Loboda, Andrii

Loboda, Andrii [Лобода, Андрій], b 26 June 1871 in Švenčonys, Lithuania, d 1 January 1931 in Kyiv. Folklorist, literary scholar, and pedagogue; full member of the Shevchenko Scientific Society, and the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences (VUAN) from 1922, corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences from 1924, and honorary member of the Leningrad Ethnographic Society from 1925. After graduating from Kyiv University (1894) he taught there and at Saint Olha’s Women’s Institute in Kyiv. He edited the university’s journal and was secretary of the Faculty of History and Philology. He was the first professor to offer a course in 19th-century Ukrainian literature at Kyiv University. After 1919 he served as vice-president and administrative head of the VUAN, head of the ethnographic section of the Ukrainian Scientific Society in Kyiv (1920–1), director of the Ethnographic Commission of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences (1921–30) and Regional Studies Commission (from 1923), and editor of Etnohrafichnyi visnyk (1925–31), Biuleten’ Etnohrafichnoï komisiï (1926–30), various collections such as Materialy do vyvchennia vyrobnychykh ob’iednan’ (Materials for the Study of Manufacturing Associations, 1929–31), and Oleksander Yu. Andriievsky’s bibliography of Ukrainian folklore (1930). His earliest books dealt with the bylyny (1895, 1896, 1904). Then he wrote several reference works on the Russian oral tradition (four editions, 1909–14) and on 18th-century Russian literature.

Altogether he published nearly 100 scholarly works and edited many folklore collections. He was a proponent of the comparative historical method in folklore studies. In the late 1920s he emphasized the need to collect and to study ‘contemporary’ folklore without corrupting it. In Etnohrafichnyi visnyk (1925) he published a programmatic article on the current state and tasks of Ukrainian ethnography.

Mykola Mushynka

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