For the third consecutive year, the Radehiv City Council, along with its Department of Culture, Tourism, Youth, and Sports, is co-organizing the regional war prose writing competition named after Osyp Turianyk, in collaboration with the National Union of Writers of Ukraine in the Lviv region.
Osyp Turianyk was a teacher at Galician secondary schools, a writer, and a literary critic. He graduated from Lviv Ukrainian Gymnasium and the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Vienna (1907), and earned a Doctor of Philosophy degree. He made his literary debut in 1908 with short stories in the Vienna ‘Sich’ almanac. From 1910, he taught Ukrainian language and literature at the Peremyshliany Gymnasium.
During World War I, he was captured by Serbs and in the winter of 1915 was among 60,000 Austrian prisoners who were transported across the Albanian mountains in harsh, freezing weather – only 15,000 survived. Turianyk’s life was saved by his compatriot, doctor Vasyl Romanishyn, who soon after perished in the war. While on Elba Island in 1917, in a POW camp, he poured his experiences from this dreadful ‘march of death’ into the bitter lines of the novella ‘Beyond the Limits of Pain.’
This expressionist novella, published in Vienna in 1921 in a German translation, unexpectedly turned him into the most famous Ukrainian writer in Europe, and the work became a phenomenon in Ukrainian modern literature. At the time, German and Austrian literary criticism ranked the novella higher than the anti-war works of renowned literary figures, including French writer Henri Barbusse and one of the most famous German writers of the 20th century, Erich Maria Remarque.
After his release, he taught law at the University of Vienna, and from 1923 in Galicia, he worked as the director of the Yavoriv, Drohobych, and Rohatyn gymnasiums, where he taught German, French, and Latin languages, and engaged in translation and publishing activities. Osyp Vasylovych Turianyk was born and developed in the village of Ohliadiv in the Radehiv area, in a carpenter’s family, on February 2, 1880. Turianyk was predicted to have a great creative future. But, of course, the Soviet horde was also a factor. Despite their efforts, the ‘brothers’ could not destroy memory and truth! We are proud!
Happy Birthday, Osyp Vasylovych!