Swoboda, Victor

Swoboda, Victor [Свобода, Віктор; Svoboda, Viktor; pseuds: M. Davies, Michael Browne], b 20 February 1925 in Kompaniivka, now in Kirovohrad oblast, d 1 July 1992 in London. Writer and teacher. Displaced by the Second World War, Swoboda settled in England in 1948. He studied at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies at London University (1950–3) and was an assistant (1955–9), lecturer (1959–73), and senior lecturer (1973–83) in the Russian language and Ukrainian language there. Swoboda is the author of articles on early Ukrainian lexicography, Ukrainian-Belarusian and Ukrainian-Yiddish linguistic relations, and Taras Shevchenko. Under the pseudonym M. Davies he translated and published Ivan Dziuba’s Internatsionalizm chy rusyfikatsiia? as Internationalism or Russification?: A Study in the Soviet Nationalities Problem (1968). In the 1970s he contributed reports on political persecution of dissidents in Ukraine to Index on Censorship and edited, under the pseudonym Michael Browne, Ferment in Ukraine: Documents by V. Chornovil, I. Kandyba, L. Lukyanenko, V. Moroz, and Others (1971). He contributed articles on Ukrainian literature and writers to The Penguin Companion to European Literature (1969) and Cassell’s Encyclopaedia of World Literature (1973) and was the coauthor (with Bohdan Nahaylo) of Soviet Disunion: A History of the Nationalities Problem in the USSR (1990).

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