Nimchynov, Kostiantyn

Nimchynov, Kostiantyn [Німчинов, Костянтин; Nimčynov, Kostjantyn], b 3 January 1899 in Andriivka, Zmiiv county, Kharkiv gubernia, d after 1936. Linguist. A professor at Kharkiv University in the 1920s and 1930s and a member of the State Commission for the Formulation of Rules for the Orthography of the Ukrainian Language (1925–6), he helped compile a Russian-Ukrainian dictionary (coauthored with Maik Yohansen, Mykola Nakonechny, and Borys Tkachenko, 1926) and two advanced course books of Ukrainian (1929, 1931), and wrote a booklet on the Ukrainian language in the past and present (1925, 1926) and articles on Ukrainian historical morphology, syntax, and etymology. He agreed with Stepan Smal-Stotsky’s rejection of the theory of one proto-Rus’ nation. In 1934 he published a brochure attacking ‘nationalist sabotage’ in Ukrainian syntax, but this Stalinist diatribe did not forestall his arrest by the NKVD in Moscow in 1936. His further fate is unknown.

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