Lavrovsky, Petr

Lavrovsky, Petr [Лавровский, Пётр; Lavrovskij], b 25 March 1827 in Vydropusk, Torzhok county, Tver gubernia, Russia, d 12 March 1886 in Saint Petersburg. Russian philologist; corresponding member of the Imperial Academy of Sciences from 1856. After graduating from the Main Pedagogical Institute in Saint Petersburg (1851) he taught Slavic languages at Kharkiv University. Then he served as rector of Warsaw University (1869–72) and curator of the Orenburg (1875–80) and Odesa (1880–5) school districts. Some of his numerous works on Slavic languages were devoted to the history and distinctive nature of Ukrainian, eg, Obzor zamechatal'nykh osobennostei narechiia malorusskogo sravnitel'no s velikorusskim i drugimi slavianskimi narechiiami (A Survey of the Main Peculiarities of the Little Russian Dialect in Comparison with the Great Russian and Other Slavic Dialects, 1859) and O iazyke severnykh russkikh letopisei (On the Language of Northern Rus’ Chronicles, 1852). Disagreeing with Mykhailo Maksymovych, Lavrovsky sided with Mikhail Pogodin and claimed that the language used in Kyivan Rus’ was Russian.

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 3 (1993).]