Krupnytsky, Borys

Krupnytsky, Borys [Крупницький, Борис; Krupnyc’kyj], b 24 July 1894 in Medvedivka, Chyhyryn county, Kyiv gubernia, d 5 June 1956 in Himmelpforten, Germany. Historian; full member of the Shevchenko Scientific Society and of the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences. He studied at Kyiv University before the Revolution of 1917, then immigrated to Germany, where he continued his studies in Berlin at Berlin University (PH D 1929). Krupnytsky was a research associate and professor (from 1932) at the Ukrainian Scientific Institute in Berlin and from 1941 at the Ukrainian Free University. A specialist in 17th- and 18th-century Ukrainian history, he wrote over 150 works. The most noteworthy of these were his studies of Hetmans Pylyp Orlyk, Ivan Mazepa, and Danylo Apostol: Het’man Pylyp Orlyk (1672–1742) (1938), Hetman Mazepa und seine Zeit (1687–1709) (1942), and Het’man Danylo Apostol i ioho doba (Hetman Danylo Apostol and His Era, 1948). He also wrote several works based on Swedish and other Western European sources, and a number of historiographical surveys: Johann Christian von Engel und die Geschichte der Ukraine (1931, based on his PH D dissertation on Johann Christian von Engel), Ukraïns’ka istorychna nauka pid Sovietamy (1920–1950) (Ukrainian Historical Scholarship under the Soviets [1920–1950], 1957, which contains a bibliography of his works), Istorioznavchi problemy istoriï Ukraïny (Historiographic Problems in the History of Ukraine, 1959), and Osnovni problemy istoriï Ukraïny (Fundamental Problems in the History of Ukraine, 1955). His most noted work in German was a survey of Ukrainian history— Geschichte der Ukraine von den Anfüangen bis zum Jahre 1917 (1943; 2nd edn, 1963).

Oleksander Ohloblyn

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