Sviatoslav Karavansky is a legendary Odesa resident, a “Ukrainian bourgeois nationalist” who could not be broken and “denazified” by 30 years of Soviet camps. As a linguist, poet, translator, journalist, and human rights activist, he greatly contributed to the formation of the Ukrainian national identity and the spiritual world of modern Ukraine. He is worthy of the title of Hero of Ukraine.
Viktor Danylenko, historian
Sviatoslav Karavansky was a Ukrainian linguist, translator, public and political figure, dissident, member of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, and a long-term prisoner of Soviet camps; he lived and worked in the United States.
The dissident was born on December 24, 1920, in Odesa. He began writing his first poems and short stories at school. S. Karavansky studied at the Odesa Industrial Institute (1938-1940) and the Moscow State Pedagogical Institute of Foreign Languages (1939). During the Second World War, he was taken prisoner by the Nazis. Returning to Odesa in early 1942, he entered the university’s Faculty of Literature.
A year later, he joined the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN (B) — headed by Stepan Bandera) and organized the Osnova bookstore of Ukrainian literature. In 1944, Sviatoslav Karavansky was arrested by the Soviet authorities and sentenced to 25 years. In the camps, along with hard physical labor, he found the opportunity to do his favorite literary work: he wrote and translated poems and short stories. The dissident even started working on the “Slovnyk rym ukrainskoi movy” (A Dictionary of Ukrainian Rhymes). In 1960, after being released under amnesty, he returned to Odesa.
Sviatoslav Karavansky completed a titanic work on the Dictionary, independently composing 60 thousand rhyming pairs. In 1961, he married Nina Strokata. The dissident took an active part in Ukraine’s national and cultural life. In 1965, he published an article, “Pro odnu politychnu pomylku” (About a Political Mistake), criticizing the Russification policy, for which he was imprisoned in a strict regime camp for a second time. S. Karavansky spent a third of his life in the camps, 31 years. While still in exile, he joined the Ukrainian Helsinki Group. In 1979, the Karavansky family was deprived of USSR citizenship and allowed to move to the United States by agreement between the US President Jimmy Carter and Leonid Brezhnev, general secretary of the USSR Communist Party.
For almost 40 years, he lived and worked in Detroit and Denton (USA). The scientist made an invaluable contribution to the development of linguistics: he compiled the “Praktychnyi slovnyk synonimiv ukrainskoi movy” (A Practical Dictionary of Ukrainian-language Synonyms), the “Slovnyk rym ukrainskoi movy” (A Dictionary of Ukrainian Rhymes), and the “Rosiisko-ukrainskyi slovnyk skladnoi leksyky” (A Russian-Ukrainian Dictionary of Complex Vocabulary). He published poetry collections “Sutychka z taiphunom” (Fighting the Typhoon, New York, 1980), “Moye remeslo” (My Craft, London, 1981), “Humorystychnyi samvydav” (Humorous Self-Publishing, Philadelphia, 1982), and others.
Sviatoslav Karavansky died on December 17, 2016, in Baltimore (USA).
