 Dmytro Chyzhevsky as a high school student | |
| Native name | Дмитро Іванович Чижевський |
| Born | (1894-03-03)March 3, 1894 |
| Died | April 18, 1977(1977-04-18) (aged 83) |
Dmytro Ivanovych Chyzhevsky (Дмитро Іванович Чижевський) (March 3, 1894 – April 18, 1977) was a Ukrainian-born scholar ofSlavic literature, history, culture and philosophy.
Dmytro Chyzhevsky was born of Russian-Polish-Ukrainian ancestry on 3 March 1894, atOleksandriia, in theKherson Governorate of the Russian Empire, near theBlack Sea. His first interest was philosophy, and his teachers wereNikolay Lossky, Vasyl Zenkivskyi, andGeorgy Chelpanov. From 1911 to 1913 he studied philosophy and literature at theUniversity of St. Petersburg[1] and afterwards at the department of history and philology atSt. Volodymyr University of Kyiv, where he graduated in 1919.
During theRussian Revolution he was involved in politics and was a member of theMensheviks.[2] After teaching at high school inKyiv from 1919 to 1921, he emigrated from Soviet Russia to Germany and continued his philosophical studies at Heidelberg during the winter semester 1921–22, and then at Freiberg, where he was a student ofEdmund Husserl (SS 1922- WS1923/24).
He lived in Prague from 1924 to 1932, where he became a professor inthe Ukrainian university there, and was a member of the prestigiousPrague linguistic circle,[3] a group of linguists and philologists that includedRoman Jakobson.[4]
In 1932 he moved to theUniversity of Halle in Germany, where he completed his dissertation in Philosophy,Hegel in Russland, under Adhémar Gelb and Paul Menzer. DuringWorld War II, Chyzhevsky took a position at theUniversity of Marburg.
After the war he moved to the United States of America in 1949, and became a professor of Slavic studies atHarvard University.
In 1956 he returned to Germany and settled inHeidelberg as a professor of Slavic studies at theHeidelberg University,[4] where he remained until his death on April 18, 1977.[5]
He had a daughter called Tatjana Čiževska alias Tatiana or Tatyana Marshak (Тетяна Чижевска / Маршак[6] (1924—1986), who was a professor of Slavic studies at various universities in the United States, particularlyWayne State University (Detroit,Michigan).[7]
Chyzhevsky wrote on a broad range of subjects, includingfolklore,history,philosophy,linguistics,Slavic andcomparative literature. He wrote monographs on the Ukrainian philosopherHryhorii Skovoroda (1974) and the German philosopherGeorg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1934). He is also known for his studies of the Russian writer,Nikolai Gogol.[4]
He argued for the existence of a literary baroque and wrote several books on the subject, becoming one of the foremost authorities onbaroque literature.[8]
