Borys Hrinchenko


Borys Dmytrovych Hrinchenko was a classical Ukrainian prose writer, political activist, historian, publicist, and ethnographer. He was instrumental in the Ukrainian cultural revival of the late 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries.
Hrinchenko was an editor of various Ukrainian periodicals. He was one of the founders of the Ukrainian Radical Party. Hrinchenko also was an author of seminal ethnographic, lexicographic, and pedagogical works, literary studies, historical reviews, the first textbooks in the Ukrainian language, particularly Native word, the school-book for reading. He was an editor of the four-volume Словарь української мови.
One of the organizers and the first director of the Prosvita Society in Kiev.

Biography

Borys Hrinchenko was born on December 9, 1863 in the khutir of Vilkhovy Yar, in the Kharkov Governorate of the Russian Empire, but was baptized in the Archangel-Michael church in a village of Borshcheve. His father was a retired army officer of an impoverished noble heritage. His mother Poliksenia Litryova, a daughter of a colonel. His family possessed 19 desyatinas of land, mostly forest and a water mill. His father knew Ukrainian well and used it only when talked with neighboring peasants, whereas at home everyone in the family spoke Russian.
Before enrolling in the Kharkiv city secondary school, young Hrinchenko was home schooled. At the fifth grade he was imprisoned on 29 December 1879 "for possession and distribution" of Serhiy Podolynsky's banned book "Steam Machine". He was excluded from school and spent couple of months in prison where he became sick on tuberculosis. After about a year of exile to his father's estate, he returned to Kharkiv and worked as a tutor, earning money to obtain a diploma from Kharkiv University as a people's educator.
He died on May 6, 1910 in the town of Ospedaletti in Liguria, Italy.

English Translations

English translations of Borys Hrinchenko's works include: