Abstract
The article deals with the linguistic views of Ivan Nečuj-Levyc′kyj (1838–1918), a famous writer from the period of Ukrainian realism. After the 1905 abolishment of censorship in Russian Ukraine, the local literary language went though drastic linguistic and orthographic changes. A staunch defender of the Central Dnieper features of this language, Nečuj-Levyc′kyj was notoriously opposed to the innovations coming from Austrian Galicia. Based either on the Dniester dialect or induced by Polish, such innovations were allegedly polluting the Dnieper Ukrainian language used in contemporary periodicals and fiction. In a series of linguistic essays and in private letters, Nečuj offered well-grounded recommendations in the realms of phonetics, morphosyntax, and orthography, in order to fend off the excessive blending of Galician elements from the “new jazyčiȇ” with eastern Ukrainian. The author concludes that the place of Nečuj-Levyc′kyj’s in the normalization of modern Ukrainian deserves to be reassessed.