Smotrych, Oleksander

Smotrych, Oleksander [Smotryč] (pen name of Oleksander Floruk), b 28 April 1922 in Kamianets-Podilskyi. (Photo: Oleksander Smotrych.) Writer. During the Second World War he worked as a journalist for the nationalist papers Ukraïns’ke slovo (1941) and Holos (Berlin). As a postwar refugee in Germany (where he was a member of the MUR literary organization) and, since the late 1940s, Toronto he wrote the story collections Nochi (Nights, 1947), Vony ne zhyvut’ bil’she (They Are No Longer Alive, 1948), Vybrane (Selections, 1952), and Buttia: 16 nikomu nepotribnykh opovidan’ (Being: 16 Stories Nobody Needs, 1973). Having switched to poetry, he published on his own nine booklets of satirical and provocative poems titled Virshi (Verses, 1974–5) and the collections 20 korotkykh virshiv (20 Short Verses, 1975) and 1933 (1975). A lyrical collection, Uzhynok (The Reaping, 1985), was published by the Suchasnist’ publishing house. His stories and poems have appeared in Novi dni, Suchasnist’, and other émigré periodicals.

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 4 (1993).]