Pavlovych, Oleksander

Pavlovych, Oleksander [Павлович, Олександер; Pavlovyč; pseudonym: Chernian Makovytsky] b 19 September 1819 in Šarišské Čierné (Sharyske Chorne), Prešov region, d 25 December 1900 in Svydnyk, Prešov region. Writer and cultural figure. He studied at gymnasiums in Bardejov in the Prešov region, and Miskolc and Eger in Hungary, and at the Trnava Catholic Seminary (1843–7). He was ordained a Uniate priest in 1848, and worked as secretary of the episcopal chancery in Prešov (see Prešov eparchy), where he became a close associate of Oleksander Dukhnovych and the Prešov Literary Society. He then ministered in the village of Beloveža (1851–63). From 1864 until the end of his life he lived in Svydnyk. Greatly influenced by the Czech national revival and the Galician Russophiles, from the 1850s on he wrote, in the yazychiie and later in the Transcarpathian dialect (see Transcarpathian dialects), social, patriotic, historical, and didactic poetry, which appeared in miscellanies and periodicals in Vienna, Prešov, Uzhhorod, and Lviv, and as the collection Pesnik dlia makovitskoi russkoi detvy (Songbook for Ruthenian Children in the Makovytsia [Prešov] Region, 1860). He also wrote fables and collected and published ethnographic and historical materials on the Prešov region. His collected works were published in Uzhhorod in 1942 and in Prešov in 1955. Books about him have been written by S. Voskresensky (1947), Fedir Kovach (1969), and A. Shlepetsky (1982).

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