Shcherbyna, Nykyfor

Shcherbyna, Nykyfor [Щербина, Никифор; Ščerbyna], b 22 February 1900 in the Cossack settlement of Stanytsia Starokorsunska, Kuban, d 21 March 1977 in New York. Poet. He was active in the Prosvita society (1919–20) and the Ukrainian Literary Society (1920–3) in the Kuban and was secretary of the literary journal Zoria (1920–3) in Krasnodar. He contributed poems and short stories to the major Soviet Ukrainian literary periodicals as a member of Hart (1923) and the Association of Panfuturists (1924–6) in Kyiv and Vaplite (1927–30) and the All-Ukrainian Association of Proletarian Writers (1930–2) in Kharkiv. Published separately were his poetry collections Ranok (Morning, 1929) and Homin budniv (The Echo of Workdays, 1930). In 1931 he was accused of ‘nationalism,’ and his work was not published again until 1941. In the 1930s he translated 12 books of Russian literature into Ukrainian. An associate of the Taras Shevchenko Scientific Research Institute (1935–6), he graduated from Kharkiv University in 1936 and then worked as a teacher in Novoselivka (1936–7) and a lecturer in world literature at the Kharkiv Pedagogical Institute (1937–8). As a postwar refugee and displaced person he lived in Germany and, from 1950, the United States of America, where he contributed to émigré periodicals and published a collection of poems for children, Prolisky (Clearings, 1969).

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