Shabliovsky, Yevhen

Shabliovsky, Yevhen [Шабліовський, Євген; Šabliovs'kyj, Jevhen], b 27 April 1906 in Kamin-Koshyrskyi, Kovel county, Volhynia gubernia, d 10 January 1983 in Kyiv. Literary scholar and literary critic; corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR from 1934. He studied at the Kyiv Institute of People's Education until 1931. He specialized in the works of Taras Shevchenko and in 1932 published his first study, Proletars'ka revoliutsiia i Shevchenko (The Proletarian Revolution and Shevchenko), which was the first attempt to treat Shevchenko according to official ideology, as a revolutionary democrat and student of the Russian literary critics Vissarion Belinsky and Nikolai Chernyshevsky. For his loyalty to the Communist Party policy Shabliovsky was appointed director of the Taras Shevchenko Scientific Research Institute (1933–5). His other works on Shevchenko were written in a similar official vein— T.H. Shevchenko, ioho zhyttia ta tvorchist’ (T.H. Shevchenko: His Life and Works, 1934) and Shevchenko i rosiis'ka revoliutsiina demokratiia (Shevchenko and Russian Revolutionary Democracy, 1934). Shortly after his appointment Shabliovsky was arrested and sent to a labor camp. In 1954 he was released and was rehabilitated, and in 1956 he was reinstated as a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR and worked at the Institute of Literature of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR. He published several more works on Shevchenko: Narod i slovo Shevchenka (The People and the Poetry of Shevchenko, 1961), Humanizm Shevchenka i nasha suchasnist' (Shevcheko’s Humanism and Our Times, 1964), Poetychnyi svit Tarasa Shevchenka (The Poetic World of Taras Shevchenko, 1976), T.G. Shevchenko i russkie revoliutsionnye demokraty (T.H. Shevchenko and the Russian Revolutionary Democrats, 1962; in Russian), and others. Shabliovsky also wrote some works on the theory of socialist realism, including Sotsialistychnyi realizm i svitova kul'tura (Socialist Realism and World Culture, 1973) and Na peredovykh rubezhakh suchasnosti (On the Front Line of Contemporaneity, 1975). His literary scholarship is marked by an adherence to official Party policy and by an emphasis on the guiding role of Russian literature in the development of Ukrainian literature (as in Estetyka Chernyshevs'koho i nasha suchasnist' [The Esthetics of Chernyshevsky and Our Times, 1978] and, in Russian, Chernyshevskii i Ukraina [Chernyshevsky and Ukraine, 1978]).

Ivan Koshelivets

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 5 (1993).]