Naumenko, Volodymyr

Naumenko, Volodymyr [Науменко, Володимир], b 7 July 1852 in Novhorod-Siverskyi, Chernihiv gubernia, d 8 July 1919 in Kyiv. (Photo: Volodymyr Naumenko.) Civic figure, educator, ethnographer, and philologist. He graduated from Kyiv University in 1873 and taught in Kyiv's secondary schools until 1903. From 1905 to 1914 he was director of a gymnasium in Kyiv founded by him. Naumenko was a member of the Old Hromada of Kyiv; he was elected its treasurer in 1875, and maintained contact between it and Mykhailo Drahomanov in Geneva. He regularly contributed to Kievskaia starina, in which he published over 90 articles on Ukrainian history, literature and writers, education, and ethnography, and of which he served as the last editor (1893–1906). In addition to contributing to other Ukrainian periodicals he wrote a survey (in Russian) of the phonetic traits of ‘Little Russian’ (1889) and discovered a collection of folk songs compiled by Zorian Dołęga-Chodakowski. From 1914 to 1917 he was president of the Ukrainian Scientific Society in Kyiv. After the February Revolution of 1917 he temporarily headed the newly created Central Rada in Kyiv until Mykhailo Hrushevsky's arrival. In 1917 he quit the Russian Constitutional Democratic party and became a founding member of the conservative Ukrainian Federative Democratic party (est December 1917). He served as the last minister of education (November–December) of the 1918 Hetman government, and after its downfall he worked at the newly founded Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, where he collected new materials on the history of 19th-century Ukrainian literature (pub 1919, 1924). He was executed by the Bolsheviks and went unmentioned in Soviet publications.

Roman Senkus

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