Shchepotiev, Volodymyr

Shchepotiev, Volodymyr [Щепотьєв, Володимир; Ščepot'jev], b 6 November 1880 in Poltava, d 29 November 1937 in Poltava. Ethnographer and literary historian. Before the Revolution of 1917 he was a member of the Poltava Gubernia Learned Archival Commission. In the Soviet period he was a professor at the Poltava Institute of People's Education, head of the Poltava Scientific Society of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, an associate of the Kharkiv Scientific Research Institute of the History of Ukrainian Culture, and a member of the Ethnographic Commission of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. One of the compilers of the systematic index to Kievskaia starina (published by the Poltava Archival Commission in 1911), he wrote a booklet about Mykola Lysenko (Poltava 1913, under the pseudonym Budyshanets) and a book about Ukrainian writers from the earliest times to the 1860s (published by the Poltava Prosvita society in 1918; 2nd edn 1919), and contributed articles on Ukrainian folklore and writers (Ivan Kotliarevsky, Taras Shevchenko, Oleksa Storozhenko) to Trudy Poltavskoi uchenoi arkhivnoi komissii, Etnohrafichnyi visnyk, Ukraïna (1914–30), and Zapysky Poltavs'koho instytutu narodnoï osvity. He was arrested in 1930 and sentenced at the show trial of the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine to three years in a Siberian labor camp. He was released in 1936 but was rearrested in 1937, tortured, and shot by the NKVD.

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 4 (1993).]