Vagilevich, Ivan

Born Sept. 2, 1811, in the village of Iasenev-Gorishnyi, now Rozhniatov Raion, Ivano-Frankovsk Oblast; died June 10, 1866, in L’vov. Ukrainian writer, scholar, philologist, and folklorist.

Vagilevich’s father was a priest. Vagilevich studied at the L’vov Seminary. He began his literary and scholarly activity in the mid-1830’s. He and M. Shashkevich and Ia. Golovatskii published an almanac, The Dnestr Water Nymph (1837), which laid the foundation for the development of modern Ukrainian literature in Galicia. Vagilevich is the author of the heroic romantic narrative poem Madei, the ballard Zhulin and Kalina, and poems written in Polish. He translated The Tale of Igor’s Campaign into Ukrainian and Polish; he is also the author of Remarks on Russian Literature (1848). Vagilevich compiled the Dictionary of Southern Russian (unpublished) and the Grammar of the Ukrainian Language in Galicia (1845, written in Polish). In 1848 he published a Ukrainian newspaper entitled Dnevnik rus’kii. Later, Vagilevich joined the Polonophile movement.