Ihor Sevcenko was a man of many attainments and remarkably wide learning: a Byzantinist, a Slavist, a Classical scholar, a paleographer, an epigraphist and a gifted linguist in addition to being a keen angler. Perhaps he could best be described as a cultural historian.
Born of Ukrainian parents in the village of Radosc in east-central Poland, Ihor Ivanovic Sevcenko attended the Adam Mickiewicz Classical Gymnasium in Warsaw, where he acquired a sound grounding in Greek and Latin, and continued his studies at the Charles University of Prague, winning his first doctorate (in Classical philology) in 1945.
A refugee at the end of the war, he moved to Belgium and enrolled in the University of Louvain where, in 1949, he was awarded his second doctorate, this time on a recondite topic of Byzantine intellectual history. His thesis, covering what was at the time new ground, was eventually published in 1962 under the title ?tudes sur la pol?mique entre Th?odore M?tochite et Nic?phore Choumnos. The high point of his Belgian years was, however, his participation in the lively seminar conducted at Brussels by Henri Gr?goire, the doyen of Byzantine studies, whom he came to regard as his master.
Sevcenko’s next move was to the US, first to Berkeley, where he joined the circle of the eminent medievalist Ernst Kantorowicz. He then taught at the universities of Michigan and Columbia, before accepting a chair at Harvard’s Dumbarton Oaks Centre in Washington in 1965, where he was for a time director of Byzantine studies. When the research activities of that centre were downgraded in 1973, he transferred to Harvard itself as Dumbarton Oaks Professor of Byzantine History and Literature until his retirement in 1992. There he helped to found in 1973 the Ukrainian Research Institute, of which he remained associate director until 1989. Always eager to travel, he lectured as visiting professor in Paris, Cologne, Munich, Budapest and Bari, and was a familiar figure at Oxford, having held visiting fellowships at All Souls (1979-80) and Wolfson College (1987, 1993).
Sevcenko’s bibliography as at 2003 lists more than 200 titles, starting with a Ukrainian translation of George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1947). Many of his scattered articles, some of them very substantial, have been collected in four volumes devoted in large part to two broad subjects: the intellectual history of Byzantium and its impact on the eastern Slavs.
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In the latter field he maintained the view that Byzantine influence in religion, political ideology and letters remained paramount down to the spread of European Enlightenment in the 17th-18th century, a view that brought him into conflict with Soviet historians who argued for an autochthonous Russian culture with only a thin Byzantine veneer. In his latter years he had been paying increasing attention to the troubled history of Ukraine as a battleground between Roman Catholic and Orthodox ideologies.
Sevcenko himself described his approach as representing what he called “normal science” (meaning Wissenschaft) based on a close study of texts and their mutual interdependence, and was disappointed when his brand of scholarship, laborious as it was to produce, began to be questioned both for political motives and in the name of various forms of Post-Modernism.
One example of his method will suffice, namely his spectacular demolition of the so-called Fragments of Toparcha Gothicus. This enigmatic Greek text, first published in 1819 by the noted Hellenist K. B. Hase and purporting to narrate the experiences of a Byzantine commander faced by unspecified barbarians somewhere on the north coast of the Black Sea, had provoked a plethora of conflicting interpretations not free from national bias. Yet no one was much bothered by the mysterious disappearance of the medieval manuscript that Hase claimed to have used. Relying on the printer’s copy of the editio princeps written in Hase’s own hand, on Hase’s rather scabrous secret diary (composed in Greek) and a minute philological examination of the published text, Sevcenko was inevitably led to the conclusion (since confirmed) that the Fragments were an elaborate hoax perpetrated by Hase himself at the expense of his Russian paymasters. A more erudite and humorous piece of literary detection would be hard to find, but, predictably, not everyone was pleased.
As happened to most perfectionists, Sevcenko did not live to complete all the projects he had in mind, but his critical edition of the highly important Life of the Byzantine Emperor Basil I (867-886) ascribed to Constantine Porphyrogenitus is ready for the printer and promises to become a model of its kind.
Sevcenko received many distinctions, including three honorary doctorates and festschriften on his 60th and 80th birthdays. He was a member of a dozen academies, including the British Academy (corresponding Fellow) and was from 1986 to 1996 president of the Association Internationale des ?tudes Byzantines, in which capacity he presided over the memorable international congress held at Moscow (1991) which happened to coincide with the coup attempt against Mikhail Gorbachev.
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A man of commanding presence and outgoing personality, Sevcenko had a wide circle of friends both in Europe and North America with whom he communicated in French, German, Italian, Russian, Polish, modern Greek and occasionally Latin.
He made high demands on his graduate students, but obtained excellent results from the few who satisfied his expectations.
His marriages to Oksana DrajXmara, Margaret Bentley, an editor of scholarly works, and Nancy Patterson, a distinguished Byzantine art historian, were dissolved. He is survived by two daughters.
Professor Ihor Sevcenko, historian, was born on February 10, 1922. He died on December 26, 2009, aged 87