Accession - UAA-1991-138

Ivan Lysiak-Rudnytsky was born in Vienna, Austria on 27 October 1919 to Pavlo Lysiak, a lawyer and politician, and Milena Rudnytska, a politician, writer and women's activist. Rudnytsky studied history and law at the University of Lviv (1937-39), the University of Berlin (1940-43) and completed a PhD at Charles University in Prague (1945). He later attended the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva (1946-51) and Columbia University (1951-53).

Rudnytsky is considered a leading international scholar of Ukrainian history. He was a professor of East European and Ukrainian history at the University of Wisconsin in Madison (1953-54), La Salle College in Philadelphia (1956-67) and became a tenured professor at the American University in Washington, DC (1967-71). In 1971, Rudnytsky moved to Edmonton where he taught Ukrainian and east-central European history at the University of Alberta. While at the University of Alberta, Rudnytsky helped establish the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (CIUS) and became an Associate Director from 1976 to 1980.

Rudnytsky has authored over 200 historical essays, commentaries and reviews in Zhinka (1937-38), Natsiia v pokhodi (1939-40), Biuleten’ Tsentrali NOUS (1943-44), Ukraïns’ki visti (1948-51), The Annals of the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences in the U.S., Lysty do pryiateliv, Suchasnist’, and several other periodicals and Western academic journals and books. A selection of his writings were published as a collection in Mizh istoriieiu i politykoiu (Between History and Politics, 1973) and posthumously in Essays in Modern Ukrainian History (1987) and Istorychni ese (Historical Essays, 1994). Rudnytsky edited Drahomanov: A Symposium and Selected Writings (1952), a large volume of Osyp Nazaruk’s letters to Viacheslav Lypynsky (1976), and the conference papers Rethinking Ukrainian History (1981). He also contributed to Entsyklopediia ukraïnoznavstva (Encyclopedia of Ukrainian Studies), Ukraine: A Concise Encyclopaedia and the Encyclopedia of Ukraine. Rudnytsky primarily focused his work on Ukrainian history, and also wrote of the relations Ukrainians had with their Russian, Polish and Jewish neighbors.

Rudnytsky had two children, Peter and Elizabeth, from his first marriage. At a 1968 conference of the Canadian Association of Slavists in Calgary, Rudnytsky met his future wife Alexandra Chernenko, a literary scholar and poet. They lived together in Edmonton from 1971 until Rudnytsky’s death on 25 April 1984.