Martovich, Les

(also Aleksei Semenovich Martovich). Born Jan. 31 (Feb. 12), 1871, in the village of Torgovitsa, in present-day Gorodenka Raion, Ivano-Frankovsk Oblast; died Dec. 29, 1915 (Jan. 11, 1916), in the village of Pogorisko, in present-day Nesterov Raion, L’vov Oblast. Ukrainian writer and public figure. Son of a clerk.

Martovich received a higher education in law as an external student. From 1895 he practiced law in villages in Galicia, which was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and did social and educational work. In 1897-98 he was editor of the newspaper Gromads ’kyi golos (Voice of the Community). A democrat by conviction, Martovich sympathized with the liberation struggle of the working people and was attracted to scientific socialism. His works were first published in 1889. The sociopsychological short story “A Muzhik’s Death” (1898) brought him success. With the appearance of the collections Nechital’nik (1900), Sly Pan’ko and Other Stories (1903), and The Gift ofStribog and Other Stories (1905), Martovich demonstrated that he ranked with the great Western Ukrainian short-story writers V. Stefanik and Marko Cheremshina and showed himself to be a spokesman for the working peasantry with its aspirations to freedom. In the satirical novella Superstition (1911, published 1917) he ridiculed the mores of the middle class and bourgeois intelligentsia. Martovich was also a publicist, publishing the revolutionary proclamation “On the First of May, 1893. Karl Marx” in the city of Kolomye. His works have been translated into many languages.