Galan, Iaroslav

Born July 14, (27), 1902, in Dynów, now part of Poland; died Oct. 24, 1949, in L’vov. Soviet Ukrainian writer.

Galan was born into the family of an office worker. From 1923 to 1928 he studied at the universities of Vienna and Kraków. In 1924, Galan joined the Communist Party of the Western Ukraine, and in 1949 he became a member of the CPSU. He took part in illegal revolutionary work, contributed to the journal Vikna, and was one of the organizers of the group of proletarian writers called Horno. He suffered persecution, and in 1934 and 1937 he was imprisoned. After the reunification of the Ukrainian lands in 1939, he published short stories and sketches on the rebirth of the liberated western regions of the Ukraine. During the Great Patriotic War he worked in the editorial offices of frontline newspapers and also as a radio commentator (Frontline On the Air, 1943). In a number of pamphlets he exposed bourgeois-nationalistic and clerical reactionaries, including Their Faces (1948),/« Satan’s Service (1948),/« the Face of Facts (1949), and The Prince of Darkness and His Gang (1949). In his tragedy Under the Golden Eagle, Galan portrayed the hard life in camps for “displaced persons” and the arbitrariness of the American occupation authorities, and he created heroic images of the Soviet patriots. He is the author of a number of plays, including Don Quixote of Ettenheim (1926-27), 99% (1930), Load (1930), and Party Cell (1932). The play Love at Dawn (written 1949, published 1951) depicts the class struggle in a postwar western Ukrainian village. Galan’s plays are characterized by political acumen and tense dramatic conflict. Galan died tragically at the hand of a Ukrainian bourgeois nationalist. In 1952 he was posthumously awarded the State Prize of the USSR for the pamphlets in the collection Izbrannoe (1951). Galan’s works have been translated into many languages.