Ostroverkha, Mykhailo

Ostroverkha, Mykhailo [Островерха, Михайло; Ostroverxa, Myxajlo], b 7 October 1897 in Buchach, Galicia, d 17 April 1979 in Brooklyn, New York State. Writer and journalist. In 1923 his poetry appeared under the pen name M. Osyka together with that of Yevhen Malaniuk and M. Selehii in the collection Ozymyna (Winter Grain). In the years 1926–39 he contributed to various Lviv journals and newspapers. In 1934–9 he wrote books about Italy and its political and cultural figures. During the Second World War he worked in the Military Board of the Division Galizien in Lviv and was chief editor (1943–5) of its weekly, Do peremohy. As a postwar émigré (from 1948 in the United States of America) he contributed to the daily Svoboda and published several collections of essays on literature, art, and politics—Z ryms'koho shchodennyka (From a Roman Journal, 1946), Nihil novi (1946), Bez dokoru (Without Reproach, 1948), Homin z daleka (An Echo from Afar, 1953), Chornoknyzhnyk iz Zubrivky: Khvyl'ovyi i khvyl'ovyzm (The Sorcerer from Zubrivka: Mykola Khvylovy and Khvylovism, 1955)—and the collections of memoirs Obnizhkamy na bytyi shliakh (Towards the Main Road, 1957), Na zakruti: Osin' 1939 roku (At the Turn: The Autumn of 1939, 1958), Hrona kalyny USS (Viburnum Clusters of the Ukrainian Sich Riflemen, 1962), and Blysky i temriavy (Flashes and Glooms, 1966). He also translated Italian literary works (G. Deledda, A. Negri, N. Machiavelli’s The Prince) into Ukrainian. A selection of his works was published in 1989.

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