Doroshenko, Volodymyr

Doroshenko, Volodymyr [Дорошенко, Володимир; Dorošenko], b 30 October 1879 in Saint Petersburg, d 25 August 1963 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Bibliographer, literary scholar, civic and political leader. Doroshenko was brought up in the Poltava region. He was a co-founder of the Ukrainian Student Hromada in Moscow, a member of the Revolutionary Ukrainian party, and then a member of the Ukrainian Social Democratic Workers' party, until 1911. To escape police persecution, he moved to Lviv in 1908, and until 1944 he worked at the library of the Shevchenko Scientific Society, where he became the director in 1937. In 1944 he emigrated to Germany and in 1949 settled in the United States. During the First World War Doroshenko helped found the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine and sat on its presidium. He edited Vistnyk Soiuza vyzvolennia Ukraïny and wrote some of the union’s publications. In 1913 he became a member of the Ukrainian Scientific Society in Kyiv, and in 1925, a full member of the Shevchenko Scientific Society.

Doroshenko wrote many bibliographical works, including the bibliographies of the works of Ivan Franko (2 vols), Taras Shevchenko (vol 16 of the Warsaw 1939 edition of Shevchenko’s works), Olha Kobylianska, and Panteleimon Kulish. He also translated the works of Nikolai Gogol, Leo Tolstoy, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Vladimir Korolenko into Ukrainian. He wrote a number of literary works, among which his polemics with Serhii Yefremov (published separately in his Zhyttie i slovo [Life and the Word, 1918]) should be singled out. He also wrote on Vasyl Stefanyk (1921), Franko (1926), Hrytsko Chuprynka (1926), and many other writers, on zemstvos and co-operatives in Ukraine, on Ukrainian literary history and politics, and on the Shevchenko Scientific Society and its library (Ohnyshche ukraïns'koï nauky [The Hearth of Ukrainian Scholarship, 1951]). Doroshenko edited the almanac Dnipro (1929–39) in Lviv. He published a number of valuable memoirs and articles on various topics, particularly in Ukrainskaia zhizn’, Kievskaia starina, Literaturno-naukovyi vistnyk, Rada (Kyiv), Dilo, Svoboda (USA), and Ameryka (Philadelphia).

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 1 (1984).]