Hrynevycheva, Katria

Hrynevycheva, Katria [Гриневичева, Катря; Hrynevyčeva, Katrja] (née Банах; Banakh), b 19 November 1875 in Vynnyky, Lviv county, d 27 December 1947 in Berchtesgaden, Germany. Modernist writer and community leader. With encouragement from Vasyl Stefanyk and Ivan Franko, she began writing poetry and prose in Ukrainian, which appeared in such journals as Literaturno-naukovyi vistnyk and Bukovyna from 1893 on. From 1909 to 1911 she edited the children’s magazine Dzvinok. From 1915 to 1917 she taught at Ukrainian internment camps in Austria and contributed to Vistnyk Soiuza vyzvolennia Ukraïny. Starting in 1918 she worked for the newspaper Ukraïns’ke slovo (1915–18). In 1922 she was elected president of the Union of Ukrainian Women in Galicia. She is the author of short-story collections—Legendy i opovidannia (Legends and Short Stories, 1902), Po dorozi v Sykhem (On the Way to Sychem, 1923), Nepoborni (The Invincible, 1926, about Galician internees)—and a few years later she wrote several historical novelettes set in the Princely era— Sholomy v sontsi (Helmets in the Sun, 1924, 1929), and Shestykrylets’ (The Six-Winged One, 1935, 1936). Her works, most of which appeared first in periodicals, have not been collected. Her masterly handling of the Ukrainian language, particularly her stylizing of the folk vernacular and her sophisticated use of Ukrainian archaisms in her historical novelettes, places her among the important Ukrainian modernist prose writers. Her biography, by her son Ya. Hrynevych, was published in Toronto in 1968.

Mykola Hlobenko

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