Mosendz, Leonid

Mosendz, Leonid [Мосендз, Леонід] (pseuds: Osyp Liaskovets [Осип Лясковець], Rostyslav Berladnyk [Ростислав Берладник]), b 20 September 1897 in Mohyliv-Podilskyi, Podilia gubernia, d 13 October 1948 in Blonay, Switzerland. Writer. He studied at the teachers' seminary in Vinnytsia (1911–15) and worked as a teacher in Hnivan (1918–20). A demobilized Army of the Ukrainian National Republic soldier, he fled to Poland in 1920. He returned to Lutsk in 1921, whereupon he was arrested by the Poles and sent to an internment camp in Kalisz. After his release he studied chemical engineering at the Ukrainian Husbandry Academy (1923–8) in Poděbrady. There he translated a Czech inorganic chemistry textbook (1924) with M. Vikul, contributed to the student periodicals Podiebradka and Students’kyi visnyk, worked as an assistant to V. Ivanys, and wrote a brochure in Czech about Ukraine. After two years of graduate studies in Brno he received a doctorate from the academy in 1931 and worked as a civil engineer in Bratislava. In 1937–9 he taught in a commercial school in Sevliush, Transcarpathia. From 1939 to 1945 he was a chemist in Bratislava, whence he fled to the British zone in Austria. He died in a Swiss tuberculosis sanatorium.

From the late 1920s Mosendz contributed poetry, prose, literary criticism, and book reviews to Literaturno-naukovyi vistnyk, the journal Vistnyk, Samostiina Ukraïna, and Proboiem. He wrote the drama in verse Vichnyi korabel’ (The Eternal Ship, 1933); the narrative poems Kanitfershtan (from the German Kann nicht verstehen, 1945) and Volyns’kyi rik (A Volhynian Year, 1948); the poetry collections Zodiiak (Zodiac, 1941) and Dyiabolichni paraboly (Diabolic Parabolas, 1947, together with Yurii Klen under the collective pseud Porfyrii Horotak); the autobiographical novelette Zasiv (The Sowing, 1936, 1941, 1946); the story collections Liudyna pokirna (Homo lenis, 1937, 1951), Vidplata (Retribution, 1939), and Pomsta (Revenge, 1941); and the posthumously published unfinished novel Ostannii prorok (The Last Prophet, 1960). He also translated English (eg, Edgar Allan Poe), French, German, and other literary works into Ukrainian. The principal themes of Mosendz's works, including his publicistic pamphlets about the Prussian statesman Baron K. Stein (1935) and Mykola Khvylovy (1948), derive from his well-developed sense of Ukrainian patriotism.

Roman Senkus

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 3 (1993).]