Koshelivets, Ivan

Koshelivets, Ivan [Кошелівець, Іван; Košelivec'; Koszeliwec, Iwan], b 10 November 1907 in Velyka Koshelivka, Chernihiv gubernia, d 5 February 1999 in Munich. A leading émigré literary scholar and critic; full member of the Shevchenko Scientific Society and the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences; husband of Emma Andiievska. A graduate of the Nizhyn Institute of People's Education (1930), he worked as a teacher in Kremenchuk and Nizhyn in the 1930s and was a graduate student at the Institute of Literature of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR in 1940–1. As a postwar refugee, he lived in Munich from 1947. He was the editor in chief of the monthlies Ukraïns’ka literaturna hazeta (1955–60) and Suchasnist’ (1961–6, 1976–7, 1983–4) and, with a few breaks, a member of the latter’s editorial board. Since the late 1950s he has also been a member of the editorial board of Entsyklopediia ukraïnoznavstva (Encyclopedia of Ukraine). Koshelivets wrote many articles on literature and the arts. He compiled and edited the anthology Panorama nainovishoï literatury v URSR (Panorama of the Newest Literature of the Ukrainian SSR, 1963; rev edn, 1974); wrote the monographs Suchasna literatura v URSR (Contemporary Literature in the Ukrainian SSR, 1964), and studies of Mykola Skrypnyk and Oleksander Dovzhenko, Mykola Skrypnyk (1972) and Oleksander Dovzhenko (1980); edited a Polish collection of Soviet Ukrainian dissident documents, Ukraina 1956–1968 (Ukraine, 1956–1968, 1969); and translated into Ukrainian literary works from Russian, Belarusian, German (Franz Kafka’s short prose), and French (including Denis Diderot’s Jacques le Fataliste et son maître). His memoirs, Rozmovy v dorozi do sebe (Conversations on the Way to Myself), appeared in 1985.

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 2 (1988).]