Kost Lewyzkyj

Kost Lewyzkyj

Kostjantyn "Kost" Antonowytsch Levyzkyj ( Ukrainian Костянтин "Кость" Антонович Левицький , born November 18, 1859 in Tysmenyzja , today Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast , Ukraine ; † November 12, 1941 in Lemberg , Ukraine, was a well-known politician and Galician from Lemberg ) Chairman of the Ukrainian National Democratic Party (UNDP).

From 1907 to 1918 Levyzkyj was a member of the Austrian Reichsrat , where he held the office of Vice President of the House of Representatives for a long time, from 1910 to 1916 also chaired the Reichsrat faction of the Ukrainian parliamentary club and headed the Association of Ukrainian Members of Parliament in both chambers of the Reich Council. Between 1908 and 1914 Levyzkyj was also a member of the Galician Landtag , where he also held the office of Vice-President of the Chamber and chaired the "Ruthenian Club" (1910-1914).

After the dissolution of Austria-Hungary , he was the first president of the Council of State Secretaries - the government of the Western Ukrainian People's Republic .

life and work

Kost Lewyzkyj was born in 1859 in the small Galician town of Tysmenyzja near Stanislau (today Ivano-Frankivsk ) into the family of a Greek Catholic priest. In 1878, after graduating from high school in Stanislau, he studied law at the universities in Lemberg and Vienna , and in 1884 he received a doctorate in law from the University of Vienna .

In 1881 he was co-founder of the first professional association of Ukrainian lawyers Kruschok prawnyzyj ("Legal Circle"), he was also a board member of " Prosvita ".

In 1889 he and other lawyers from Lviv founded the Ukrainian legal journal (from 1894 - edition of the Scientific Shevchenko Society in Lemberg ), shortly afterwards the quarterly journal of the Association of Ukrainian Lawyers Shyttja i prawo ("Life and Law")

In 1890 Levyzkyj opened a law firm in Lviv. He combined the work as a lawyer with the activities in different bodies of the Ukrainian business associations such as the artisan cooperative Sorja ( "Star"), the consumer cooperative Narodowa torhiwlja ( "people trafficking", 1883), the credit union Dniester (1891), the National Credit Union (1898) the state revision union (1904) and the state mortgage bank (1910).

In the interwar period, Levyzkyj was a member of the Central Committee of the Ukrainian National Democratic Union, Director of Centrobank and wrote essential historical treatises on the history of Ukraine.

After the Red Army marched into western Ukraine in September 1939 , he was arrested by Soviet authorities and imprisoned in the Lubyanka prison in Moscow . In the spring of 1941 he was released and was able to return to Lviv. Eight days after the start of the German-Soviet war , a short-lived Ukrainian state was proclaimed on June 30, 1941, with Levyzkyj heading the council of elders of the national government under the patronage of Stepan Bandera's faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists . He died in Lviv in November 1941 and was buried there in the Janivskyj cemetery .

Levyzkyj is considered to be one of the main founders of Ukrainian legal terminology; He translated numerous Austrian laws from German and wrote a German-Ukrainian specialist dictionary for lawyers. He particularly tried to give the Ukrainian population of Galicia access to legal aid and to educate them about their rights. His series of popular legal articles for the mostly rural population is known, such as Our freedom, or What rights do we have (1888), Our municipal law, or What rights and obligations do we have in the commune (1889) etc.

Web links

Commons : Kost Lewyzkyj  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} biography of Kost Lewyzkyj in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine ; accessed on August 14, 2016
2. ^ Entry on Kostjantyn Levyzkyj in the Encyclopedia of the History of Ukraine ; accessed on August 18, 2020 (Ukrainian)