“I’ve never served a regime”

George Yurii Shevelov was born on December 17, 1908, in Kharkiv to the family of Major-General Wladimir Schneider and Varvara Meder. In 1916, during World War One, his father, an ethnic German, had to change his last name: “It was to be distinctly Russian and suggest no sedition or treason. He chose Shevelov and the patronymic Yurievich.”

After leaving school, he planned to enter the Literature Faculty of the Kharkiv Institute of Public Education (before the October Revolution, Kharkiv University’s Faculty of History and Linguistics), but, following the current vogue for engineering professions, decided to apply to the Chemistry Faculty of the Kharkiv Technological Institute, pinning all his hopes on fate. He got a bad mark in algebra at the last exam in this institute, which made him “unboundedly grateful to Providence.” In 1931 he graduated as teacher of language and literature in secondary educational institutions. He refused to be paid a scholarship at the institute, for he did not want to be indebted to the Soviet state.

He did not exactly rush to do a postgraduate course because candidates were vetted meticulously and this could reveal his “social origin.” And only the year 1936 started a new period in his life, when Stalin announced: “The son will not be held responsible for his father.”

In 1939 he defended a Candidate of Sciences dissertation, “The Language and Style of Pavlo Tychyna’s Political Lyricism,” supervised by Professor Leonid Bulakhovsky.

From 1944 on, Shevelov lived for some time in Germany, where, in spite of difficult postwar conditions, he plunged into the creation of a new Ukrainian literature – he was deputy chairman of the Artistic Ukrainian Movement in 1945-48 and an associate professor of Slavic linguistics at Munich’s Ukrainian Free University in 1946-49. In 1949 he obtained a doctorate “on the basis” of the work On the Genesis of the Nominal Sentence which he had written back in Kharkiv.

After moving to the US in 1952, he taught Slavic studies at Harvard and Columbia (New York) universities in 1952-54 and 1954-77, respectively.

Shevelov is the author of about 800 scholarly publications. The best-known of them are A Prehistory of Slavic: The Historical Phonology of Common Slavic (1965) and A Historical Phonology of the Ukrainian Language (1979), after which, to quote Oksana Zabuzhko, “it is as impossible to seriously repeat the old imperial mantra about ‘the common Eastern Slavic roots’ and ‘a cradle of the three fraternal peoples’ as it is to teach about the Earth on three whales after Copernicus.”

He won the National Taras Shevchenko Prize of Ukraine in 2000.

Shevelov died on April 12, 2002, in New York.

In 2013, the Ukrainian Center of the International PEN Club, the Kyiv Mohyla Business School, the Dukh i Litera publishing house, and the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute founded a George Shevelov Prize for modern essay writing.

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“Legend and documents have it that I was born on December 17 (December 4 by the Julian calendar) in Kharkiv at about 3 o’clock a.m. At the time, neither the births nor the deaths of people were hidden from the public eye. Women were not taken to maternity hospitals for sort of a mass production. An obstetrician was called home, and the baby saw the light of day among his or her immediate family, not within the white aseptic walls of a state-run laboratory.”

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“I revolted for the first time when I was about seven. What triggered it was the rejection of my first name. I was christened Georgy but usually called Zhorzhyk, a diminutive. I could not then pronounce either ‘zh’ or ‘r,’ and Zhorzyk turned into Ziozia in my lips. The nickname stuck, and I was called so in the family at first jocularly and then customarily. This excessive affection annoyed me, and I said I would no longer respond to Ziozia, for I was already big and this made me undeservedly small. But I didn’t want to be George, either. This must have also been the impact of patriotism in the first years of war against the Germans. Of course, the French were our allies, but it was still better to have a Slavic name. Thus I became Yurii. Let me remind you that, approximately at the same time, my father turned from Volodymyr Karlovych into Volodymyr Yuriiovych – a harmony of generations.”

