George Shevelov. UVAN archive
George Shevelov at the ceremony of awarding an honorary doctorate from the University of Lund. UVAN archive
From left to right: George Shevelov, Ulas Samchuk, Yevhen Malaniuk, and Hryhory Kostiuk. UVAN archive
The three terrible enemies of the Ukrainian revival are Moscow, Ukrainian provincialism, and the Kochubeevshchyna complex…
George Shevelov
George Shevelov (pseudonyms: Yurii Sherekh, Hryhory Shevchuk, and others) was a Ukrainian Slavic scholar, linguist, literary critic, cultural studies expert, publicist, President of The Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences in the United States; a representative of the third (political) wave of emigration. He lived and worked in Germany, Sweden, and the United States. Shevelov was a winner of the Taras Shevchenko National Prize of Ukraine.
The scholar was born in Kharkiv on December 17, 1908, to a family of ethnic Germans, the Schneiders. During the First World War, his father changed his surname to Shevelov. In 1931, George graduated from the Faculty of Literature and Linguistics of the Kharkiv Pedagogical Institute. He defended his PhD thesis under the supervision of Academician Leonid Bulakhovsky (1939).
During the Second World War, he moved to the West. From 1944 to 1949, he stayed in camps for displaced persons and refugees in Germany. He took an active part in Ukrainian cultural and scientific life. He initiated the creation of the Artistic Ukrainian Movement (MUR) and served as deputy chairman of the MUR. He taught at the Ukrainian Free University in Munich. He studied the language of displaced persons and refugees from Ukraine.
During 1950-1952, he moved to Sweden and taught Ukrainian and Russian at Lund University. Since 1952, he had lived and worked in the United States. He taught at Harvard and Columbia Universities. He was elected president of the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences (UVAN), the most prominent Ukrainian academic institution abroad, a full member of the Shevchenko Scientific Society (NTSh) in the United States, a member of the Linguistic Society of America, editor-in-chief of the journal “Suchasnist (Modernity)” (Munich), and a founder of the Ukrainian Writers’ Association “Slovo (Word)” in the United States.
George Shevelov is the author of about a thousand works written in Ukrainian, English, German, Polish, French, and Russian. The main object of his research in linguistics was the Ukrainian language. His fundamental work, “A Historical Phonology of the Ukrainian Language” (1979), is devoted to the history of the formation of the Ukrainian language. The author concluded that the Ukrainian language is directly derived from the Common Slavic language. He refuted the concept of the Russian linguist A. Shakhmatov about the existence of a typical East Slavic language as a predecessor of the three modern Slavic languages — Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Russian.
In his monograph “The Ukrainian Language in the First Half of the Twentieth Century 1900-1941: Its State and Status” (1987), Shevelov conducted a sociolinguistic study of the language policy pursued by various governments on Ukrainian lands in the first half of the twentieth century.
After Ukraine gained independence, he visited Ukraine several times.
He died on April 12, 2002 in New York. He was buried in the Cambridge City Cemetery.
