Robert Bohdan Klymasz is a living legend of Canadian-Ukrainian folklore studies… A man of expansive views and interests, a cosmopolitan folklorist, a tireless and principled researcher, a generator of ideas, a pragmatist and at the same time an optimist, a wise and patient person, kind and charismatic.
Svitlana Kukharenko, folklorist
Robert Bohdan Klymasz was a Canadian folklorist of Ukrainian descent, public figure, and executive director of the Ukrainian Cultural and Educational Centre “Oseredok”. He lived and worked in Canada.
The patriarch of Ukrainian-Canadian folklore was born on May 14, 1936, in Toronto, in a Ukrainian immigrants’ family. He graduated from the University of Toronto (1957) and Manitoba (1960).
He wanted to visit Ukraine for a folklore expedition but he couldn’t in Soviet times. Therefore, he decided to study Ukrainian folklore in Canada. In the early 1960s, as part of an expedition of the National Museum of Canada, he recorded many folklore materials from Ukrainians in Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba. The materials obtained formed the basis of his dissertation (supervised by Richard Dorson), which he defended in 1971 at Indiana University (USA). In 1980, a facsimile edition of the dissertation, Ukrainian Folklore in Canada, was published in New York as part of the World Folklore series, and it is still a reference book for folklorists today. Thirty years later, the book was published in Ukrainian language (“Ukrainian Folk Culture in the Canadian Prairies.” Kyiv. Duliby, 2013).
Klymasz explored the folk culture of Ukrainian immigrants who arrived in Canada in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and began farming there. Over several decades, they formed a unique Ukrainian-Canadian regional subculture. The researcher used a wide range of collected folklore material and commercial records of Ukrainian folk and pop songs to study oral folk stories about the pioneer era, the half-and-half dialect, immigrant humor, and Ukrainian country music.
Robert Bohdan Klymasz has taught at several universities in North America, worked in various positions at the Canadian Centre for Folk Culture Studies at the National Museum of Civilization in Ottawa (then in Gatineau, 1967-1976, 1984-2000), as executive director of the Ukrainian Cultural and Educational Center “Oseredok” in Winnipeg (1976-1982), and as a researcher at the Centre for Ukrainian Canadian Studies (since 2002).
After Ukraine gained independence, he visited his homeland.
Robert Bogdan Klimasz passed away on 17 March 2024 in Winnipeg, Canada.
