Hrytsai, Ostap

Hrytsai, Ostap [Грицай, Остап; Hrycaj], b 2 November 1881 in Kniazhpil, Dobromyl county, Galicia, d 7 May 1954 in Munich, West Germany. Journalist, literary critic, writer, and translator. After receiving a PH D in German language and literature from the University of Vienna in 1910, he taught at the Academic Gymnasium of Lviv. He lived in Vienna from 1914 to 1945 and then in Bavaria. During the First World War he belonged to the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine and edited its irregular periodical Ukrainische Blätter. He was a full member of the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the Shevchenko Scientific Society. His first literary works began to appear in Sich in 1908. His stories and articles appeared in such publications as Dilo, Literaturno-naukovyi vistnyk, Svoboda (Lviv), Volia (Vienna), and Ukraïns’ke slovo (1922–5). A series of his articles on Ukrainian literature and his German translations of Slovo o polku Ihorevi (The Tale of Ihor’s Campaign), many of Taras Shevchenko’s poems, and poems by other Ukrainian poets were published in the Vienna newspaper Ukrainische Nachrichten.

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