Tyktor, Ivan

Tyktor, Ivan [Тиктор, Іван], b 6 July 1896 in Krasne, Zolochiv county, Galicia, d 27 August 1982 in Ottawa. Publisher and community figure. In 1923 he founded in Lviv the Ukrainska Presa publishing company, until 1939 the largest and most important and successful Ukrainian publishing house in Western Ukraine, which supplied the Ukrainian public with several nonpartisan periodicals and approximately 400 books. During the Second World War he directed the trade department of the Ukrainske Vydavnytstvo (Cracow) publishing house and ran the religious publishing house Nove Zhyttia in Cracow (1939–41) and Lviv (1941) and the Volyn publishing house in Rivne (1941–3). As a postwar refugee in Austria, he headed the Ukrainian Students' Aid Commission there. In 1948 Tyktor emigrated to Canada and settled in Winnipeg, where he founded the Club of Friends of the Ukrainian Book, which revised and republished several of the most important books issued by Ukrainska Presa—including Velyka istoriia Ukraïny (The Great History of Ukraine, 1931, 1948), Istoriia ukraïns'koho viis'ka (The History of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, 1935, 1953), and Istoriia ukraïns'koï kul'tury (A History of Ukrainian Culture, 1937, 1964)—and approximately 40 books of prose and poetry. A booklet about Tyktor and Ukrainska Presa by Yevhen Yavorivsky was published in Winnipeg in 1953.

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 5 (1993).]