Irchan, Miroslav

(pseudonym of Andrei Dmitrievich Babiuk). Born July 2 (14), 1897; died 1937. Soviet Ukrainian writer; member of the CPSU from 1920.

The son of a poor peasant in the village of Piadiki in present-day Kolomyia Raion, Ivano-Frankovsk Oblast, Irchan graduated in 1914 from the L’vov Teachers Seminary. His first book, Laughter of Nirvana (1918), was a response to the events of World War I, in which he had fought. In 1923 he published a collection of tales, Films of the Revolution. His memoirs in two parts, The Tragedy of May First (1923) and In Tangles of Weeds (1925), were popular.

In 1923, Irchan moved to Canada, where he launched a vigorous career in publishing, literature, and publicistic journalism. In his plays he portrayed the revolutionary struggle of the working people of Galicia, unmasking nationalists in Underground Galicia (1926). He exposed the bourgeois system in several plays, The Family of Brushmakers (1927), Radium (1928), and The Jumping-Off Place (1931), as well as in the short novel Carpathian Night (1927) and a book of sketches, Against Death (1927).

Irchan returned to the Soviet Ukraine in 1929. He was editor of the magazine Zakhidna Ukraina (Western Ukraine). His plays were translated into several languages and performed on the stages of many Soviet and Canadian theaters.