Kochubinsky, Aleksandr

Kochubinsky, Aleksandr [Кочубинский, Александр; Kočubinskij], b 3 November 1845 in Kishinev, Bessarabia, d 28 May 1907 in Odesa. Slavist. A graduate of Warsaw University and Kyiv University, in 1871 he was appointed docent at Odesa University. His works, written in a pre-Neogrammarian spirit, dealt with the history of eastern Slavic languages and with toponymy (the historical boundaries of Baltic and Slavic tribes in the Dnipro River Basin and the Slavic colonization of Transylvania). His theory of the development of the Ukrainian language was set forth in his doctoral dissertation, Kvoprosu o vzaimnykh otnosheniiakh slavianskikh narechii (On the Question of Mutual Relations among Slavic Dialects, 1877), and in his extensive review of Pavlo Zhytetsky’s Ocherk literaturnoi istorii malorusskogo narechiia v XVII v. (Outline of the Literary History of the Little Russian Dialect in the 17th century, 1889) in Otchet o ... prisuzhdenii nagrad grafa Uvarova, 32 (1892). In his Otchet o zaniatiiakh... (Report on the Activities ..., 1876) he summarized his studies on the dialects of Galicia and described several manuscript collections in Lviv. A bibliography of his publications can be found in Sbornik v pamiat' A.A. Kochubinskogo (A Collection in Memory of A.A. Kochubinsky, 1909).

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