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Bohdan Ihor Antonych was born on 9 October 1909 in the Lemko village of Novytsia (Polish: Nowica) in Gorlice county, Galicia. His father was a Uniate Catholic priest. Antonych's mother tongue and the one that he and other family members spoke at home was Lemko, the westernmost Ukrainian dialect, which is quite distinct from standard Ukrainian. he did not learn to speak the latter until he was a teenager. Antonych's formal education at the gymnasium he attended in Sanok and, from the age of eighteen, in the humanities at Lviv University, from which he graduated with the degree of master of philosophy in 1934, was conducted exclusively in Polish. While living and studying in Lviv, he was exposed not only to the Polish and Ukrainian cultures, but also to the Jewish, German, and other minority cultures of that city. The first two cultures, however, had a determining influence on him.
Antonych was not the first Ukrainian writer to function in more than one linguistic milieu.1 Although he never wrote poetry in Polish, he drew upon his bicultural heritage to introduce new aesthetic ideas into Ukrainian literature. To understand the nature of his new poetic diction, one must appreciate the complicated interaction of his Lemko origins, his formal Polish education, and his relatively late literary mastery of standard Ukrainian.
In the context of interwar Western Ukrainian literature, Antonych's poetry had a different ring from the very outset. While most of his contemporaries were preoccupied primarily with political and social issues, he was interested in metaphysical, philosophical, and meta-poetic questions. His first collection of poetry, Pryvitannia zhyttia (Greetings to Life, 1931), had a beginner's bookish air, but it surprised readers with its many new themes, including those of sports and of the unconscious. The critics warmly welcomed the young poet, but they failed to appreciate the innovative nature of his poetry. In general, they praised Antonych for his pastoral depiction of nature, which was familiar to the Ukrainian reader, and deemed him a "poet of the soil," to quote levhen Malaniuk. This led to the misinterpretation of Antonych's later works, for example, of his depiction of urban loci in catastrophic terms. Malaniuk asserted that the gloomy imagery of the urban poetry in Antonych's 1938 collection Rotatsii...