Riezanov, Volodymyr

Riezanov, Volodymyr [Рєзанов, Володимир; Rjezanov; Rezanov, Vladimir], b 9 September 1867 in Liubache, Oboian county, Kursk gubernia, d 31 December 1936 in Nizhyn, Chernihiv oblast. Literary scholar; corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR from 1923; an associate of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences (VUAN). He graduated from the Nizhyn Historical-Philological Institute (1890), where he taught from 1899 and became a professor in 1910. In 1934 he was purged from his position. Riezanov wrote 70 works on the history of Ukrainian, Russian, and world literature. His studies on the history of Jesuit religious drama and the Ukrainian school drama that arose on its foundation are based on extensive use of primary sources. They include books on the history of Russian drama (1907), an accompanying volume of texts of 17th- and 18th-century school plays (1910), and books on 17th- and 18th-century school plays and Jesuit theater (1910), on Jesuit theater (1910), and on school dramas in Polish-Lithuanian colleges (1916). His Drama ukraïns'ka: Starovynnyi teatr ukraïns'kyi (Ukrainian Drama: Old Ukrainian Theater, vols 1, 3–6, 1926–9) is a fundamental scholarly work and collection of primary sources on the subject. He also wrote Do istoriï literaturnykh styliv: Poetyka renesansu na tereni Ukraïny i Rosiï (Toward a History of Literary Styles: Renaissance Poetics in the Territory of Ukraine and Russia, 1931).

Roman Senkus

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