Tsurkovsky, Yaroslav

Tsurkovsky, Yaroslav [Цурковський, Ярослав; Curkovs'kyj, Jaroslav], b 1 January 1905 in Ternopil, d 24 April 1995 in Lviv. Poet and psychologist. He graduated from Lviv University (1927) and Prague University (1927) and wrote poetry collections Prozolot' svitanku (The Gilding of the Dawn, 1925), Vohni (Fires, 1926), Smoloskypy (Torches, 1926), and Momenty i vichnist' (Moments and Eternity, 1927); narrative poems ‘Zbentezhenyi litak’ (The Confused Airplane, Sluzhbovyk, 1928, nos 4–6) and ‘Boianovyi homin’ (Boian’s Echo); the novel Bohach ta nuzhdar (The Rich Man and the Indigent); and the drama Teklia Moroz. In the years 1932–9 he was director of Lviv’s Institute of Psychological Research by the Integral Method. During the 1939–41 Soviet occupation of Galicia he headed the Writers' Union of Ukraine’s organizing committee in Lviv and was secretary of Literatura i mystetstvo. After the Second World War he organized the first Soviet Ukrainian experimental laboratory of the psychology and physiology of labor at the Lviv Forklift Plant; in 1966 it became the Central Branch Laboratory of Psychology, Physiology, and Working Conditions of the USSR Ministry of the Automobile Industry. The author of works in psychology and human engineering and the originator of the theory of psychological controllability, he invented a ‘controlograph’ for use in psychological diagnoses.

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 5 (1993).]



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