Lev, Vasyl

Lev, Vasyl [Лев, Василь], b 7 February 1903 in Staryi Yazhiv, Yavoriv county, Galicia, d 23 March 1991 in New York, New York State, USA. Linguist and literary historian; member of the Shevchenko Scientific Society since 1947 and of the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences in the US. After graduating from Lviv University (PH D, 1930) he taught languages in secondary schools in Lviv and then lectured at Lviv University (1937–41). After the Second World War he was a lecturer and professor at the Ukrainian Free University in Munich (1944–9, 1963–1988) and then a professor of Ukrainian and Church Slavonic at Saint Basil’s College in Stamford (1952–8), Marywood College (1958–72) in Scranton, and the Ukrainian Catholic University (Rome) (1963–1988). Lev wrote numerous works, including articles on Taras Shevchenko, Lesia Ukrainka, Ivan Franko, and Bohdan Lepky; linguistic studies of the Krekhiv Apostolos (1929); articles on the Ukrainian translation of Marcin Bielski’s chronicle (1935); Shevchenko’s early poetry (1946); and the members of the Ruthenian Triad (1953). With I. Verbiany he compiled a Ukrainian-English and English-Ukrainian dictionary (1947–8). He was a coeditor of the collected works of Vasyl Grendzha-Donsky (1981–8) and of historical collections on the Ternopil (vol 2, 1970), Berezhany (1970), Yavoriv (1984), and Komarne–Rudky (1987) regions.

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 5 (1993).]