The Jewish World of Yurii Shevelov (Based on Memoirs and Essays)

The article deals with the intellectual biography of Yuri Shevelov (1908–2002); in particular, it covers and analyzes the contacts of this Ukrainian Slavic scholar and writer with representatives of the Jewish nation in the Kharkiv period of his life. In his memoirs and essays, he repeatedly uses the expression “Ukrainian Jews”, forming an author’s unique and axiologically marked concept of “his Jews” (spiritually close Jews or “svoji jevreji” in Ukrainian in these texts). Yu. Shevelov found his “spiritually close Jews” in Kharkiv in the 1910s and 1930s. He called them so because he felt their closeness as carriers of those moral principles and psychological and intellectual qualities that were important to him as a Ukrainian by his conscious choice. The aim of the article is to clarify the specifics of the phenomenon of Yu. Shevelov’s Jewish world as a specific part of his social and intellectual environment before World War II. Yu. Shevelyov’s “Jewish World” is considered a phenomenological construct reflected in the scholar’s memoirs and essays describing his relations with Jews and their role in shaping his intellectualism, critical thinking, moral principles, and worldview in general. The components of Yu. Shevelyov’s “Jewish World” are his relations with Jews in everyday life described in his memoirs and reflections on the Kharkiv performances of the Jewish theatre staged by Alexis Granovsky in Yiddish. The authors of the article emphasize that “spiritually close Jews” were an important component of Yu. Shevelov’s existential project, the implementation of which provided for the creation of modern Ukrainian culture as a basis for establishing historical justice – Ukraine’s understanding of its independent development without Russian pressure. The existential nature of cultural communication with “his Jews” is underlined by the fact that Yu. Shevelov was not a supporter of their linguistic and cultural assimilation that was consistently implemented by the governments in tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union.