Tkachuk, Ivan [Ткачук, Іван; Tkačuk; pseudonym: Ivan Chornobyl], b 25 September 1891 in Piadyky, Kolomyia county, Galicia, d 9 October 1948 in Lviv. Writer and journalist. After being released from a Russian prisoner of war camp following the February Revolution of 1917, he joined the Bolshevik party and remained in Soviet Ukraine. He edited the newspapers Chervona pravda (Kyiv, 1920), Selians'ka pravda (Katerynoslav, 1921–3), Zirka (Katerynoslav, 1923–4), and Radians'kyi step (Melitopol, 1924), and the journal Zoria (Dnipropetrovsk) (1925–9). From 1925 to 1933 he belonged to the writers’ group Zakhidnia Ukraina. His stories and articles on political, literary, and cultural topics appeared in Soviet Ukrainian and Ukrainian communist periodicals in Lviv, the United States of America, and Canada. Published separately were his prose collections Pomsta (Revenge, 1927), Smerekovi shumy (The Spruces’ Murmurings, 1929), Nezakinchenyi lyst (An Unfinished Letter, 1930), Na vkradenii zemli (On the Stolen Land, 1930; 2nd edn 1933), Prostrilenyi dekret (The Plugged Decree, 1930), Ukraïntsi za okeanom (Ukrainians across the Ocean, 1930), Straik (Strike, 1931), and Za Kavkaz'kymy khrebtamy (Beyond the Caucasian Ranges, 1932). He also coauthored (with Mykola Skrypnyk and Ye. Cherniak) a book of essays on contemporary Western Ukrainian literature (1930) and wrote a short book about revolutionary proletarian literature in Western Ukraine (1932). He was arrested in 1933, and was imprisoned in a Soviet labor camp. When he was released and settled in Lviv after the Second World War he was a very sick man. Posthumous editions of his works were published in 1955, 1962, and 1968.

Roman Senkus

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