Yevhen Malaniuk

He was hated and feared by the Soviet government. He did not have easy relations with Ukrainian diaspora in America. When he returned to Ukraine in his books after independence, Malaniuk became an irreconcilably critical contemporary of ours.

Oksana Pakhlovska, cultural critic

Yevhen Malaniuk was a Ukrainian poet, publicist, literary critic, interpreter, public and cultural figure, and a representative of the Prague poetry school.

The poet was born on February 1, 1897, in Novoarkhangelsk in the Kirovohrad region in a family of intellectuals. He came from a Chumak-Cossack family. After graduating from the Kyiv Military School (1916), he participated in the First World War. From the beginning of the Ukrainian Revolution, he served in the Ukrainian People’s Republic Army. In 1920, he was in an internment camp for Ukrainian soldiers in Kalisz (Poland). Y. Malaniuk tried to find out for himself the historical significance of the Ukrainian Revolution and understand the reasons for the defeat of the national liberation struggle. These reflections determined the direction of his poems of the early 1920s.

From 1923 he lived in Czechoslovakia. He studied at the Faculty of Engineering of the Ukrainian Husbandry Academy in Poděbrady, which he called “a laboratory where the type of the modern Ukrainian was cultivated.” He took an active part in Ukrainian cultural life. He belonged to the Prague Poetry School with his friends Olena Teliha, Oleh Olzhych, Leonid Mosendz, and Oksana Liaturynska. In 1925, he published his first poetry collection, “Stylet i Stylos” (The Stiletto and the Stylus).

In 1929, he returned to Poland and lived in Warsaw. He collaborated with the “Literaturno-naukovyi vistnyk” (Literary and Scientific Bulletin), edited by Dmytro Dontsov. He published several collections of poetry, translated works of foreign poets into Ukrainian, and published journalistic pieces on the development of Ukrainian and world literature.

During 1944-1949, Malaniuk stayed in West Germany. He lived in a camp for displaced persons and refugees in Regensburg,  taught Ukrainian literature and mathematics at the Ukrainian camp gymnasium to earn a living. His students remembered Professor Malaniuk’s lectures with gratitude. He was a member of the Artistic Ukrainian Movement (MUR), headed by Ulas Samchuk.

Since 1949, he has lived in the United States. Y. Malaniuk was elected honorary chairman of the association of Ukrainian writers “Slovo.” He published several poetry collections, the poem “P’iata symfoniia” (The Fifth Symphony, 1954), and journalistic and literary works, including “Narysy z istorii nashoi kul’tury” (Essays on the History of Our Culture, 1954) and “Malorosiystvo” (Little Russian mentality, 1959).

Yevhen Malaniuk died on February 16, 1968, in New York. He was buried in the Ukrainian cemetery of St. Andrew in South Bound Brook.