OBITUARY: Prof. Oleksa Horbach, Eastern European linguist, 79 (07/27/97)

OBITUARY: Prof. Oleksa Horbach, Eastern European linguist, 79

by Andrij Kudla Wynnyckyj

TORONTO - Prof. Oleksa Horbach, an eminent Ukrainian linguist, died on May 23 in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. He was 79.

Born on February 5, 1918, in Romaniv, Bibrka district in Halychyna, Dr. Horbach studied in Lviv from 1928, first at the Lviv Gymnasium (graduated 1936) and then at Lviv University (graduated 1940) under "Prague school" Ukrainian linguist and philologist Vasyl Simovych, and the German philologist Z. Steiber. In early 1939, he began his long association with the Shevchenko Scientific Society (NTSh) by acting as secretary of its Commission on New Ukrainian Literature.

In March 1939, he participated in the Union of Ukrainian Student Organizations under Poland's seventh congress, and was arrested by Polish authorities, as were all of the congress's delegates. He was imprisoned in Lviv's Brygidky prison for six months. Upon his release, he worked as a research assistant and lecturer at the University of Lviv's Chair of Ukrainian Language.

In October 1940, Prof. Horbach was drafted into the Red Army. While stationed in eastern Ukraine a year later, he deserted, seeking to return to Lviv, but was captured by the Germans and imprisoned in Kharkiv after a failed escape attempt from a POW camp. In December 1941, Prof. Horbach was released and returned to Lviv, where until mid-1943 he held a lectureship in languages at the Ukrainian Catholic Seminary.

As he recounted in a memoir, faced with deportation to Germany as an "Ostarbeiter" and the choice of joining the Ukrainian Insurgent Army or enlisting in the Waffen SS Division "Galizien," Prof. Horbach chose the latter.

Having seen action in Slovakia, Slovenia and Germany, he ended up in the American zone in Bavaria in 1945, and was released from a U.S. POW camp, but without right of settlement in a displaced persons camp or of emigration to North America.

Prof. Horbach moved to Munich in 1946 and resumed his studies at the Ukrainian Free University (UFU), defending doctoral dissertations in Slavic linguistics in 1948 and 1951.

In 1949, he began serving as the academic secretary to the NTSh, as revived by Prof. Volodymyr Kubijovic, assisting in the organization of the NTSh in Europe (becoming a full member in 1962). Together with Prof. George Shevelov, Dr. Horbach contributed substantially to its major project, the 10-volume Entsyklopedia Ukrainoznavstva (Encyclopedia of Ukrainian Studies) in the area of linguistics, authoring over 100 entries, many of which appear in translation in the five-volume English-language Encyclopedia of Ukraine.

In 1952, Dr. Horbach began lecturing on Polish and Ukrainian language and linguistics at the University of Göttingen. Four years later, he secured his first full-time position at the University of Marburg in (1956-1958), also as a lecturer. In 1958, Dr. Horbach was appointed lecturer of Slavic philology at the University of Frankfurt, and in 1966 was granted the rank of professor (held until his retirement in 1979). In 1965, he became head of Frankfurt University's second chair in Slavic studies, and in 1972-1974 served as the dean of its department of Eastern European languages.

In 1963, he was also named professor of Slavic philology at the Ukrainian Catholic University in Rome (until 1982), and was full professor of the UFU from 1965.

Prof. Horbach participated in several landmark conferences on Germanic and Slavic philology held in Sofia, Bulgaria (1963), Prague (1968), Warsaw (1973), Zagreb (1978) and Bratislava (1993); as well as conferences on linguistics and dialectology in Louven, Belgium (1960), Marburg (1965) and Bucharest (1967); and Balkanology in Athens (1970).

In August 1993, Prof. Horbach took part in the second International Congress of Ukrainists in Lviv, at which he was awarded the NTSh's Hrushevsky Medal for his contributions to scholarship.

Prof. Horbach wrote his doctoral dissertation and numerous articles on regional dialects of Ukrainians living in Poland, Romania, Slovakia and the former Yugoslavia. A major area of interest for him was social slang (the "argot" of students, criminals, soldiers, beggars, itinerant musicians and tradespeople), on which he published widely.

However, most important were Prof. Horbach's studies of Ukrainian, Church Slavonic and Polish texts of the 16th-19th centuries. Among his invaluable contributions were studies of the 17th century "Correct Syntax of Slavonic Grammar" by Archbishop Meletii Smotrytsky (re-published with Prof. Horbach's introduction in 1974), of the 17th century "Slavonic-Ruthenian Lexicon" by Pamva Berynda (1955), and his work in the publication of numerous previously unpublished or inaccessible "middle Ukrainian" texts.

From 1984, Prof. Horbach was closely involved with scholarly efforts devoted to commemorating the 1,000th anniversary of Christianity in Ukraine. He served as one of the organizers of the conference held in Rome in April-May 1988 and as editor of its proceedings "Congressus Series Philologica" (Munich, 1988).

An emeritus professor of Frankfurt University from 1980, he settled in Berfurt, Germany, in 1977.

Prof. Horbach is survived by his wife, Anna; daughters, Kateryna and Maryna; son, Marko, and his wife, Roma; and grandchildren, Olenka and Mykhailo.

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