Novytsky, Mykhailo

Novytsky, Mykhailo [Новицький, Михайло; Novyc'kyj, Myxajlo], b 20 September 1892 in Nizhyn, Chernihiv gubernia, d 29 March 1964 in Kyiv. A scholar of Taras Shevchenko. He graduated from Petrograd University (1919) and in 1921 became director of the textual studies seminar and cabinet of Shevchenko’s biography at the Kyiv branch of the Taras Shevchenko Scientific Research Institute. He took part in the editing and/or annotation of approximately 30 Soviet editions of Shevchenko’s works and discovered many of the poet’s manuscripts and letters and materials about him. Together with Serhii Yefremov and Pavlo Fylypovych he coedited the collection Shevchenko ta ioho doba (Shevchenko and His Era, 2 vols, 1925–6). Novytsky wrote pioneering articles about Shevchenko’s life, including Shevchenko’s arrest in 1859 (1924), his trial in 1847 (1925), and his arrest in 1850 (1925). He also edited Panteleimon Kulish’s memoirs about Shevchenko (1930). Novytsky was arrested in 1933 and sent to a labor camp in the Solovets Islands in 1937. He was released after Joseph Stalin’s death in 1956 and ‘rehabilitated.’ During his last years he worked at the Kyiv Shevchenko Museum and helped to compile a book of memoirs about Shevchenko (1958).

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