Zaslavskyi Ritalii

On the last day of July 2014, the NaUKMA Library acquired a new collection: that of Ritalii Zaslavskyi (1928–2004), a renowned poet, translator, and literary scholar.
The collection was donated to NaUKMA by his widow, Iryna Demidova-Lazytska. As of January 1, 2026, the collection comprises 5,066 items representing 4,262 titles.
Ritalii Zaslavskyi was a poet and translator who lived and worked in Kyiv. He graduated from the Maxim Gorky Literary Institute, where he studied under the poet Ilya Selvinsky. He began his literary career by writing poetry and children's stories and by translating foreign-language poets into Russian.
His first publications appeared in 1946, while his first poetry collection, Touches (Dotykannia), was published in 1970. His works appeared in such literary journals as Yunost, Druzhba Narodov, Noy, Neva, and Novyi Mir.
In 1996, the monograph The Life and Worldview of Ritalii Zaslavskyi was published in Leipzig. In 2003, he was awarded the Pushkin Medal.
Zaslavskyi translated poetry from Azerbaijani, English, Armenian, Georgian, Hebrew, Yiddish, Spanish, Moldovan, Sorbian, Serbian, Ukrainian, Croatian, French, and Romani. His own poetry has been translated into Armenian, Yiddish, Persian, Polish, Hungarian, and Ukrainian.
He compiled the first anthology of Ukrainian children's poetry and was a member of the Union of Soviet Writers from 1974 and of the National Writers' Union of Ukraine from 1992.
He also served on the editorial board of the literary almanac Yehupets.

The collection is fully represented in the Electronic Catalogue.
Collection Profile.