Shyrotsky, Kostiantyn

Shyrotsky, Kostiantyn [Широцький, Костянтин; Šyroc'kyj, Kostjantyn; aka Sherotsky; pseudonyms: Kost, K. Ladyzhenko, K. Sushchynsky], b 7 June 1886 in Vilshanka, Olhopil county, Podilia gubernia, d 13 September 1919 in Bilousivka, Bratslav county, Podilia gubernia. Art historian and community figure. A graduate of the Saint Petersburg Archeological Institute (1911) and Saint Petersburg University (1912), he lectured in the university’s department of art history and was active in the Ukrainian Hromada in Saint Petersburg. He devoted himself to the study of Ukrainian and Russian art and architecture and collected Western Ukrainian folk art. He contributed to Rada (Kyiv), Ukrainskaia zhizn’, Literaturno-naukovyi vistnyk, and Zapysky Naukovoho tovarystva im. Shevchenka. After the February Revolution of 1917 he was appointed commissioner of Horodenka county in Galicia by the Russian Provisional Government, and in 1918 he organized the Ukrainian National Republic’s Secretariat of Education. He wrote 16 articles on Taras Shevchenko’s artworks (1911–14), books on Hryhorii K. Levytsky (1914), the first volume of a history of Ukraine’s decorative art (1914, dealing with interior home decoration), and an illustrated guide to Kyiv (1917). Under the pseudonym K. Baladyzhenko he and P. Balytsky wrote, in Russian, an illustrated history of Galicia (1915), a book on Bukovyna and its past (1915), and a brief history of the Halych principality (1915).

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