Mariyka Pidhiryanka

Mariyka Pidhiryanka (Ukrainian: Марійка Підгірянка, 1881–1963) was a Ukrainian poet, best remembered for her children's poetry though she also wrote adult work on patriotic themes.

Pidhiryanka was a pen-name, meaning "from under the mountains" and she was born Mariya Omelyanivna Lenert on 29 March 1881, in the village of Bili Oslavy near the town of Nadvirna on the edge of the Carpathian forest, in what was then Austrian Galicia. The landscape inspired her poem Верховина (Uplands):

Блакитне небо в головах,
А в ногах - ліси сині.
Орли мандрують в небесах,
Овечки - в полонині.

My head is in a sky so blue,
But I stand true in woods on high.
Sheep now shelter where I grew,
Where eagles freely fly.

Her father was a forester with a large family, who decided that he could only afford to send his sons to school. Instead, she was taught to read and write and subsequently given a literary education by her grandfather, a Greek Catholic priest. She subsequently won a scholarship to a girls' secondary school and in 1900 gained a place at a teacher training academy in L'viv, the provincial capital of eastern Galicia.

The city was the leading centre of Ukrainian literary life and political activism, led by the poet Ivan Franko and his admirers. Unlike Tsarist Russia, Austria allowed publication in the Ukrainian language and Pidhiryanka's first collection of poetry appeared in L'viv in 1908. By then she was married and officially Mariya Lenert-Dombrovs'ka.

During the First World War, with her husband conscripted into the Austro-Hungarian army, Pidhiryanka was evacuated with her children away from the Russian advance. Ukrainians were suspected of pro-Russian sympathies and the family was placed in civilian internment camps in Transcarpathia (then part of Hungary) and in Austria. She described the experience in her 1916 poem На чужині (In a strange land):

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