Narizhny, Symon

Narizhny, Symon [Наріжний, Симон; Narižnyj], b 30 January 1898 in Sokilka, Kobeliaky county, Poltava gubernia, d 23 July 1983 in Sydney, Australia. Emigré historian and community figure; brother of Oleksander Narizhny. He studied at the Poltava Historical and Philological Faculty (1918–21). As an émigré in Prague he studied at the Ukrainian Free University (UVU, 1922–7; PH D, 1927) under Dmytro Doroshenko and taught medieval and modern world history at the Ukrainian Higher Pedagogical Institute (1928–32) before becoming a docent and professor (1933–45) of Ukrainian and Eastern European history at the UVU. Narizhny also served as deputy director (1925–45) and director (1945–8) of the Museum of Ukraine's Struggle for Independence and secretary of the Ukrainian Historical-Philological Society (1929–44). A postwar refugee in Germany, in 1951 he emigrated to Australia, where he taught at the University of Adelaide.

Narizhny wrote articles about Hetman Ivan Vyhovsky (1929), the Treaty of Hadiach in Ukrainian historiography (1930), Poltava University (1930), Volodymyr Antonovych (1934), Vasyl Bidnov (1934), justice and punishment in the Zaporizhia (1939), the Hrabianka Chronicle (1939), the Ukrainian Historical-Philological Society (1939), the Odesa Society of History and Antiquities (1941), and the Kharkiv Historical-Philological Society (1944). Most of them appeared in Ukrainian scholarly serials and collections published in Prague and Lviv. He also wrote a booklet about Mykola Vasylenko and his scholarly work (1936) and a book on the medieval Muslim world (1931), but he is best known for his pioneering survey, Ukraïns’ka emigratsiia: Kul’turna pratsia ukraïns’koï emigratsiï mizh dvoma svitovymy Viinamy (Ukrainian Emigration: The Cultural Work of the Interwar Ukrainian Emigration, 1942). Later he wrote three booklets about the Museum of Ukraine's Struggle for Independence (1957–9) and an article about the Historical Society of Nestor the Chronicler (1975–6). In the mid 1990s a manuscript of volume two of Narizhny’s magnum opus on the cultural life of the Ukrainian emigration was discovered by Mykola Mushynka. It was published in Kyiv in 1999.

Marko Antonovych

[This article was updated in 2013.]