Naumovych, Ivan

Naumovych, Ivan [Наумович, Іван; Naumovyč; pseudonyms: I.N. Buzhanenko, Reb-Chaim], b 26 January 1826 in Kizliv, Zolochiv circle, Galicia, d 16 August 1891 in Novorossiisk, Kuban oblast, Russian Empire. Writer and cultural and political figure. He graduated from the Greek Catholic Theological Seminary in Lviv (1851) and was ordained. While serving as a priest in Galician villages he established reading rooms and temperance societies and promoted peasants’ savings banks, communal stores, and rational animal husbandry. He was a prominent Russophile spokesman (he saw Galicia’s union with Russia as the only alternative to Polonization) and an active member of the Halytsko-Ruska Matytsia society. He was elected to the Galician Diet (1861–6) and the State Council in Vienna (1873–9). In Kolomyia he founded the first Galician beekeepers’ association (1868), the Russophile Kachkovsky Society (1874), and the Russophile periodicals: the journal Nauka (editor, 1871–2, 1874–6) and Russkaia rada (editor, 1871–80). For encouraging a parish in Hnylychky, Zbarazh county, to convert to Russian Orthodoxy he was imprisoned for eight months in 1883–4 and then excommunicated. After his release he emigrated to Russian-ruled Ukraine. From 1886 he served as an Orthodox missionary in Kyiv, where he led a campaign against Stundism, and then as a parish priest in Borshchahivka, Skvyra county, Kyiv gubernia.

Naumovych published articles, prose, and poems in Galician periodicals, such as Zoria halytska, Slovo (Lviv), Lastivka, the journal Nauka, Russkaia rada, Prolom, Novyi prolom, from 1849. His didactic novelettes, stories, and plays, written in the vernacular, were popular, especially in Galicia. An edition of his complete works (3 vols, 1926–7) was published in Lviv. Biographies of him have been written by O. Monchalovsky (1899) and V. Vavrik (1926).

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 3 (1993).]