Evarnitskii, Dmitrii

(also D. I. Iavornyts-kyi). Born Oct. 25 (Nov. 6), 1855, in the village of Borisovka, in what is now Kharkov Oblast; died Aug. 5, 1940, in Dnepropetrovsk. Ukrainian historian, archaeologist, ethnographer, folk-lorist, and writer. Academician of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR (1929); member of the Moscow Archaeological Society.

Evarnitskii graduated from the University of Kharkov in 1881. He taught at Moscow University, the University of St. Petersburg, and the University of Ekaterinoslav (now Dnepropetrovsk); at the last of these he established a subdepartment of Ukrainian studies. From 1902 to 1932 he was director of the museum of local lore in Ekaterinoslav, now known as the Academician D. I. Evarnitskii Dnepropetrovsk Historical Museum.

Evarnitskii was one of the first scholars to study the history of the Zaporozh’e cossacks; he published a large number of documents and was the author of A History of the Zaporozh’e Cossacks (vols. 1–3, 1892–97). He also gathered extensive folk-loric material, much of which was published in the collection Little-Russian Folksongs Collected Between 1878 and 1905 (1906). His scholarly works describe everyday life; some of his works, written during the prerevolutionary period, exhibit nationalistic tendencies.

Evarnitskii’s novellas include Our Lot is God’s Will (1901), Not for His Own Sins (1907), and To the Seminary! To the Seminary! To the Seminary! (1908). Evarnitskii also wrote satirical short stories and poems.