In memoriam: Taras Zakydalsky

Roman Senkus

This issue of the Journal of Ukrainian Studies is dedicated to Taras

Zakydalsky, its editor from January 2003 to October 2007 and my friend
and colleague of the past three decades. Taras’s unexpected but
mercifully quick demise from inoperable brain cancer on 8 November
2007, during a brief stay in hospital, was truly shocking and sad. He
should have lived to at least eighty — the new threescore and ten — if not
ninety. Regrettably, he was forced from this mortal coil much too soon.
Taras was bom on 2 Febmary 1941 as the only child of his recently
deceased mother Natalia and the late Danylo Zakydalsky. The event
occurred during Natalia’s trip from Drohobych to Lviv to visit her
husband, who had been imprisoned by the NKVD. Baby Taras never
knew his father, for three months later the secret police murdered him
along with many other prisoners during the Soviet retreat from Lviv.
Thus Natalia was obliged to raise Taras alone. Toward the end of World
War II she took her son and fled to Austria along with her brother and
sister and their families.
In 1949 Natalia and Taras emigrated from Bregenz to Canada. After
a year in Newmarket, Ontario, where Natalia worked as a housekeeper,
they settled in Toronto. There Natalia ran the Plai co-operative store of
the Plast Ukrainian scouting organization on Queen Street West, while
Taras attended school and was active in Plast. After receiving his high-
school diploma from Harbord Collegiate, Taras majored in English
literature and philosophy at the University of Toronto (1960-64). He
pursued graduate studies in philosophy at Bryn Mawr College in
Pennsylvania, producing a master’s thesis on the theory of man in
Skovoroda’s philosophy (1965)* and defending a Ph.D. dissertation on
Nikolai Fyorodov’s philosophy of physical resurrection (1976). In 1970,

Roman Senkus is director of the CIUS Publications Program and

managing editor of the Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine.

1 . The full text is on-line at <www.ditext.com/zakydalsky/skovoroda.html>.

X Roman Senkus

while still a doctoral candidate, Taras began teaching philosophy courses

at Ursinus College in Collegeville, Pennsylvania, and in 1977 he re-
ceived a teaching award there. A year later Taras and his wife, Oksana
(nee Witushynska), whom he had married in 1966, returned to Toronto
along with their five-year-old son, Danylo.^
Soon after returning to Toronto, Taras began translating articles at

home for the Encyclopedia of Ukraine project initiated and directed by

Professor George S. N. Luckyj at the University of Toronto office of the
Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, where I had begun my career at
CIUS in 1976. It was then Our acquaintance grew
that I first met Taras.
closer through our involvement in the Toronto Committee for the
Defense of Soviet Political Prisoners, which Taras joined soon after
returning to Toronto.^
In late 1982, after Professor Danylo H. Struk succeeded Professor
Luckyj as managing editor of the encyclopedia project, Taras began
working as a full-time translator of the encyclopedia at the CIUS Toronto
office. After the publication of the first volume in 1984, he became one
of the encyclopedia’s in-house manuscript editors. Later Taras and I were
joined in this capacity by Boris Balan, Andrij Makuch, and other editors
of shorter duration. Our work entailed much fact checking, content
editing, rewriting, updating, and over a decade of frequent overtime work
in order to meet the project’s tight publication deadlines. In the process
we manuscript editors became “comrades-in-arms” in the encyclopedia
project’s “trenches.”
In June 1985 Danylo took Taras, Roma Yanchinski (the project’s
researcher from 1982 to 1985), and me to the Shevchenko Scientific
Society’s building in Sarcelles, a northern banlieue of Paris, to work on
entries for volume two of the encyclopedia. There, for nearly two
months, the four of us shared a house and worked weekdays from 8:00
a.m. to noon, took a two-hour lunch break, and then worked again until

6:30. Because of the long walk to the local station to catch the train to
Gare du Nord and because the last train from there back to Sarcelles left

2. Their second son, Orest, was bom in Toronto in 1981.

3. While still became involved in defense campaigns on behalf of

in the U.S., Taras
Soviet political prisoners organized by the Smoloskyp Organization for the Defense of
Human Rights in Ukraine.
In memoriam: Taras Zakydalsky XI

at 9:45 p.m,, going to Paris after work was impractical (except for
Danylo, who could sleep over at a friend’s apartment in Paris if need be).
Instead, we and the project’s resident representative in Sarcelles, the late
Ivan Ochrymowicz (a former agronomist from Belgium), spent most
evenings together eating freshly baked baguettes and a great variety of
French cheeses, pates, and other delicacies, drinking tax-free French
wines and cognacs (which Danylo was able to get through an American
friend in Paris who had access to U.S. PX stores), and going for walks.
Taras was in good spirits the entire time we were there, and he
“documented” the experience in a small collection of humorous, satirical,
and bawdy poems and limericks in English and Ukrainian about each of
us and about professors Volodymyr Kubijovyc, Vasyl Markus, Arkadii
Zhukovsky, and Wolodymyr Janiw and the society’s young librarian,
Iryna Popovych."^
Our work on the encyclopedia project was particularly onerous
during the years 1988-93, when we produced the last three of five
volumes. After that Taras had an opportunity to remain part of the
project’s skeleton staff Instead he chose to pursue other opportunities.
For a few years he worked as a court translator. We saw each other less
then, but we remained good friends and it was always good to see him.
For several years, until Taras’s untimely death, we served together on the
executive of the Shevchenko Scientific Society of Canada, Taras as
recording secretary and I We saw each more often
as publications officer.
after Taras accepted my become editor of the Journal of
offer to
Ukrainian Studies in January 2003. As I knew he would, he performed
his duties conscientiously and professionally. Under his helm three
special double issues (2001-2002, 2004) and seven regular issues (2003,
2005-2007) of the journal appeared.

