George Shevelov

George Yurii Shevelov was a Slavic linguist, philologist, essayist, literary historian, and literary critic. A longtime professor of Slavic philology at Columbia University, he challenged the prevailing notion of a unified East Slavic language from which Ukrainian, Belarusian and Russian later developed, instead proposing that these languages emerged independently from one another.

George Yurii Shevelov was born Yurii Shneider in Kharkiv, Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire in 1908. Some sources however, indicate Kharkiv as his place of birth . His family moved to Kharkiv in 1910. His father, Vladimir Karlovich Shnaider was a high ranking Russian Imperial Army officer who held the rank of majorgeneral. His father and mother were both ethnic Germans. When Russia declared war on the German Empire in 1914, his father a fervent Russian monarchist decided to russify the family name. Shnaider choose the Russian equivalent of his surname Shevelov, and also changed the patronymic Karlovich to Yuryevich. Such changes required a personal petition to the Tsar, and in his case it was personally granted by Nikolai II in 1916. During the World War I, Yurii and his mother moved to Kharkiv. At the beginning of 1918, Shevelovs father was missing in action and was presumed killed.

Source: Wikipedia