Mushynka, Mykola

Mushynka, Mykola [Мушинка, Микола; Mušynka] (Mušinka, Mikulaš; pseud: M. Hnatiukivsky), b 20 February 1936 in Kuriv, Bardejov county, Czechoslovakia, d 13 September 2024 in Prešov, Slovakia. Ukrainian folklorist. After graduating from Prague University (1959) he completed his graduate studies in Kyiv University and again in Prague (1967) and worked in the department of Ukrainian studies at the Prešov campus of Košice University (1966–71). He founded and edited Naukovyi zbirnyk Muzeiu ukraïns’koï kul’tury u Svydnyku (1965–70) for the Svydnyk Museum of Ukrainian Culture. Because of his contacts with Ukrainian dissidents and Ukrainian émigrés he was expelled from his job and forbidden to publish. He was not reinstated in a research position until 1990.

Mushynka has written over 300 studies, articles, and reviews, mainly on folklore and the culture of Ukrainians in Czechoslovakia. He compiled two anthologies of Ukrainian folklore in Eastern Slovakia (1963 and 1967) and a collection of the folk songs sung by A. Yabur (1970). Besides a study of the folklore of the Ruthenians of Vojvodina (1976) and biographies of Orest Zilynsky (1983) and Stepan Klochurak (1995), he has published several monographs on Volodymyr Hnatiuk: Volodymyr Hnatiuk–doslidnyk folkl’oru Zakarpattia (Volodymyr Hnatiuk: Researcher in the Folklore of Transcarpathia, 1975), Volodymyr Hnatiuk: Bibliohrafiia drukovanykh prats’ (Volodymyr Hnatiuk: Bibliography of Printed Works, 1987), and Volodymyr Hnatiuk: Zhyttia ta ioho diial'nist' v haluzi folkl'orystyky, literaturoznavstva ta movoznavstva (Volodymyr Hnatiuk: His Life and His Work in the Field of Folklore Studies, Literary Scholarship, and Linguistics, 1987). Mushynka reconstructed and edited (together with George Yurii Shevelov and Oleksa Horbach) a festschrift for Ivan Zilynsky (1993) that had been in a manuscript form for decades and wrote a history of the Museum of Ukraine's Struggle for Independence (1996). He was made a foreign member of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in 1997. A festschrift for Mushynka was published in 1998 as Blahovisnyk pratsi (Herald of Work). Mushynka has contributed numerous articles to and served as subject editor of ethnography for the Encyclopedia of Ukraine.

Danylo Husar Struk

[This article was updated in 2014.]