Early life Yuri Schneider was born in
Kharkiv, then part of the
Russian Empire (now
Ukraine) in 1908. Some sources state his place of birth as
Łomża,
Łomża Governorate (then part of the Russian Empire, now Poland), although according to Shevelov, this is because his mother falsified records fearing persecution. His father, Vladimir Karlovich Schneider was a high ranking
Russian Imperial Army officer who held the rank of major-general. His father and mother (Varvara Meder, who originally was of noble birth from an established Moscow family) were both ethnic
Germans. When Russia declared war on the German Empire in 1914, his father – a fervent Russian monarchist – decided to russify the family name. Schneider chose the Russian equivalent of his surname, Shevelov, and also changed the patronymic “Karlovich” to “Yuryevich”. Such changes required a personal petition to the Tsar, and in his case it was personally granted by
Nicholas II in 1916. During the
World War I, Shevelov and his mother moved to Kharkiv. At the beginning of 1918, Shevelov's father was
missing in action and was presumed killed. In Kharkiv, Shevelov initially attended the E. Druzhkova Private School, then the 3rd State Boy's Gymnasium, followed by Technical School #7 (). Under the influence of his cousin Tolia Nosiv, who worked as an
anthropologist at the
Ukrainian Academy of Sciences and had been mentored by
Fedir Vovk, Shevelov developed an interest in the Ukrainian language and history. During his youth he read the
Illustrated history of Ukraine by
Mykhailo Hrushevsky and translated a story by
Edgar Allan Poe into Ukrainian. At the age of 17, before entering university, Shevelov travelled to
Kyiv together with his cousin, meeting Hrushevsky and
Serhiy Yefremov.
Career in Soviet Ukraine In 1925 Shevelov graduated from the
First Kharkiv Trade and Industry Union School (). From 1925 till 1927 he worked as a statistician and archive keeper for South Chemical Trust. In 1927–1931 he attended classes at the literary-linguistic branch of the
Kharkiv People's Education Institute. He is considered a member of the
Kharkiv Linguistic School. From August 1931 he was employed as a Ukrainian language school teacher. From 1932 till 1938 he was employed as a Ukrainian language teacher at the
Ukrainian Communist Newspaper Technical School (). From 1933 till 1939 he also taught Ukrainian language at the
Ukrainian Communist Institute for Journalism. From September 1936 he was a postgraduate student under the guidance of
Leonid Bulakhovsky. In 1939, he taught the history of the Ukrainian language and literature. From November 1939 he became the assistant professor and deputy chair of the philology department of the
Kharkiv Pedagogical Institute. In 1941 he became a research fellow at the Linguistic Institute of the
Academy of Science of the Ukrainian SSR. In that same year he was pressured to become an
NKVD informer. In 1934, Shevelov was the co-author of a grammar of the Ukrainian language in two volumes. This text was reprinted in 1935 and 1936.
World War II Shevelov was able to avoid induction into the
Red Army and remained in Kharkiv following the Soviet evacuation and during the entry of
Wehrmacht troops into Kharkiv on 25 October 1941. Within
Reichskommissariat Ukraine, he joined the “New Ukraine” in December 1941, a Ukrainian language newspaper partially controlled by
OUN. Later Shevelov also worked at the "Ukrainian Sowing" newspaper (). From April 1942 Shevelov worked for the city administration and collaborated with the educational organization
Prosvita. In his memoirs, one of his former students
Oles Honchar claimed that when as a Soviet POW he was detained in a Nazi Camp in Kharkiv, Shevelov refused his pleas for assistance . Shevelov answered the allegation in an interview stating that he never received the letter "...And then we had another face-to-face meeting. Honchar started attacking me - ideologically, recalling some facts that I knew nothing about. As though when he was imprisoned in Kharkiv during the war, he gave me a letter in which he asked me to help free him, and I could have, but I didn't want to. Perhaps there really was such a letter, but it never reached me.". Honchar escaped death to become a renowned and influential Ukrainian writer. Shevelov has been critical of Soviet novels including Honchar's major work. Shevelov and his mother fled the returning Red Army's advance on Kharkiv in February 1943. He lived for a brief period in
Lviv, within the
General Government, where he continued to study the Ukrainian language, including the creation of a new Ukrainian grammar until the spring of 1944, when the Soviets continued their drive westwards. Shevelov with the assistance of the moved to Poland (
Krynica) and then to Slovakia, Austria and finally
Saxony.
Emigration After the fall of Nazi Germany, Shevelov worked for the Ukrainian émigré newspaper “Chas” (“Time”). In 1946 he enrolled in the
Ukrainian Free University in Munich and defended his doctorate dissertation in philology in 1947, continuing on his pre-war research and work "До генези називного речення" (1941). He was also vice-president of the MUR (), a Ukrainian literary association (1945–49). In order to avoid repatriation to Soviet Union from Germany, he moved to neutral Sweden, where he worked in 1950–52 as Russian language lecturer at
Lund University. In 1952, together with mother, he emigrated to the US. After settling there he worked as a lecturer in Russian and Ukrainian at
Harvard University (1952-4), associate professor (1954-8) and professor of Slavic philology at
Columbia University (1958–77). He was one of the founders and president of the émigré scholarly organization the
Ukrainian Free Academy of Sciences (1959–61, 1981–86) and received an honorary doctorate from the
University of Alberta (1983) and
Lund University (1984). He was a founding member of the
Slovo Association of Ukrainian Writers in Exile and was published in numerous émigré bulletins and magazines.
Return to Ukraine Shevelov was almost unknown to Ukrainian academic circles after 1943. In 1990, after an extended absence, he visited Ukraine where he was elected an international member of the
National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. In 1999 he received an honorary doctorate from the
Kharkiv University and from the
National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. In 2001 he published two volumes of his memoirs “Я – мене – мені…(і довкруги).”: Спогади. He died in 2002 in New York. ==Awards==