Vincenz, Stanisław

Vincenz, Stanisław, b 30 November 1888 in Sloboda Rungurska, Kolomyia county, Galicia, d 28 January 1971 in Lausanne, Switzerland. Polish writer and essayist. He spent his childhood and youth in the Hutsul region. He studied at Vienna University and worked for a few years as a journal editor in Warsaw. Later he lived in Hungary (1940–6) and Germany (1946–7), near Grenoble, France (1947–64), and in Lausanne. From 1947 he contributed to the Polish journal Kultura (Paris). Fluent in the Hutsul dialect and well versed in Hutsul folkways, folk customs, and folklore, he wrote an epical tetralogy about the Hutsul region’s past and present, Na wysokiej połoninie: Obrazy, dumy i gawędy z Wierchowiny Huculskiej (In the High Mountain Pasture: Pictures, Elegies, and Tales from the Hutsul Highland, 1936 [rev edn 1956], 1970, 1974, 1979; repr 1983). An abridged English translation of the first volume, On the High Uplands, was published in New York in 1955, and Ukrainian translations of it were serialized in the Lviv journal Zhovten’ (1969–71). Several editions of Vincenz’s philosophical, cultural, and political essays and reminiscences were published in the West and in Poland between 1965 and 1983; they include Wspomnienia o Lwowie (Reminiscences of Lviv, 1967) and Dialogi Lwowskie (Lviv Dialogues, 1968).

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 5 (1993).]