Tetyana Kardynalovska

Tetyana Mykhailivna Kardynalovska (1899, Kiev — 27 June 1993, Ann Arbor), was a Ukrainian interpreter, pedagogue, memoir writer.

Kardynalovska was the daughter of a Russian general of artillery Mykhailo Hryhorovych Kardynalovsky. She also was an older sister of a Ukrainian architect Yelyzaveta Kardynalovska. Tetyana finished one of the Kiev city gymnasiums and studied at the Engineering Department of the Kiev Polytechnic Institute which she did not manage to finish due to the war with Russia. After finishing gymnasium she married Vsevolod Holubovych who at that time was a General Secretary as well as a deputy to the Russian Constituent Assembly. That marriage, however, did not last for long and in 1919 the couple petitioned for divorce. For some time Tetyana continued to live in Kamyanets-Podilsky, working for a local editorship of Chervony Shliakh headed by her former husband, Holubovych.

Tetyana later married a former Ukrainian Socialist-Revolutionary and writer Serhiy Pylypenko who in 1919 joined the ranks of the Bolsheviks and was a Combrig of the Red Army. Pylypenko, like numerous other Ukrainian nationals, was murdered by the Stalinist regime in March 1934, when he was recognized as a counterrevolutionary. After that Tetyana continued to live as a widow of the former enemy of the people in Ukraine until World War II when in 1943 she was deported to Austria for "work". After escaping from a labor camp she lived in neighboring Italy, then Great Britain. After the war she emigrated to the United States, as returning home was not an option.

In the United States she worked as a pedagogue at Harvard University where Kardynalovska taught Russian at first and later the Ukrainian languages. She wrote a collection of her memoirs Nevidstupne mynule (Persistent past). Kardynalovska also was one of the authors of the Russian language textbook "Modern Russian" (1964/65). She died on June 27, 1993 in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Couple of months later the newspaper Literaturna Ukraina (Literary Ukraine) of September 2, 1993 wrote an article about her "To the memory of Tetyana Kardynalovska".