Holoskevych, Hryhorii

Holoskevych, Hryhorii [Голоскевич, Григорій; Holoskevyč, Hryhorij], b 4 November 1884 in Soprunkivtsi, Nova Ushytsia county, Podilia gubernia, d autumn 1934 in Tobolsk, Siberia. Linguist nd lexicographer. He graduated from the Kamianets-Podilskyi Theological Seminary in 1905 and studied linguistics under Aleksei Shakhmatov at Saint Petersburg University (1906–11); he was active in the Ukrainian Student Hromada in Saint Petersburg. In 1917 he moved to Kyiv and organized, with Pavlo Zaitsev and Petro Stebnytsky, the Drukar publishing house (1917–20). He was a central figure in the Slovo publishing house (1922–6). He became an associate of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences (later VUAN) in 1918 and was a coeditor of its Russian-Ukrainian dictionary (1924–8). He wrote studies on Podilian dialects (1910) and the language of the Eusebius Gospel (1914), and compiled the first Ukrainian orthographic dictionary (1st edn 1914; 7th edn 1931, incorporating changes codified in the 1928 orthography, repr New York 1952). He was arrested in August 1929 and at the Stalinist show trial of the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine in 1930 he was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment. After serving three years in the Yaroslavl prison he was exiled to Tobolsk, where he committed suicide.

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 2 (1988).]