Yaroslav Ivanovych Pavulyak was a Ukrainian

Ukraine

Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It has an area of 603,628 km², making it the second largest contiguous country on the European continent, after Russia...

 poet. He was also known as Iaroslav Pavuliak.

Life

He was born in the village of Nastasiv in Ternopil

Ternopil Oblast

Ternopil Oblast is an oblast' of Ukraine. Its administrative center is Ternopil, through which flows the Seret River, a tributary of the Dnister.-Geography:...

, western Ukraine. He attended art school in Lviv

Lviv

Lviv is a city in western Ukraine. The city is regarded as one of the main cultural centres of today's Ukraine and historically has also been a major Polish and Jewish cultural center, as Poles and Jews were the two main ethnicities of the city until the outbreak of World War II and the following...

, focusing on ceramics. He graduated in 1967. and began working at different galleries and craftwork sites while also doing various restoration work.

In 1969, he built a statue of Taras Shevchenko

Taras Shevchenko

Taras Hryhorovych Shevchenko -Life:Born into a serf family of Hryhoriy Ivanovych Shevchenko and Kateryna Yakymivna Shevchenko in the village of Moryntsi, of Kiev Governorate of the Russian Empire Shevchenko was orphaned at the age of eleven...

 in Nastasiv which led to a severe prosecution of his family by KGB

KGB

The KGB was the commonly used acronym for the . It was the national security agency of the Soviet Union from 1954 until 1991, and was the premier internal security, intelligence, and secret police organization during that time.The State Security Agency of the Republic of Belarus currently uses the...

. He was threatened and put under house arrest for two months. Later, he attended the University of Chernivtsy. In December 1971 he was fired because he was again promoting Ukrainian language

Ukrainian language

Ukrainian is a language of the East Slavic subgroup of the Slavic languages. It is the official state language of Ukraine. Written Ukrainian uses a variant of the Cyrillic alphabet....

 and culture. He restarted his studies in 1972 at the Department of Teaching at the University of Kamianets-Podilskyi

Kamianets-Podilskyi

Kamyanets-Podilsky or Kamienets-Podolsky is a city located on the Smotrych River in western Ukraine, to the north-east of Chernivtsi...

, where he was again forced to leave for the same reason as he left Tchernivtsy.

In 1973 he was accepted to the Gorki Institute of Literature in Moscow

Moscow

Moscow is the capital, the most populous city, and the most populous federal subject of Russia. The city is a major political, economic, cultural, scientific, religious, financial, educational, and transportation centre of Russia and the continent...

. After graduating and getting married to a Czechoslovakian citizen, he relocated to the former Czechoslovakia

Czechoslovakia

Czechoslovakia or Czecho-Slovakia was a sovereign state in Central Europe which existed from October 1918, when it declared its independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, until 1992...

where he worked at a literary agency, LITA. Later he returned to the Ukraine. He worked as a director of a Museum of Political Prisoners and Victims of Communist Regime in Ternopil. He was a member of The National Writers' Union of Ukraine and the Society of Ukrainian Writers in Slovakia (Spolok ukrajinských spisovateľov na Slovensku).

Literary work

Pavulyak wrote three books of poems:

• Блудний лебідь - "Bludniy lebid" (1993)
• Mогили на конях - "Mohyly na konyax" (1999)
• "Dorohy dodomu: Poezii. Poemy" (2009)

External links

• Ярослав Павуляк, an article within a literary overview Література рідного краю (Ukrainian)
• Yaroslav Pavulyak website