OBITUARY: Hryhoriy Kostiuk, 99, prominent literary scholar and editor (10/27/02)

OBITUARY: Hryhoriy Kostiuk, 99, prominent literary scholar and editor

by Ika Koznarska Casanova

SILVER SPRING, Md. - Hryhoriy Oleksandrovych Kostiuk, prominent émigré literary scholar and editor, who wrote extensively on Ukrainian literature and politics in interwar Soviet Ukraine, died here on October 3, at the age of 99.

Prof. Kostiuk was an active participant in the life of the literary organizations of the Ukrainian cultural renaissance of the 1920s - a most intense and dynamic period of Ukrainian literary development that was fostered by the revolutionary era and the policy of Ukrainianization. He was instrumental, as an émigré, in editing new editions of the work of some of the leading writers of the time who fell victim to the Stalinist terror and whose works had been banned from publication in Soviet Ukraine.

Prof. Kostiuk was editor-in-chief of the first complete edition of the works of Mykola Khvyliovy (1893-1933), the single most important writer and polemicist of the cultural renaissance. (A national communist, Khvyliovy, advocating independent development for Ukrainian literature, called for a turning "away from Moscow" toward Western Europe, as the orientation where Ukrainian culture should seek its true inspiration.) The five-volume edition of Khvyliovy's works appeared in the years 1978-1986.

Prof. Kostiuk also edited new editions of works by Valeriian Pidmohylny (1954), Mykola Kulish (1955), Mykola Plevako (1961), Pavlo Fylypovych (1971) and Mykhailo Drai-Khmara (1979).

Equally important was his contribution to maintaining interest in the West in Volodymyr Vynnychenko (1880-1951), writer and statesman, head of the Directory of the Ukrainian National Republic (1918-1919). Under Prof. Kostiuk's guidance, the standing Commission for the Study and Publication of the Heritage of Volodymyr Vynnychenko was established at the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences in the United States. Prof. Kostiuk served as chair and subsequently as chair emeritus of the Vynnychenko archive, which was transferred in 1956 from Mougin, southern France, and today is housed at Columbia University in New York.

Prof. Kostiuk also edited several volumes of Vynnychenko's previously unpublished literary works and diaries, the latter which came out as two of the planned four-volume "Schodennyk" (Vol. 1, 1980; Vol. 2, 1983).

* * *

Hryhoriy Oleksandrovych Kostiuk was born October 25, 1902, in the village of Boryshkivtsi, in the Podillia region of Ukraine. He studied at the Kyiv Institute of Popular Education (1925-1929), followed by graduate studies in literature at the Shevchenko Institute of Literature in Kharkiv (1930-1932).

He worked closely with the writers of the Free Academy of Proletarian Literature, or VAPLITE (Vilna Akademiya Proletarskoi Literatury), the avant-garde writers' organization founded by Khvyliovy that existed in Kharkiv in 1925-1928. He was also a member of the Union of Workshops of the Proletarian Literary Front, or Prolitfront, an organization inspired by Khvyliovy, which published an eponymous journal.

Upon completion of his graduate studies, Prof. Kostiuk was lecturer of Ukrainian literature at the Prosvita Ukrainian Pedagogical Institute, the All-Ukrainian Association of Marxist-Leninist Scientific Research Institutes (VUAMLIN) and the Institute of Journalism.

From 1927 to 1931 his literary reviews and essays appeared in such journals as Zhyttia i Revolutsiya (Life and Revolution), Molodniak, Chervonyi Shliakh (The Red Path), Krytyka (Critique), and Prolitfront; he also worked as editor for Molodyi Bilshovyk (Young Bolshevik).

Prof. Kostiuk taught Ukrainian literature at Kharkiv University (1932-1933) and at the Luhansk Pedagogical Institute (1933-1934).

Arrested in Kyiv during the Stalinist terror and accused of "nationalism" and "Khvyliovism," he spent the years 1935-1940 in a Soviet prison and concentration camps in Vorkuta in the Komi ASSR, above the Arctic Circle, where he did forced labor as a miner.

Memoirs of his imprisonment, "Okaianni Roky" (Accursed Years) appeared in 1978.

After serving his sentence, Prof. Kostiuk, not allowed to go to any major city in Ukraine, settled in Sloviansk in the Donbas region. With the eruption of World War II, he left Sloviansk with his wife, Raisa née Butko, going first to Kyiv and from there, in 1942, to Lviv. In Lviv he became a member of the Writers' Union and the Association of Journalists.

A post-war refugee in West Germany beginning in 1944, Prof. Kostiuk was among the co-founders of the Ukrainian Art Movement, or MUR (Mystetskyi Ukrainskyi Rukh), a literary organization of Ukrainian émigré writers founded in Fürth, Germany, in 1945 and was a founding member of the Ukrainian Revolutionary Democratic Party (URDP), serving as its head in 1947-1948. As a member of its left-wing faction, he was co-founder in 1949 of the monthly Vpered.

Upon emigrating to the United States in 1952, Prof. Kostiuk taught two lecture cycles at Columbia University as part of its Research Program on the USSR, 1954-1957, which dealt with the formation of the USSR and the Ukrainian SSR, and their respective cultures.

Prof. Kostiuk was a founding member of the Slovo Association of Ukrainian Writers in Exile (Obiednannia Ukrainskykh Pysmennykiv v Emigratsii Slovo), which was founded in 1954 in New York with the aim of continuing and developing the activities of its European predecessor, MUR. Prof. Kostiuk served as president of Slovo from 1954 to 1975 and as editor-in-chief, starting in 1962, of the association's non-periodic eponymous almanac, serving in that capacity for Vols. 2 (1964) and 3 (1968).

Prof. Kostiuk wrote extensively in the fields of literary history and criticism, and political thought. Many of his essays, which appeared in several émigré periodicals, were republished in his collections: "Volodymyr Vynnychenko ta Ioho Doba (Vynnychenko and His Age, 1980); "Na Magistraliakh Doby" (On the Thoroughfares of an Age, 1983); "U Sviti Idei i Obraziv" (In the World of Ideas and Images, 1983); and, "Z Litopysu Literaturnoho Zhyttia v Diaspori" (From the Chronicle of Literary Life in the Diaspora, 1972).

He was the author of the work "Stalinist Rule in the Ukraine: A Study of the Decade of Mass Terror, 1929-1939" (1960) and of "Teoria i Diisnist'" (Theory and Reality, 1971).

Among his English-language publications were: "Stalinism in Ukraine: Origins and Consequences" (1995) and "The Fall of Postyshev" (1954).

Prof. Kostiuk was a member of the board of PEN Club International. He was a full member of the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences in the United States (UVAN) and the Shevchenko Scientific Society. Upon Ukraine's independence, he was inducted as a member of the Writers' Union of Ukraine and an academician of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.

A laureate of the Omelan and Tetiana Antonovych International Foundation for his memoirs "Zustrichi i Proschannia" (Meetings and Leave Takings), which came out in 1989, Prof. Kostiuk was also awarded the Volodymyr Vynnychenko Prize by the Ukrainian Cultural Foundation of Kyiv in 1990.

Prof. Kostiuk was predeceased by his wife, who died on November 8, 1998. He is survived by his son, Theodor, and daughter-in-law, Oleksandra (née Dobrianska) Kostiuk.

A commemorative literary evening dedicated to Prof. Kostiuk will be held in New York on December 1 under the auspices of the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences in the United States. Taking part in the memorial event will be Dr. Mykola Zhulynski, director of the Taras Shevchenko Institute of Literature at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and former vice prime minister of Ukraine, and other members of the academy.

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