Perfetsky, Yevhen

Perfetsky, Yevhen or Perfeckij, Jevgenij [Перфецький, Євген; Perfec'kyj, Jevhen], b 11 April 1888 in Nosów, Konstantynów county, Siedlce gubernia, d 18 August 1947 in Bardejov, Czechoslovakia. Historian; cousin of Roman Perfetsky. As a young man he took part in the Ukrainian national revival in Podlachia and founded a branch of the Prosvita society in Kobyliany, Bielsk Podlaski county. He graduated from Saint Petersburg University (1912). In 1919–21 he was a privatdocent at Kyiv University. An émigré from August 1921, from 1922 he taught the history of Eastern Europe (especially Transcarpathia) at Bratislava University, where he became a professor in 1935 and a dean in 1946–7, and continued his archival and ethnographic research in Transcarpathia.

Perfetsky’s works written in Russian include a survey of ‘Ugro-Russian’ (Transcarpathian) historiography (1914), a book on the Kyivan Rus’ chronicle compilations and their interrelationship (1922), and a long article on the 17th- and 18th-century religious movement in Transcarpathia (1915). He also wrote articles in Ukrainian about Transcarpathia in the 17th century (1917), Nestor the Chronicler (1918), Yoanykii Bazylovych and his Brevis Notitia ... (1918, 1919), Bishop Vasyl Tarasovych of Mukachevo eparchy (1923), the Novgorod Chronicle and its relation to the 12th-century Ukrainian Rus’ chronicles (1924), and the Peremyshl codex as part of Jan Długosz’s chronicle (1927, 1928, 1931). In Czech he wrote on Prince Fedir Koriiatovych (1922), Transcarpathian and Galician tales and legends about King Matthias Corvinus (1926), the history of the Ukrainian church in Transcarpathia, and Russian Slavophilism. Also published in Czech were his pioneering monograph on socioeconomic conditions in 13th- to 15th-century Transcarpathia (1924) and a book on Długosz’s history of Poland and the Rus’ chronicles (1932).

Arkadii Zhukovsky

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