Lidiia Dunayevska

Lidiia Frantsivna Dunayevska (28 June 1948 - 16 May 2006) was a Ukrainian folklorist, teacher, literary critic, poet, doctor of philological sciences, professor, founder and first head of the Department of Folklore Studies of the Institute of Philology at Taras Shevchenko Kyiv National University.

Early life and education Lidiia Dunayevska (maiden name - Govoretska) was born in 1948 in the village of Vorobiivka, Vinnytsia region, in a family of teachers. Her parents, Frantz Martynovych and Sofiia Yakivna Govorecki, were supporters of education and high spiritual culture.

While studying in high school, Dunayevska began to write poems, and published them in regional and Kyiv newspapers. After graduating from high school, she entered the philological faculty of the Taras Shevchenko Kyiv National University at the department of Ukrainian language and literature as a winner of the Republican Olympiad in Ukrainian language and literature in 1966.

In 1971, Dunayevska graduated from the university with honors.

One of the forms of Dunayevska's educational work was the organization of folklore evenings, where students and representatives of different peoples of the world performed their original songs along with outstanding performers.

She created folklore clubs, where it was possible to prepare scientific folklore conferences and listen to reports and lectures of famous folklorists-contemporaries from the Rylsky Institute of Art Studies, Folklore, and Ethnology. Her students and postgraduates participated in numerous scientific conferences in Ukraine and abroad. In total, 29 candidate's and three doctoral theses were defended under the supervision of Dunayevska.

Research activities Professor Dunayevska is known in Ukrainian science primarily for her conceptual developments in the theory and history of Ukrainian folkloristics, the founder of the Department of Folkloristics, and the founder of the professional training of folklorists at Taras Shevchenko Kyiv National University.

After the opening of the department in 1992 and the specialty of folklore studies in 1993, and later the specialization of musical folklore studies in 2001, Dunayevska directed the scientific and pedagogical activities of the department to improve the following courses: "Oral Folk Art," "History of Folklore," "Theory of Folklore." She developed new courses such as "Ukrainian Mythology," "Customary Law," "World Epic," "Ethnopsychology," "Ethnopedagogy," "Folklore Teaching Methodology," "Folk Music," etc.

Ukrainian fairy tales and folk prose are among the main objects of Dunayevska's research. She had a scientific interest in studying archetypal images, world folklore universals, elements of Proto-Slavic mythology in Ukrainian oral and poetic literature, typology and evolution of various folklore genres, peculiarities of folklore life in modern civilizational conditions, etc.

Compilation and publishing activities The main task of Dunayevska as a folklorist was to record samples of folk art and popularize them, which she did with her composing activity. When compiling folklore collections for children, Dunayevska adhered to aesthetic and scientific principles in selecting and processing folklore materials. She selected fairy tales according to the classical classification by thematic groups: magical, about animals, and social and everyday fairy tales. Dunayevska tried to find the brightest examples of fairy tales from the point of view of content, an artistic realization of an idea, and a compositional solution. She searched for texts in various collections, unprinted sources, and ancient collections. Dunayevska insisted on careful, minimal processing of grammatical forms and lexical material, providing dictionaries at the end of the collections.

In total, Dunayevska was the compiler of more than 20 collections of Ukrainian fairy tales and fairy tales of the peoples of the world. She is the author of notes to the first volume of Mykhailo Hrushevsky's History of Ukrainian Literature (1993), the author and co-author of two university folklore textbooks.

Dunayevska published four collections of folk prose and songs and four collections of poetry. She created three scripts for scientific and educational films and a slide film. Dunayevska compiled about 20 educational programs and other educational materials for higher education institutions.

Honors For the best scientific research in folkloristics and philology, Dunayevska became a laureate of the Filaret Kolessa Prize of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (2001). For her highly qualified selfless work, the scientist was awarded a certificate of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine (2005). Dunayevska became a laureate of the Pavlo Chubynskyi award (2007, posthumously).

Monographs

Ukrainian folk tale. - Kyiv: Higher School, 1987. - 127p. Ukrainian folk prose (legend, fairy tale) is the evolution of epic traditions. - Kyiv, 1998. - 447 p. Character system of Ukrainian folk mythological prose. Aspects of poetics. - Kyiv, Library of the Ukrainian, 1999.