Tys, Yurii
Tys, Yurii (Тис, Юрій; pseudonym of Юрій Крохмалюк; Yurii Krokhmaliuk), b 27 October 1904 in Cracow, d 1 January 1994 in Bloomington, Illinois, USA. Writer, editor, and military historian. He graduated from the Vienna Technical Higher School (1928) and worked as an engineer in Galicia, where he was a member of the Union of Ukrainian Merchants and Entrepreneurs. During the Second World War he was a staff officer with the rank of major in the Division Galizien. As a postwar refugee in Argentina, he was a cofounder of the Association of Ukrainian Scholars, Artists, and Litterateurs in Buenos Aires. After moving to the United States of America, he settled in Detroit where he founded the Institute of Ukrainian Culture and, from 1962, was chief editor of the journal Terem. A major émigré author of historical fiction, he wrote the novels Pid L'vovom pluh vidpochyvav (Near Lviv the Plow Rested, 1937), Reid u nevidome: Dyvni pryhody znatnoho molodtsia pana Mykoly Predtvycha (Raid into the Unknown: The Strange Adventures of the Notable Young Noble Mykola Predtvych, 1955), Zhyttia inshoï liudyny (The Life of a Different Person, 1958), Konotop (1959), Zvidun z Chyhyryna (The Scout from Chyhyryn, 1961), Na svitanku: Biohrafichna povist' z zhyttia Marka Vovchka (At Daybreak: A Biographical Novelette from the Life of Marko Vovchok, 1961), and K-7 (1964), and the story collections Shliakhamy vikiv (Along the Roads of Ages, 1951) and Markiza (The Marquise, 1954). He also wrote the reportage collection Symfoniia zemli (The Earth’s Symphony, 1951), the Christmas mystery play Ne plach, Rakhile (Don’t Cry, Rachel, 1952), the humorous autobiographical Shchodennyk natsional'noho heroia Selepka Lavochky (Diary of the National Hero Selepko Lavochka, 1954; 2nd edn 1982), and the monographs Boï Khmel'nyts’koho (Khmelnytsky’s Battles, 1954), La Batalla de Poltava (1960), Guerra y libertad: Historia de la Division ‘Halychyna’ (d.u.1) del Ejercito Nacional Ucranio (1943–1945) (1961), and UPA Warfare in Ukraine: Strategical, Tactical and Organizational Problems of Ukrainian Resistance in World War II (1972). His belletristic, historical, and political writings appeared in émigré periodicals such as Vyzvol’nyi shliakh, Visti kombatanta, and Estafeta.
Roman Senkus
[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 5 (1993).]