Fylypovych, Pavlo

Fylypovych, Pavlo [Филипович, Павло; Fylypovyč], b 1 September 1891 in the village of Kaitanivka, Kyiv gubernia, d 3 November 1937 in Sandarmokh, Karelia, RSFSR. Poet and literary scholar. Fylypovych studied at Galagan College and at Kyiv University (1910–5), where he later was a professor (1917–35). His first poems were published, under the pseudonym Pavel Zorev, in Russian journals beginning in 1910. After the Revolution of 1917 Fylypovych switched to writing poetry in Ukrainian. He contributed to the Ukrainian symbolist almanac Muzahet (1919). In the 1920s he became a member of the Neoclassicists and published two collections of poetry—Zemlia i viter (Earth and Wind, 1922) and Prostir (Space, 1925). Fylypovych was an associate member of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences and secretary of its Historical-Literary Society. His first major scholarly work was Zhizn’ i tvorchestvo E.A. Boratynskogo (The Life and Works of E.A. Boratynsky, 1917). Fylypovych is the author of over 100 scholarly articles and reviews. He made a major contribution to the comparative study of Ukrainian literature, particularly to the study of Taras Shevchenko and Ukrainian romanticism. He edited (and wrote introductions for) the collection of articles Shevchenko ta ioho doba (Shevchenko and His Period, 2 vols, 1925–6) and a collection on Ivan Franko (1927); he also edited, with long introductions, collections of works by Lesia Ukrainka, Olha Kobylianska, Oleksander Oles, Nikolai Gogol, Nikolai Leskov, and Aleksandr Pushkin. A collection of his literary studies, Z novitn’oho ukraïns’koho pys’menstva (From the New Ukrainian Literature), was published in 1929. Fylypovych was arrested in August 1935 during the Stalinist terror, presumably for his critical attitude to official Soviet cultural policies, and sentenced to 10 years in concentration camps. He was imprisoned in the Solovets Islands labor camp and murdered during the mass executions of political and other prisoners marking the twentieth anniversary of the October Revolution of 1917. His collected poems were published posthumously in Poeziï (Poems, Munich 1959), as were his major scholarly articles, collected in Pavlo Fylypovych, Literatura: Statti, rozvidky (Literature: Articles, Studies, Reviews, Melbourne 1971). In Ukraine, a book of Fylypovych’s poetry Poezii (Poems) appeared in Kyiv in 1989 and a collection of his literary studies was published in 1991.

Roman Senkus

[This article was updated in 2007.]