Yashek, Mykola

Yashek, Mykola [Яшек, Микола; Jašek], b 23 November 1883 in Paniutyne, Pavlohrad county, Katerynoslav gubernia, d 17 August 1966 in Kharkiv. Bibliographer and literary critic. A graduate of Kharkiv University (1909), he worked as a librarian and bibliographer in various academic institutions in Kharkiv. In the 1920s he published a bibliography of materials in the years 1903–21 (1921) and over 10 articles in Taras Shevchenko studies in the magazine Znannia as well as Chervonyi shliakh and other journals. Together with Aleksandr Leites he compiled Desiat' rokiv ukraïns’koï literatury (1917–1927) (Ten Years of Ukrainian Literature [1917–27], 2 vols, 1928), an important biobibliographic and documentary source and his most important contribution to Ukrainian bibliography. In 1929, with Yurii Mezhenko, he copublished a bibliography of translated literature. His last major work was a bibliography of Vladimir Lenin’s writings on culture and literature (1933). During the Stalinist terror Yashek stopped publishing; he was ‘rehabilitated’ in 1963, and published an article on Shevchenko in 1964.

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