Michael M. Naydan is the Woskob Family Professor of Ukrainian Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. He has received numerous prizes for his translations, including the George S. N. Luckyj Award in Ukrainian Literature Translation from the Canadian Foundation for Ukrainian Studies in 2013. He has been writing about Ukrainian literature—and translating it—for WLT since 2005. His “Literary and Historical Sources for Understanding Ukraine” recommended reading list appeared in the July 2022 issue. Naydan and Alla Perminova’s translation of Zelensky: A Biography, by Serhii Rudenko, was published by Polity Books in 2022.
Ukrainians and the Ukrainian language and culture have been repressed and russified for over two centuries by both tsarist Russia and the USSR. Michael M. Naydan looks at the evidence for Russia’...
In the past, regrettably, there has been a dearth of translations of Ukrainian literature available in English. This situation has dramatically changed over the last decade with numerous authors and...
Photo by Steve Evans / Flickr
A longtime scholar, translator, and promoter of Ukrainian literature reflects on the existential crisis confronting Ukraine—and the West—today.
In Pavlo...
Barricade with the protesters at Hrushevskogo street on January 26, 2014 in Kiev, Ukraine. Photo Sasha Maksymenko/FlickrThe movement is precisely about what Nadya, the elderly...
In the Ukrainian literary tradition there have been scores of women poets, several of them reaching extraordinarily prominent status. The most renowned of them include the legendary seventeenth-centur...