4. The title page of this tongue-in cheek samvydav collection reads: ''Les Fleurs du
Mai Eau d’Heure [by] Moe Pissant: UpHCB^yyio Bcm thm, mo CTparnjiH posyM b
6opoTb6i 3Q Hauiy npaBffy And Ty Shshsh, Sursmells sans Brie, 1985. Second Edition,
Revised and Illustrated, Toronto, 2006. Library of Congress No. LCBO 40%. Warning:
This collection is not for adults. It contains hints of violence, obscene language, and
virtual nudity. Some readers may be offended by its content. Ideological supervision is

strongly advised.” Taras presented a one-off copy of the second edition to me as a

memento on the occasion of my thirty years of service to CIUS.
Xll Roman Senkus

Throughout his adult life, Taras maintained an abiding interest in

Ukrainian and Russian philosophy.^ From 1988 on he was the
philosophy subject editor of the Encyclopedia of Ukraine and wrote more
than twenty-five articles for it. After Ukraine became independent, Taras
established close relations with the former Soviet political prisoner Vasyl
Lisovy and other scholars at the Institute of Philosophy of the National
Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in Kyiv.^
He contributed articles in philosophy to that institute’s journal,

Filosofska i sotsiolohichna dumka, and to other Ukrainian publications,

and in the fall semesters of 1994, 1995, and 2000 he taught courses in
philosophy as a visiting professor at the Kyiv Mohyla Academy National
University.
In 1997 Taras succeeded James Scanlan as editor of the translation
journal Russian Studies in Philosophy. Besides choosing and editing the
contents, he translated more than thirty-five articles from Russian for that
journal.
Taras also lectured at the Ostroh Academy National University, and
in 2006 he founded the Canadian Friends of the Ostroh Academy and
established a scholarship in memory of his father at that university. For
his contributions, the university’s Scholarly Council named Taras an
honorary professor. In January of this year that university held a
memorial for Taras. The speakers included Rector Ihor Pasichnyk, Dean
Svitlana Novoseletska, and Alla Atamanenko, director of the university’s
Ukrainian Diaspora Research Institute. A scholarship named in honor of
Taras was announced for students of religion and Ukrainian philology at

5. The focus of Taras’s scholarly interests can be seen in the bibliography of his
writings that follows this article. An assessment of his contributions to the study of
philosophy can be found in “Taras D. Zakydalsky (1941-2007)” by George L. Kline,
Taras’s colleague and former professor, in Russian Studies in Philosophy 46, no. 4
(2008): 93ff

6. A quarter century Taras had translated the Smoloskyp collection of

earlier
documents about the and imprisonment of Lisovy, Yevhen Proniuk, and Mykola
trials

Bondar, Three Philosophers: Political Prisoners in the Soviet Union (Baltimore, 1976).
Soon after Taras died, Lisovy’s reminiscence and assessment of Taras’s contributions to
the study of philosophy in Ukraine, with excerpts from their correspondence, were
published as “Pam’iati radisnoho filosofa” and “Iz lystiv Tarasa Zakydalskoho,”A^^7 (y/ra
(Kyiv), 2007, no. 12 (122): 24-25; on-line at <www.krytyka.kiev.ua/articles/
s.ll 12 2007.html>.
In memoriam: Taras Zakydalsky xiii

the event, ^ as was a collection of scholarly articles dedicated to him,

edited by Professors Pasichnyk and Atamanenko.

Taras was, of course, not only a serious and hard-working scholar, a
good editor and translator, a community activist, and a committed
defender of human and democratic rights, particularly in Ukraine. He
was a genuinely decent person whose generosity of spirit, joie de vivre,
and wit —what his son Orest has called “his peculiar brand of dry
humour — sarcastic and ironic, but never mean”^ — are well known. A
devoted and loving son, husband, father, and grandfather, he was liked
and respected by many, and hundreds of his friends and admirers
attended his panakhyda and funeral. I had the privilege of emceeing his

tryzna after his burial at Prospect Cemetery in Toronto.

This issue of the Journal of Ukrainian Studies, which Taras planned
together with his Kyiv colleague Iryna Valiavko, contains six articles
about Dmytro Chyzhevsky as a scholar of literature and philosophy.

7. “Vshanuvaly pam’iat Tarasa Zakydalskoho” <www.uosa.uar.net/ua/info/news/

2008/2 1-01-2008>.

8. Orest Zakydalsky, “Memories of My Father,” Novyi shliakh (Toronto), 13

December 2007 <www.infoukes.eom/newpathway/48-49-2007.html>.