Zavitnevych, Volodymyr

Zavitnevych, Volodymyr [Завітневич, Володимир; Zavitnevyč], b 14 April 1853 in Litsviany, Minsk gubernia, Russian Empire, d 18 February 1927 in Kyiv. Historian and archeologist of Belarusian descent. He graduated from the Saint Petersburg Theological Academy (1879) and studied at the Warsaw Theological School (until 1883). He was a professor of Russian history at the Kyiv Theological Academy (1884–1911), a member of the Historical Society of Nestor the Chronicler, and a contributor to Trudy Kievskoi dukhovnoi akademii (TKDA). In 1918 he sat on the Scientific Committee of the Ministry of Religions of the Ukrainian State led by Hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky. Zavitnevych conducted archeological excavations in Belarus and Polisia near the Prypiat River, as well as in the Kyiv region, Kharkiv region, and Poltava region. He wrote studies of the Princely era on the basis of his explorations, such as ‘Vladimir Sviatoi kak politicheskii deiatel'’ (Saint Volodymyr as a Political Figure, TKDA, 1880; published separately in 1890) and ‘Proiskhozhdenie i pervonachal'naia istoriia imeni Rus'’ (The Origin and Primordial History of the Name Rus’, TKDA, 1892). Among his other works are Palinodiia Zakharii Kopystenskogo i eë mesto v istorii zapadno-russkoi polemiki XVI i XVII vv. (Zakhariia Kopystensky’s Palinodiia and Its Place in the History of Southern Russian [Ukrainian] Polemics in the 16th and 17th Centuries, 1883), Religiozno-nravstvennoe sostoianie N.V. Gogolia v poslednie gody ego zhizni (The Religious and Moral State of Nikolai Gogol in the Last Years of His Life, 1902), and Aleksei Stepanovich Khomiakov (2 vols, 1902-3).

Arkadii Zhukovsky

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