Dmytro Yavornytsky - Legacy

Legacy

During the Joseph Stalin repressions of the 1930s, Yavornytsky was prevented from publishing and had to keep a very low profile. During the Holodomor (the Ukrainian famine of 1932–33), he felt compelled to give away artifacts from his collections to obtain food for starving local peasants and others.

His death passed unnoticed both in the USSR and in the wider world. The Yekaterinoslav (today Dnipropetrovsk) Museum was eventually renamed in his honour and he was partially rehabilitated during the Nikita Khrushchev and Petro Shelest eras. Materials about him began to appear, and in the early 1970s, a four volume collection of his works was prepared for publication. Political circumstances again prevented this from happening, but with the advent of the Perestroika reforms in the late 1980s, new materials began to appear and his major works were republished. At that time, his History of the Zaporozhian Cossacks was reprinted both in Russian and in Ukrainian (1990–91). The Ukrainian edition contains numerous additional illustrations. In 2004, the first volume of his Collected Works in Twenty Volumes was published. The first ten volumes of this collection will contain his historical, geographical, and archeological works, the second ten volumes, his works on folklore, ethnography, and language.

Today, Yavornytsky is still widely revered as "the Father of the Zaporozhians".