IN 1948 SHEVELOV WROTE AN ARTICLE, “THE FOURTH KHARKIV,” IN WHICH HE TOOK AN “EVOLUTIONARY” GLANCE AT THE CITY. THE COMMUNIST PARTY AND GOVERNMENT PLANNED TO MAKE A “SHEER PROVINCE” OUT OF THE FOURTH KHARKIV. TRYING TO CONTINUE THE CHAIN AND BELIEVING IN THEIR CITY, PRESENT-DAY KHARKIV STUDENTS HAVE CREATED A GRAPHIC WORK, “THE FIFTH KHARKIV” / Photo replica from the website of the Kharkiv branch of the Union of Designers of Ukraine

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“All bodies are small. The 20th-century discovery is that millions of human bodies are also small.”

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“I have done for the Ukrainian language what Hrushevsky has done for Ukrainian history.”

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“The greatest discovery in the years of my schooling, which mattered throughout my further lifetime, was the discovery of Ukraine. The episode was as fulminating as the conversion of Saul to Christianity and his turning to Paul, but God did not visit me in a fulminating vision and I did not fall off the horse. It was just a brief exchange of retorts with Tolia Nosov [Shevelov’s cousin, ethnographer, repressed in the 1930s in the Ukraine Liberation Union case. – Ed.].

“A language spoken by millions of people cannot be unbeautiful. And this levelheaded answer was for me what the vision of God in the yawning sky was for Saul.”

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“Deep in my heart, I never took the Soviet system as my own, I never tried to join the Komsomol or the Party, and I avoided high-ranking offices that give you the right to dispose of the destiny and life of others.”

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“Any mass-scale upbringing breeds a functional person.”

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“The world cannot stand geniuses, it was and still is dominated by mediocrities, and the Soviet regime in Ukraine at the time was also setting mediocrities against talents and using various factors for strengthening itself.”

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“My longtime inner rejection of Sovietism has called up an association, in a quaint psychological game, with the condition of Ukrainian culture: it is being harassed and persecuted, which means that we are allies.”

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“Plenty of individual thinking was not one of the very encouraged features in Soviet Ukraine.”

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“I don’t think that ‘fatherland cannot be chosen,’ for in the conditions of a mixed population, everybody chooses one, but I think it can only be chosen once.”

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“It is an old maxim: the killer of one or ten is a murderer, and the killer of hundreds of thousands is a leader and general of genius.”

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“I’ve never served a regime.”

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“Rhetoric about Nazism as ‘brown plague’ was mindless because the ‘red plague’ of Russia was not put next to it.”

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“We contrive to lag behind not only the world, but also… our own selves.”

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“Well before the occupation of Kharkiv by the Germans, I knew that it was not my war and that Hitler and Stalin were equally hostile to me, and when I read Mein Kampf, I became finally convinced of it. I saw no other forces in this mindless face-off. Yes, I wanted an independent Ukraine, but I saw not a faintest chance for the emergence of it. So, I thought that my goal was just to keep a low profile, not to be drawn into the whirlwind of destructions and deaths, and not to find myself in either the Soviet or the German army. This was the only thing I was sure of, and this motivated my daily actions or the lack of these. But it is a short-term program. Maybe, I will find another, better, more perfect one in the West?”

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“The world only accepts us as modern, on the level of its own. Let us harbor no illusions: we will never conquer it with the ‘hopak.’”

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“Province is psychology, not geography, a soul, not a theory.”

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“One of the Soviet journalists who specialize on pasquinades about people on the other side of the barricades, using the material scantily measured out by KGB bosses and having no access to primary sources, alleged, without having any other ‘compromising materials’ against me, that I had ‘dodged’ service in the Soviet army. I must say he was absolutely right. To tell the truth, I didn’t have to dodge literally because, before the Soviets had retreated, I was struck off the draft books and told to get registered at the place I’ll come to. But I did not go away, and there was no place to get registered in the German-occupied Kharkiv. But I really managed to dodge – if not in action, which was impossible, then in the intention, and my poor ‘biographer’ is right here. He might have only added that I also dodged the draft into the German army – in this case I really had to dodge actively, and there was a minute when it seemed that I had lost. But ‘fate protected Eugene,’ and I remained civilian in all my lifetime.”

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“The three awful enemies of Ukrainian renaissance – Moscow, Ukrainian provincialism, and the Kochubei mentality – are still living today.”

P.S.: Read the full text of the article on Den’s Ukraine Incognita website: incognita.day.kiev.ua.