Abstract: In his two-volume memoirs, George Shevelov (1908-2002), the leading specialist of Ukrainian linguistics in the twentieth century, offers recurring observations about the development of his attitudes toward Ukrainian, and other languages to which he was exposed. The present article collects and interprets such comments from the first part of the memoirs in order to reconstruct some elements of Shevelov’s personal “history of the Ukrainian language in the first half of the twentieth century.” Keywords: George Y. Shevelov, Ukrainian Linguistics, Kharkiv, Language Biography