Molnar, Mykhailo

Molnar, Mykhailo [Мольнар, Михайло; Mol'nar, Myxajlo; Czech: Molnár, Michal], b 4 November 1930 in Velyka Chynhava (now Borzhavske), Transcarpathia, 20 October 2006 in Bratislava. Literary scholar; husband of Larysa Molnar. He studied at the Ukrainian gymnasium in Modřany, near Prague (1940–5) (see Ukrainian Gymnasium in Czechoslovakia), Prague University (1950–5), and Kyiv University (graduate studies, 1956–60). From 1960 he worked at the Slovak Academy of Sciences in Bratislava, where he was director of the Institute of World Literature and Languages. An authority on 19th- and 20th-century Ukrainian-Czechoslovak literary relations, he edited, with introductions, several books in the field (including the first Soviet anthology of works by Ukrainian writers living in Slovakia’s Prešov region, 1960), Slovak translations of Ukrainian literature, Ukrainian translations of Czech and Slovak literature, and editions of works by Ukrainian writers from the Prešov region. He wrote books on Taras Shevchenko’s reception by the Czechs and Slovaks (1961) and on Slovak-Ukrainian literary relations (1965, with relevant documents) and hundreds of articles and reviews. An edition of his selected works (with a bibliography), Zustrichi kul'tur (The Meetings of Cultures), appeared in 1980.

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 3 (1993).]