Biography of Pavlo Ritter: Attempts at Reconstruction and Search for New Material

Abstract

The article briefly describes the return of Pavlo Ritter’s name to Ukrainian Oriental studies and draws attention to the fact that Ritter’s figure is considered mainly in the context of Ukrainian Indology. He is the first Ukrainian Indologist who translated directly from Sanskrit, Bengali, Prakrit into Ukrainian, without an intermediary language. The tragic life of the scientist is connected with Kharkiv University, institutions of the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. However, Ritter’s personal interests went beyond the specialty of an Indologist. Much less is known about his connections with the Kharkiv Public Library, the music school, about his activities as a newspaper editor and correspondent who had his own column in the newspaper. Therefore, the above-mentioned should be supplemented with the clarification of Ritter’s contribution to musicology and journalism, the discovery of his musical and theater reviews related to K. Balmont, S. Rachmaninov, and O. Scriabin names. Attention is also drawn to the possible reconstruction of his childish and youthful interests, which laid the foundation for the future personality of the Indologist, since no relevant documents have been found to date. The article brought to the reader attention is an attempt to present the uniqueness of Pavlo Ritter’s figure, relying on additional facts from already known sources and on newly discovered materials. P. Ritter’s epistolary belongs to almost unknown sources, except only for his correspondence with the Moscow publishing house concerning Kalidasa’s Megaduta. It is about his correspondence with publishers, friends, colleagues, whose letters and letters to whom can be found unexpectedly. Memories of friends, personal archives of work colleagues, archives of various institutions, and among them – educational – music school and university, to which P. Ritter was involved, can be considered new sources. The archives of Oleksandr Biletskiy and Andriy Biletskiy deserve special attention. Archives of editorial offices of magazines, encyclopedias, publishing houses, academic institutions with which he directly collaborated or in which his works were later published become extremely important in terms of searching for new materials. New sources should expand the understanding of Pavlo Ritter’s figure and his creative legacy. Because the milestone anniversary – 150 years from the birthday that has passed, appears only as the beginning of the countdown to the next memorable date and means the need to prepare for it now.