Word: danylo
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Danylo had a virtually physical passion for poetry. He reacted to poetry he loved in the way a lightbulb reacts when connected to electricity. He would repeat favorite lines in that Slavic, declamatory way that makes of words a magically transporting physical experience, an illumination and a kind of intellectual drunkenness. In later life, Dan acquired a solidity of middle age, a gravitas, with even an air of the august. But I think of Dan the way he was when I first knew him at Harvard - thin, handsome, dashing in a Slavic style, with high cheekbones and curly brown hair...
...Danylo had been born in Ukraine. His father, the director of the Medical Institute in Lviv, was murdered in 1941 by the Soviet NKVD because he freed some students who had been arrested. Causa pietatis, Dan (who made it to the U.S. with his mother in 1949) became an intellectual leader of the Ukrainian diaspora, working to keep alive in exile the culture that the Soviets were doing their best to destroy at home. Danylo presided (as managing editor and later as editor in chief) over a massive five-volume Encyclopaedia of Ukraine, which he assembled, with loving, exhausting labor...
...Danylo Struk, who was my roommate many years ago when we were undergraduates at Harvard (Class of 1963), and who became a lifelong friend ("lifelong," alas, is the precise word here), amounted in himself to a one-man civilization - poet, scholar, Ukrainian patriot-in-exile, teacher, translator, editor, literary critic, art collector and chairman of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Toronto...
...Danylo went at his life with both hands, simultaneously industrious and romantic, flashingly intelligent and, always, very much alive. It seems a shock (and a hateful wrong) that such a life, so elaborately and handsomely and admirably constructed, should be smashed in a moment by the oblivious, passing bear...
...Danylo Struk's work remains. And those who loved him think of him, recomposing him in our memories...