Ivan Svitlychny — public figure, critic, literary scholar, linguist, translator, poet…
On May 27, the Department of Ukrainian Studies and General Language Training held a sincere, slightly poignant, but extremely informative meeting with the students of our university, dedicated to the 95th anniversary of the birth of Ivan Svitlychny. Presentations were made by 1st year students of the Faculty of International Tourism and Economics Polina Grigor’yeva, Anna Polska, Kristina Korniyenko, Olha Yabchenko, and Elizaveta Potapenko. The students and teachers present got acquainted with the pages of Ivan Svitlychny’s selfless life and heroic work, read his poems, listened to poetic translations performed by foreign authors and compared them with the original.
Ivan Svitlychny became a powerful beacon in the formation of Ukrainian national consciousness. He loved words and books immensely, was a first-class poet, translated from Polish, Slovenian, Slovak, Czech, Serbian, Belarusian, French, Italian, and Turkish. He left behind linguistic research that confirms the uniqueness of our language. Thanks to Ivan Svitlychny, contact was established with the diaspora, as well as with artists from Western Ukraine. And then came arrests, exiles, and camps. Exhausted and physically destroyed, Ivan remained strong internally.
Thank you to all the participants for their participation. May each of us take from Ivan Svitlychny at least a little of his enthusiasm and indifference. Let us remember his words: «The homeland is not someone or somewhere. I am also the Fatherland.
