Stebun, Illia (Стебун, Ілля; pseudonym of I. Katsnelson), b 21 January 1911 in Horodnia, Chernihiv gubernia, d 25 September 2005 in Donetsk, Donetsk oblast. Literary scholar, literary critic, and pedagogue. He graduated from the Chernihiv Institute of People's Education in 1930. From 1938 to 1941 he was managing editor of Literaturna krytyka and Radians’ka literatura. Until the Second World War he was considered one of the leading literary critics in Soviet Ukraine. In the initial stages of Joseph Stalin’s postwar anti-Jewish campaign against ‘rootless cosmopolitans,’ he was banished from Kyiv. From 1959 to 1965 he worked at the Zaporizhia Pedagogical Institute and the Zhytomyr Pedagogical Institute, and in 1966 he became a professor at Donetsk University. He wrote, among other works, studies of Ivan Kotliarevsky, Markiian Shashkevych, Taras Shevchenko, Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky, Ivan Franko, and Lesia Ukrainka. Some of his more notable works are Mykhailo Kotsiubyns'kyi (1938), Pytannia realizmu v estetytsi I. Franka (The Question of Realism in the Esthetics of I. Franko, 1958), Mystetstvo, humanizm, suchasnist' (Art, Humanism, Contemporaneity, 1965), Dzherela khudozhn'oï istyny (Sources of Artistic Truth, 1970), and Shevchenko pro mystetstvo (Shevchenko on Art, 1971, 1984).

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 5 (1993).]