Dmitry Revutsky (1881–1941) was a Ukrainian Soviet musicologist, folklorist, literary scholar, translator, teacher, and professor. He was born in Irzhavets, Chernihiv Governorate, and died in Kyiv on December 29, 1941. His younger brother was the composer Lev Revutsky; his son, Valerian Revutsky, was a theater scholar, critic, teacher, and professor.
Revutsky received his early education at home and studied at the history and philology faculty of Kyiv University from 1900 to 1906. He studied music under the composer Mykola Lysenko. From 1918, he taught at the newly established Lysenko Music and Drama Institute, where he taught orthoepy—the correct pronunciation of Ukrainian—until 1932. He also taught at Kyiv gymnasiums. In 1938, he became a senior researcher at the Institute of Folklore of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR and taught at the Kyiv Theater Institute.
Revutsky helped establish the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences’ ethnographic cabinet in 1922 and the scholarly journal Ethnographic Bulletin in 1923. His books included Ukrainian Epics and Historical Songs (1919) and The Living Word: The Theory of Expressive Reading (1920). From 1926 to 1929, he published three volumes of Ukrainian folk songs titled Golden Keys, each containing 125 songs with scholarly commentary.
He organized concerts, performed folk songs and epics, translated texts by European and Russian composers, and edited numerous score editions. His opera-libretto translations for the Kyiv Opera Theater included Mozart’s The Abduction from the Seraglio, Meyerbeer’s The Prophet, Gounod’s Faust, Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci, Glinka’s Ruslan and Lyudmila, and Rachmaninoff’s Aleko. He wrote about 60 scholarly works, including studies of Mykola Lysenko, Taras Shevchenko, and Ukrainian folk song.
Organizations
1