Mykola Lukash

He was most prolific during the relatively favourable twenty-year period between 1953 and 1973, when he translated Goethe’s Faust, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, the poetry of Schiller, Boccaccio’s Decameron and many other works.

He was a member of the Union of Writers of Ukraine from 1956 and played an active role in Ukrainian literary life.

Lukash went as far as suggesting that he serve the sentence instead of Dziuba, who, unlike him, was an ill man and had a family to support.

For a long time there was a police officer permanently stationed at the entry to his block who didn’t allow anyone to visit him.

He did not live to see the publication of a large volume of his translations which came out under the title “From Boccaccio to Apollinaire” in 1990 and became a kind of monument to Lukash.

His colleague, prominent Ukrainian translator Hryhoriy Kochur described him by saying that “people like Lukash are probably born once in several centuries”.