The paper addresses George Y. Shevelov’s linguistic studies on Pavlo Tychyna’s poetic language and style. This problem was in the focus of Shevelov’s PhD thesis, written in 1936–1939 under Leonid Bulakhovs’kyj’s supervision and defended at the University of Kharkiv. Although the typescript in question is now considered to be lost, some chapters of it are available in the form of three lengthy articles published in 1940–1941. This makes it possible to analyze Shevelov’s early research into Tychyna’s oeuvre within the entire corpus of his studies on poetic language and style, especially from the methodological point of view. A variety of Shevelov’s publications is taken into consideration, ranging from hitherto unknown newspaper articles to his classical studies on the language and style of other Ukrainian writers. Shevelov’s conclusion concerning Tychyna’s politically engaged collection of poems The Party Leads the Way, if one looks away from its ideological implications, is that it constitutes an interesting formal experiment offering a nice example of a notionally meaningless poetic language per se.