Kovalinsky, Mykhailo

Kovalinsky, Mykhailo [Ковалінський, Михайло; Kovalins’kyj, Myxajlo] (Kovalynsky), b 1757 in the Kharkiv region, d 1807. Writer and pedagogue. He studied with Hryhorii Skovoroda and at Strasbourg University, and traveled throughout western Europe with Oleksii Rozumovsky. Empress Catherine II appointed him vicegerent of Riazan and Tsar Paul I named him curator of Moscow University (1801–4). Kovalinsky’s writings are the main source of biographical data on Skovoroda. His biography of Skovoroda, Zhitie Grigoriia Skovorody, was written in 1796 but published only in 1886 in the journal Kievskaia starina; a second version, edited by the historian Dmytro Bahalii, was published in Sbornik Kharkovskogo Istoriko-filologicheskogo obshchestva in 1894. His correspondence with Skovoroda was published in that same journal and in a two-volume edition of Skovoroda’s complete works (1973). Kovalinsky also wrote two odes to Empress Catherine (1774).

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 2 (1988).]