletons and stories about the Galician working class in 1926 in the periodicals Hromads’kyi holos and Sel’-Rob. A member of the editorial board of the journal Vikna (1927–32), he cofounded the literary organization Horno in 1929 and was an editor of the weekly Syla (1930–2). During the 1939–41 Soviet occupation of Western Ukraine, he wrote for the newspaper Vil’na Ukraïna (Lviv). During the Second World War he was a Soviet radio commentator, and after the war he headed the Lviv branch of the Writer's Union of Ukraine (1944–52, 1954–65). He wrote many works, mostly of a propagandistic and socialist-realist nature, set in interwar Galicia. Over 30 collections of his stories and feuilletons appeared during his lifetime. His largest work is the trilogy Iurko Kruk (1946–56). Collected editions of his works appeared in 1960 (3 vols) and 1974–5 (4 vols). Books about him have been written by Yu. Baida (1959) and V. Kachkan (1980).

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 2 (1988).]