Pohrebennyk, Fedir

Pohrebennyk, Fedir [Погребенник, Федір], b 29 June 1929 in Rozhniv, Stanyslaviv county, Galicia, d 10 January 2000 in Kyiv. Literary scholar. He completed a degree in literature at Chernivtsi University and from 1959 worked at the Institute of Literature of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR (subsequently, Institute of Literature of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine). Except for some articles on Taras Shevchenko, Pohrebennyk concentrated on the turn-of-the-century writers from his native region. He coedited Pys'mennyky Bukovyny (Writers of Bukovyna, 1958) and edited a book on Marko Cheremshyna (1975) and a book on Olha Kobylianska (1982). He wrote Osyp Makovei: Krytyko-biohrafichnyi narys (Osyp Makovei: A Critical-Biographic Sketch, 1960). The majority of his works, however, were devoted to Vasyl Stefanyk: besides the three-volume collection of Stefanyk’s works, which he coedited with Vasyl Lesyn in 1964, he edited Spivets' znedolenoho selianstva (The Singer of the Unfortunate Peasantry, 1974) and wrote Vasyl' Stefanyk u slov’ians'kykh literaturakh (Vasyl Stefanyk in Slavic Literatures, 1976), Vasyl' Stefanyk: Seminari (Vasyl Stefanyk: Seminars, 1979), and his doctoral study, Storinky zhyttia i tvorchosti Vasylia Stefanyka (Pages from the Life and Creativity of Vasyl Stefanyk, 1980). Pohrebennyk’s approach, like that of the majority of Soviet literary scholars, avoided the ideological pitfalls of interpretive reading and concentrated on biographical details.

Danylo Husar Struk

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 4 (1993).]