Catching an Elusive Bird

Dr Leonid Volodymyrovych Ushkalov (1956-2019) was a Ukrainian literary critic, writer, academic, and author as well as editor of numerous scholarly books. He was born in the town of Krasnopillia, in the Sumy region. From 1977 to 1982 he studied at the Faculty of Philology of Kharkiv State University. After graduation, he worked as a lecturer and professor at the the Hryhorii Skovoroda National Pedagogical University of Kharkiv. In 1989, he defended his first doctoral thesis Hryhorii Skovoroda's Works and Ancient Culture at the Taras Shevchenko Institute of Literature of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, and in 1996 his second doctoral thesis Ukrainian Baroque Literature and its Relationship to Philosophy. He died at the age of 63. Subsequently, the Ukrainian Literature and Journalism Department of the Skovoroda University of Kharkiv, where he had taught for many years, was named after Leonid Ushkalov.