Nikovsky, Andrii

Nikovsky, Andrii [Ніковський, Андрій; Nikovs'kyj, Andrij], b 14 October 1885 in Malyi Buialyk (now Sverdlove), Odesa county, Kherson gubernia, d 1942 in Leningrad. Political leader, literary scholar, and journalist. He edited the newspapers Rada (Kyiv) (1913–14) and Nova rada (Kyiv) (1917–19) in Kyiv and the journal Osnova (Odesa) (1915) in Odesa. During the period of Ukraine’s struggle for independence (1917–20) he served as the first president of the Ukrainian National Union (1918) and as minister of foreign affairs in Viacheslav Prokopovych’s cabinet (1920). After returning to Ukraine in 1924, he worked as a research associate of the Commission for the Compilation of a Dictionary of the Ukrainian Vernacular and of the historical-philological division at the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. He was sentenced at the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine (SVU) show trial to a 10-year term in a prison camp, which he served in the Solovets Islands. He wrote a book of critical essays, Vita Nuova (1919), a Ukrainian-Russian dictionary (1927), introductions to works by Lesia Ukrainka, Ivan Nechui-Levytsky, Olha Kobylianska, Hryhorii Kvitka-Osnovianenko, and Tymotei Borduliak, and a translation of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1928–9). He also translated works by Nikolai Gogol and Jack London into Ukrainian.

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