Slavutych, Yar

Slavutych, Yar [Славутич, Яр; Slavutyč, Jar; né Григорій Жученко; Hryhorii Zhuchenko], b 11 January 1918 in Blahodatne, Oleksandriia county, Kherson gubernia, d 4 July 2011 in Edmonton, Alberta. Poet and literary scholar; president of the Shevchenko Scientific Society in western Canada from 1976. A graduate of the Zaporizhia Pedagogical Institute (1940) and the University of Pennsylvania (PH D, 1955), he taught the Ukrainian language at the United States Army Language School in Monterey, California (1955–60), and the University of Alberta (1960–83). He served as president of the Ukrainian Shakespeare Society from 1980. He published 12 books of poetry, including two volumes of collected works (1963, 1978). Among his poetry collections is Zhyvi smoloskypy (Living Torches, 1983). His poems appeared in Ukrainian émigré periodicals and anthologies and in Canadian English-language anthologies, and some were translated into English (Oasis [1959], The Conquerors of the Prairies [trilingual edn 1984]), French (L’Oiseau de feu [1976]), German, Hungarian, Russian, and other European languages. They have also been set to music (by S. Yaremenko, Hryhorii Kytasty, and E. Wolf) and have been recorded by the Ukrainian Bandurist Chorus of Detroit. Slavutych also wrote a book of memoiristic sketches (1957; 3rd rev edn 1985), the booklets The Muse in Prison (1956) and Modern Ukrainian Poetry (1957), the textbooks Conversational Ukrainian (1959; 4th edn 1973) and Ukrainian for Beginners (1962; 5th edn 1975), a survey of Ukrainian poetry in Canada (1976), and articles of literary criticism and on onomastics as well as reviews in émigré and Canadian scholarly periodicals and collections. The editor of the literary almanac Pivnichne siaivo (5 vols, 1964–71), two volumes of papers on Ukrainian settlers in western Canada (1973, 1975), and an anthology of Ukrainian poetry in Canada (1975), he also compiled an annotated bibliography of books of Ukrainian literature published in Canada (1984; 2nd rev edn 1986) and translated into Ukrainian a book of selected poems by John Keats (1958). A collection of articles and reviews about his poetic works (1978, ed Wolodymyr Zyla) and a bibliography of his writings (1985; rev edn 1986) were published.

Roman Senkus

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 4 (1993).]