Tkachenko, Borys

Tkachenko, Borys [Ткаченко, Борис; Tkačenko], b 6 February 1899 in Kharkiv, d 23 December 1937 in Kyiv. Linguist and literary translator; father of Orest Tkachenko. A student of Leonid Bulakhovsky and Oleksa Syniavsky, in the 1920s and 1930s he lectured at the Kharkiv Institute of People's Education and was a member of the Dialectological Commission of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. In 1925–7 he was a member of the special state commission that regulated Ukrainian orthography. He wrote a study of Ukrainian stylistics (5 fasc, late 1920s–early 1930s) and a few articles on Ukrainian lexicology and dialectal morphology, and was the coauthor of a Russian-Ukrainian dictionary (with Maik Yohansen, Kostiantyn Nimchynov, and Mykola Nakonechny, 1926) and a book of five lectures on the Ukrainian language for teachers (with Yohansen, 1928). He also translated foreign literature into Ukrainian. In 1937 he was arrested during the Stalinist terror and executed. He was ‘rehabilitated’ in 1957.

[This article was updated in 2021.]