Marko Cheremshina

(real name, Ivan Iur’evich Seman-iuk). Born June 1 (13), 1874, in the village of Kobaki, in what is now Kosov Raion, Ivano-Frankovsk Oblast; died Apr. 25, 1927, in the city of Sniatin, in what is now Ivano-Frankovsk Oblast. Ukrainian writer.

The son of a peasant, Cheremshina graduated from the law faculty of the University of Vienna in 1901 and received his doctor of law degree in 1906. In 1912 he opened a law office in Sniatin, where he became known as the peasants’ attorney. He conducted extensive cultural and educational work among the local population.

Cheremshina’s first short story, “The Helmsman” (1896), dealt with the life of raftsmen on the Cheremosh River. His cycle of lyric prose poems Leaves (1898) was influenced by modernist aesthetics. Largely under the influence of I. Ia. Franko, Cheremshina subsequently turned to critical realism in such works as Notches (1901), a collection of short stories about poor Hutzul peasants. His collection The Village Perishes (1925) consisted of antimilitarist short stories dealing with the life of the people during World War I. The short stories Cheremshina wrote during the last years of his life about the poverty of the popular masses in bourgeois Poland appeared in Soviet Ukrainian periodicals and after his death were published in Kiev in 1929 in the collection The Summit.

Cheremshina’s work was highly valued by Franko, O. Makovei, O. Kobylianskaia, and Lesia Ukrainka. Some of his works have been translated into languages of the USSR and foreign countries. A museum devoted to Cheremshina was established in Sniatin in 1949, and monuments have been erected to the democratic writer in Sniatin and Kobaki.