George Shevelov
George Shevelov was a Ukrainian-American professor, linguist, philologist, essayist, literary historian, and literary critic. A longtime professor of Slavic philology at Columbia University, he challenged the prevailing notion of a unified East Slavic language from which Ukrainian, Belarusian and Russian later developed, instead proposing that these languages emerged independently from one another.
Biography
Early life
Yuri Schneider was born in Kharkiv, then part of the Russian Empire in 1908. Some sources state his place of birth as Łomża, Łomża Governorate, although according to Shevelov, this is because his mother falsified records fearing persecution. His father, Vladimir Karlovich Schneider was a high ranking Russian Imperial Army officer who held the rank of major-general. His father and mother were both ethnic Germans. When Russia declared war on the German Empire in 1914, his father – a fervent Russian monarchist – decided to russify the family name. Schneider chose the Russian equivalent of his surname, Shevelov, and also changed the patronymic “Karlovich” to “Yuryevich”. Such changes required a personal petition to the Tsar, and in his case it was personally granted by Nicholas II in 1916. During the World War I, Shevelov and his mother moved to Kharkiv. At the beginning of 1918, Shevelov's father was missing in action and was presumed killed.In Kharkiv, Shevelov initially attended the E. Druzhkova Private School, then the 3rd State Boy's Gymnasium, followed by Technical School #7. Under the influence of his cousin Tolia Nosiv, who worked as an anthropologist at the National [Academy of Sciences of Ukraine|Ukrainian Academy of Sciences] and had been mentored by Fedir Vovk, Shevelov developed an interest in the Ukrainian language and history. During his youth he read the Illustrated history of Ukraine by Mykhailo Hrushevsky and translated a story by Edgar Allan Poe into Ukrainian. At the age of 17, before entering university, Shevelov travelled to Kyiv together with his cousin, meeting Hrushevsky and Serhiy Yefremov.
Career in Soviet Ukraine
In 1925 Shevelov graduated from the First Kharkiv [Trade and Industry Union School]. From 1925 till 1927 he worked as a statistician and archive keeper for South Chemical Trust. In 1927–1931 he attended classes at the literary-linguistic branch of the Kharkiv People's Education Institute. He is considered a member of the Kharkiv Linguistic School. From August 1931 he was employed as a Ukrainian language school teacher. From 1932 till 1938 he was employed as a Ukrainian language teacher at the Ukrainian Communist Newspaper Technical School. From 1933 till 1939 he also taught Ukrainian language at the Ukrainian Communist Institute for Journalism. From September 1936 he was a postgraduate student under the guidance of Leonid Bulakhovsky. In 1939, he taught the history of the Ukrainian language and literature. From November 1939 he became the assistant professor and deputy chair of the philology department of the Kharkiv Pedagogical Institute. In 1941 he became a research fellow at the Linguistic Institute of the Academy of Science of the Ukrainian SSR. In that same year he was pressured to become an NKVD informer.In 1934, Shevelov was the co-author of a grammar of the Ukrainian language in two volumes. This text was reprinted in 1935 and 1936.
World War II
Shevelov was able to avoid induction into the Red Army and remained in Kharkiv following the Soviet evacuation and during the entry of Wehrmacht troops into Kharkiv on 25 October 1941. Within Reichskommissariat Ukraine, he joined the “New Ukraine” in December 1941, a Ukrainian language newspaper partially controlled by OUN. Later Shevelov also worked at the "Ukrainian Sowing" newspaper. From April 1942 Shevelov worked for the city administration and collaborated with the educational organization Prosvita. In his memoirs, one of his former students Oles Honchar claimed that when as a Soviet POW he was detained in a Nazi Camp in Kharkiv, Shevelov refused his pleas for assistance. Shevelov answered the allegation in an interview stating that he never received the letter "...And then we had another face-to-face meeting. Honchar started attacking me - ideologically, recalling some facts that I knew nothing about. As though when he was imprisoned in Kharkiv during the war, he gave me a letter in which he asked me to help free him, and I could have, but I didn't want to. Perhaps there really was such a letter, but it never reached me.". Honchar escaped death to become a renowned and influential Ukrainian writer. Shevelov has been critical of Soviet novels including Honchar's major work.Shevelov and his mother fled the returning Red Army's advance on Kharkiv in February 1943. He lived for a brief period in Lviv, within the General Government, where he continued to study the Ukrainian language, including the creation of a new Ukrainian grammar until the spring of 1944, when the Soviets continued their drive westwards. Shevelov with the assistance of the moved to Poland and then to Slovakia, Austria and finally Saxony.
Emigration
After the fall of Nazi Germany, Shevelov worked for the Ukrainian émigré newspaper “Chas”. In 1946 he enrolled in the Ukrainian Free University in Munich and defended his doctorate dissertation in philology in 1947, continuing on his pre-war research and work "До генези називного речення". He was also vice-president of the MUR, a Ukrainian literary association. In order to avoid repatriation to Soviet Union from Germany, he moved to neutral Sweden, where he worked in 1950–52 as Russian language lecturer at Lund University.In 1952, together with mother, he emigrated to the US. After settling there he worked as a lecturer in Russian and Ukrainian at Harvard University, associate professor and professor of Slavic philology at Columbia University. He was one of the founders and president of the émigré scholarly organization the Ukrainian Free Academy of Sciences and received an honorary doctorate from the University of Alberta and Lund University. He was a founding member of the Slovo Association of Ukrainian Writers in Exile and was published in numerous émigré bulletins and magazines.
Return to Ukraine
Shevelov was almost unknown to Ukrainian academic circles after 1943. In 1990, after an extended absence, he visited Ukraine where he was elected an international member of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. In 1999 he received an honorary doctorate from the Kharkiv University and from the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy.In 2001 he published two volumes of his memoirs “Я – мене – мені….”: Спогади.
He died in 2002 in New York.