Dmytro Ivanovych Yavornytsky (; November 6, 1855, in Kharkiv Governorate, Russian Empire – August 5, 1940, in Dnipropetrovsk, Soviet Union) was a Russian Imperial and Ukrainian Soviet academician, historian, archeologist, ethnographer, folklorist, and lexicographer. Yavornytsky was a member of (from 1885), of All-Russian Archaeological Society (from 1886) and an academician of Ukrainian Academy of Sciences (from 1929). He was recognised as one of the most prominent researchers of the Zaporozhian Cossacks from the time of the Cossack Hetmanate, and the author of their first general history. In recognition of his many contributions to the preservation of Zaporozhian Host history and culture, he is widely known in historiography as "the father of the Zaporozhians". Education and career Yavornitsky was born as Dmitry Evarnitsky. His father Ivan Yakimovich Evarnitsky (1827–1885) belonged to Russian Imperial nobility. Dmitry was educated at Kharkov University, Kazan, and Warsaw universities but his academic career was repeatedly interrupted for political reasons. Both as a student and later as a teacher, he was wrongly accused of "Ukrainian separatism" and dismissed from his position. In the 1890s, he was compelled to go to Russian Turkestan in order to find employment. In 1897, the Russian historian Vasily Klyuchevsky helped him to obtain a position as lecturer on the Zaporozhian Cossacks at Moscow University. In 1902, when he was offered a position as Director of the Yekaterinoslav Historical Museum in modern-day central Ukraine, he gladly accepted and remained there to the end of his life. Historian As a historian, Yavornytsky displayed a romantic-antiquarian approach to his subject and was a conscious follower of his predecessor Mykola Kostomarov. He was an enthusiast who avidly sought out documents and material artifacts, as well as stories and the songs of the elderly, concerning the Zaporozhian Cossacks, and he wrote his histories on the basis of this material. He was a pioneer of Zaporozhian history and was the first to compile an extensive archive of materials on their entire history — from their origins, to their demise. He published much of this material in various collections, often at his own expense. Yavornytsky's major work was the History of the Zaporozhian Cossacks which was published in Russian in three volumes between 1892 and 1897. He planned, but never completed, a fourth volume. In this and in his other works, he portrayed the Zaporozhians as representatives of Ukrainian liberty. Later Ukrainian historians criticized him as being uncritical and