His father and mother (Varvara Meder, who originally was of noble birth from an established Moscow family) were both ethnic Germans.
When Russia declared war on the German Empire in 1914, his father – a fervent Russian monarchist – decided to russify the family name.
Schneider chose the Russian equivalent of his surname, Shevelov, and also changed the patronymic “Karlovich” to “Yuryevich”.
In 1925 Shevelov graduated from the First Kharkiv Trade and Industry Union School (Ukrainian: Перша харківська торговельна промислова профспілкова школа).
From November 1939 he became the assistant professor and deputy chair of the philology department of the Kharkiv Pedagogical Institute.
In his memoirs, one of his former students Oles Honchar claimed that when as a Soviet POW he was detained in a Nazi Camp in Kharkiv, Shevelov refused his pleas for assistance [9][failed verification].
Shevelov with the assistance of the Ukrainian Central Committee [pl; ru; uk] moved to Poland (Krynica[clarification needed]) and then to Slovakia, Austria and finally Saxony.
After the fall of Nazi Germany, Shevelov worked for the Ukrainian émigré newspaper “Chas” (“Time”).
In 1946 he enrolled in the Ukrainian Free University in Munich and defended his doctorate dissertation in philology in 1947, continuing on his pre-war research and work "До генези називного речення" (1941)[citation needed].
In order to avoid repatriation to Soviet Union from Germany, he moved to neutral Sweden, where he worked in 1950–52 as Russian language lecturer at Lund University.
[13][14] He was a founding member of the Slovo Association of Ukrainian Writers in Exile and was published in numerous émigré bulletins and magazines.
[19] Kharkiv Oblast Governor Mykhailo Dobkin suggested that Shevelov during World War II "took an apartment of a Jewish family which, most likely, was shot".