Rozdolsky, Osyp

Rozdolsky, Osyp [Роздольський, Осип; Rozdol's'kyj], b 29 September 1872 in Dobryvody, Zbarazh county, Galicia, d 27 February 1945 in Lviv. Educator, ethnographer, classical philologist, and translator; full member of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences (VUAN) from 1926 and the Shevchenko Scientific Society from 1930; father of Roman Rozdolsky. A graduate of Lviv University (1897), he taught classical languages, German, and literature at gymnasiums in Lviv, Ternopil, and Kolomyia. Under Ivan Franko’s influence he began gathering ethnographic data in 1892. He published collections of Galician folktales (1895–9), Galician folk novellas (1900), and Galician-Ruthenian folk melodies (with S. Livokevych, 1906–7), all in Etnohrafichnyi zbirnyk. He also began to record folk songs in 1900. In 1914 he was elected to the Ethnographic Commission of the Shevchenko Scientific Society in Kyiv and conducted field research in the Chernihiv region and the Poltava region. After returning to Galicia (1918) he continued his work and was elected to the Ethnographic Commission of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences (1926). Besides collecting folklore he translated Vasyl Stefanyk’s and Stepan Vasylchenko’s short stories and Lesia Ukrainka’s plays into German, and Plato’s Euthyphro (1906), Euripedes’ Medea, and Aeschylus’ Prometheus into Ukrainian.

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 4 (1993).]