George S. N. Luckyj

George (i.e. Yuriy) Luckyj and his grandfather Stepan Smal-Stotskyy in Prague, 1937.

George Stephen Nestor Luckyj (born Юрій Луцький, transcribed: Yuriy Lutskyy; Yanchyn, now Ivanivka, Lviv Oblast, 1919 - Toronto, November 22, 2001) was a scholar of Ukrainian literature, who greatly contributed to the awareness of Ukrainian literature in the English-speaking world and to the continuation of legitimate scholarship on the subject during the post-war period.

Biography[]

Luckyj was born in 1919 in the village Yanchyn, today  [uk], close to Lviv. His father was , a Ukrainian modernist poet and member of the Polish Senate, and his mother was , the child of , a Ukrainian philologist and Austrian parliament member.

After studying German literature at the University of Berlin, he fortunately went to England right before World War II for a summer program at Cambridge University. After the Soviet occupation of Western Ukraine, formerly Poland, in 1939, his father was taken by the NKVD and eventually died in a concentration camp. In 1943, Luckyj joined the British army and worked as a Russian interpreter in occupied Germany.

In 1947, he moved to Saskatoon, Canada for a position teaching English literature at the University of Saskatchewan. Two year afterwards, he left for New York to pursue a doctorate at Columbia University. His Ph.D. dissertation became the key Ukrainian literary scholarly text, Literary Politics in the Soviet Ukraine, 1917–1934. He also participated in the activities of the , an important scholarly institution begun by Ukrainian émigrés in New York.

He became a professor at the University of Toronto and was involved in the creation of the and . His writing, both scholarly and of translation, was prodigious until his death in 2001.

Awards[]

• Antonovych prize (1998)

Translations[]

Luckyj was well known for his translations of Ukrainian literature, which have exposed large new audiences to its depth and quality.

• The Hunters and the Hunted, Ivan Bahrianyi (1954, 1956)
• Iwan Majstrenko's Borotbism: A Chapter in the History of Ukrainian Communism (1954)
• Elie Borschak's Hryhor Orlyk: France's Cossack General (1956)
• Dmytro Doroshenko's "Survey of Ukrainian Historiography" (1957)
• Mykola Khvyliovy's Stories from the Ukraine (1960)
• Hryhory Kostiuk's Stalinist Rule in the Ukraine: A Decade of Mass Terror (1960)
• George Y. Shevelov's Syntax of Modern Literary Ukrainian (1963)
• by Valerian Pidmohylny (1972)
• Panteleimon Kulish's (1973)
• Mykola Kulish's Sonata Pathètique (1975)
• Yevhen Sverstiuk's Clandestine Essays (1976)
• Mykhailo Kotsiubyns'kyi's Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1981)
• Pavlo Zaitsev's Taras Shevchenko: A Life (1988)

References[]

• Luckyj, George S.N. ([1956] 1990). Literary Politics in the Soviet Ukraine, 1917–1934, revised and updated edition. Durham NC: Duke University Press. ISBN 0-8223-1099-6

• Thomas M. Prymak, "The Generation of 1919: Pritsak, Luckyj, and Rudnytsky." In The Ukrainian Weekly http://www.ukrweekly.com/uwwp/the-generation-of-1919-pritsak-luckyj-and-rudnytsky/

External links[]

• George S. N. Luckyj archival papers held at the University of Toronto Archives and Records Management Services