Nakonechny, Mykola

Nakonechny, Mykola [Наконечний, Микола; Nakonečnyj], b 6 September 1900 in Novyi Tahamlyk, Poltava gubernia, d 11 November 1981 in Kharkiv. Linguist and Slavist. After graduating from the Poltava Institute of People's Education (1923) he was a graduate student (1925–8) and a research associate (1928–32) at the Kharkiv Pedagogical Institute of Professional Education. Accused of nationalism, he was dismissed from his teaching position at Kharkiv University in 1934 (to 1939) and 1948 (to 1958). In 1943 he was head of the Ukrainian language department. Because of political persecution his scholarly output was limited to the practical Russian-Ukrainian dictionary (1926) which he coauthored with Maik Yohansen, Kostiantyn Nimchynov, and Borys Tkachenko; the Russian-Ukrainian phraseological dictionary (published in Prapor, 1963–7) which he edited; a teacher’s handbook on the Ukrainian language (1928); a university program in Ukrainian dialectology (1941, 1949); and a chapter on Ukrainian phonetics in Kurs suchasnoï ukraïns'koï literaturnoï movy (A Course in Contemporary Literary Ukrainian, 1951).

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