Name Pylyp Morachevskyi Role Poet | Died 1879, Nizhyn, Ukraine | |
Pylyp Morachevskyi (Chernihiv Oblast, 1806-Nizhyn, 1879) was a Ukrainian romantic poet, and translator of the New Testament into Ukrainian. He sometimes wrote under the pseudonym Khvylymon Haluzenko (Хвилимон Галузенко).
He was born in the village of Shestovytsya in Chernihiv District to a poor noble family, and studied at the local school in Chernihiv, then later at the University of Kharkiv. He began to work on Ukrainian language texts in the 1850s:
"In 1853 Morachevsky submitted his Dictionary of the Little Russian Language, based on the Poltava dialect, to the Imperial Academy of Sciences. During his work on the dictionary, he realized that the Ukrainian language, which by then had been nearly squeezed out of schools, had a practically unlimited vocabulary." Klara Gudzyk, The Day
In 1859 he retired with his wife, three sons and two daughters to the village of Shnakivtsi in Nizhynsky County. In the 1860s he began his Bible translations into Ukrainian starting with the Gospels, completed in November 1861, then Acts of the Apostles Revelation and Psalms. He also wrote a Ukrainian "Sacred History" for elementary schools. However the Russian authorities did not permit the publication of his Ukrainian New Testament portions until 27 years after his death in 1906.
Works
His most famous poems include: