Kyryliuk, Yevhen

Kyryliuk, Yevhen [Кирилюк, Євген; Kyryljuk, Jevhen], b 18 March 1902 in Warsaw, d 24 June 1989 in Kyiv. Slavist and literary critic; professor at Kyiv University from 1944 and corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR from 1957. A graduate of the Kyiv Institute of People's Education (1926), he became an associate of the Institute of Literature of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR; from 1944 he headed its Department of Shevchenko Studies. A prominent specialist in 19th-century Ukrainian literature, he has written books on Panteleimon Kulish (1929) (and compiled a bibliography of his works [1929]), Panas Myrny (1930, 1939), Taras Shevchenko (1951), Ivan Franko (1956, 1966), Lesia Ukrainka (1966), Vuk Karadžić and Ukrainian literature (1978), and Ivan Kotliarevsky (1969, 1982). He has also written the studies Ukraïns'ki pys'mennyky—revoliutsiini demokraty i literatury zakhidnykh i pivdennykh slov’ians'kykh narodiv u XIX stolitti (Ukrainian Writers—Revolutionary Democrats and the Literatures of the West and South Slavic Peoples in the 19th Century, 1963) and Ukraïns'kyi romantyzm u typolohichnomu zistavlenni z literaturamy zakhidno- i pivdennoslov’ians'kykh narodiv (Ukrainian Romanticism in Typological Comparison with the Literatures of the Western and Southern Slavic Peoples, 1973). A study of Ukrainian literature (1945) he wrote with Serhii Maslov was harshly criticized as ‘nationalist’ and banned. He was also the editor in chief of the complete edition of Shevchenko’s works (6 vols, 1963–4) and the Shevchenko dictionary (2 vols, 1976–7). Collections of his literary articles were published in 1969, 1972, and 1977.

Ivan Koshelivets

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