Ruban, Vasyl H.

Ruban, Vasyl H. [Рубан, Василь]; b 25 March 1742 in Belgorod in Slobidska Ukraine, d 5 October 1795 in Saint Petersburg. Publisher, historian, and Russian poet of Ukrainian descent; member of the Russian Free Economic Society. He studied at the Kyivan Mohyla Academy, the Moscow Slavonic-Latin Academy (ca 1754–5), and Moscow University (1759–61). From 1784 he was head of foreign correspondence at the Imperial War College. In Saint Petersburg he published an anonymously written book of information about Little Russia (1773), a descriptive geography of Little Russia (1777), and, together with Oleksander Bezborodko, Kratkaia letopis' Malyia Rossii (A Short Chronicle of Little Russia, 1777), thereby facilitating Russian study of Ukraine. He also published the Saint Petersburg journals Ni to, ni sio (1769), and Trudoliubivyi muravei (1771), Russian almanacs, the historical compendium Starina i novizna (Antiquity and New Times, 2 vols, 1772–3), which included materials on the history of Ukraine, Vasyl Hryhorovych-Barsky’s account of his travels (1778), and descriptions of Saint Petersburg (1779) and Moscow (1782); and he wrote many panegyrics and odes in Russian and translated literature from Latin (especially Virgil), Polish, German, and French.

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