Okhrymovych, Volodymyr

Okhrymovych, Volodymyr [Охримович, Володимир; Oxrymovyč], b 27 May 1870 in Veldizh, Dolyna county, Galicia, d 6 November 1931 in Lviv. Political figure, ethnographer, and journalist; brother of Yuliian Okhrymovych. Full member of the Shevchenko Scientific Society (NTSh) from 1899 and corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He was active in the Ukrainian Radical party and contributed to its organs Narod and Zhytie i slovo. He studied law at Lviv University (1889–93; doctorate, 1897) and headed the university’s Academic Brotherhood. He was a founding member of the National Democratic party (1899) and edited its organ Dilo (1902, 1906–7, 1924–5), in which he introduced a phonetic orthography. He edited (1900) and published (1907) the Lviv weekly Svoboda (Lviv). In 1907–8 he was a member of the Austrian parliament. After being deported by the tsarist occupational authorities to Siberia (1915–17) he underwent a change in his religious and philosophical views (described in his pamphlet Iak ia navernuvsia do Boha: Pryliudna spovid' [How I Turned to God: A Public Confession, 1920]). After his return to Lviv in 1918, he was a member of the Ukrainian National Rada of the Western Ukrainian National Republic (1918–19) and a founding member of the Ukrainian Labor party (1919–25, its leader in 1923) and Ukrainian National Democratic Alliance (from 1925). He was also a vice-president of the NTSh and head of its Statistical Commission, and a professor and dean of law at the Lviv (Underground) Ukrainian University (1921–5).

Among Okhrymovych’s works are a study of the importance of Ukrainian wedding songs and rituals in the historical development of the family (in Etnograficheskoe obozrenie, vols 11, 15 [1891–2]); an article on stress in literary Galician Ukrainian (in Zapysky Naukovoho tovarystva im. Shevchenka, vol 33 [1900]); shorter articles on Boiko ethnography, folk rituals, and views of customary law (in Zhytie i slovo, 1895), on his impressions of Hungarian-ruled Transcarpathia (in Narod, 1895, no. 6), and on primitive communism among the Boikos (in Zapysky Naukovoho tovarystva im. Shevchenka, vols 31–32 [1899]); a booklet on Ukrainian proverbs about justice with legal explications (1912); and statistical booklets on Galicia’s national composition (1909), the Galician latynnyky (1912), and factual and fictitious Ukrainian losses in Galicia’s demographic balance in the decade 1900–10 (1912). V. Malanchuk’s book about Okhrymovych’s ethnographic activity was published in Kyiv in 1972.

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