He received a Kandydat nauk in philology from Kharkiv State University in 1998. His area of interest is Ukrainian literature of the twentieth century, focusing on the 1920s and 1930s. Melnykiv will spend the spring semester at Harvard looking at the models of “ideal literature” and “ideal fiction” that participants in the literary discussions attempted to define. As Melnykiv observes, the origin of dominant aesthetic ideas, their formation, and further transformation are crucial for understanding the intellectual basis of the literary discussions and processes of the 1920s and on the whole.