Zatonsky, Dmytro

Zatonsky, Dmytro [Затонський, Дмитро; Zatons'kyj], b 2 July 1922 in Odesa, 5 June 2009 in Kyiv. Literary scholar; corresponding member from 1969 and full member since 1990 of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR; son of Volodymyr Zatonsky. He graduated from Kyiv University (1950), and taught there from 1956 to 1961. He has worked at the Department of the Literature of Western Europe and America of the Institute of Literature of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR (1961–74, director after 1986) and was an associate of the Institute of World Literature in Moscow (1974–5). A leading Soviet specialist on 20th-century Western (especially German) literature, he wrote many articles; Russian monographs on Franz Kafka and the problems of modernism (1965), the art of the novel and the 20th century (1973), and 19th-century European (French) realism (1984); four collections of theoretical essays in Russian; and four collections in Ukrainian, U poshukakh sensu buttia (In Search of the Meaning of Existence, 1967), Pro modernizm i modernistiv (On Modernism and Modernists, 1972), Shliakh cherez XX stolittia (The Path through the 20th Century, 1978), and Mynule, suchasne, maibutnie (The Past, Present, and Future, 1982). Some of his works were translated into German and published in East Germany.

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