Maksymovych at the Crossroads
Mykhailo Maksymovych, with his gentle and humane character and his Schellingesque love for man and nature, was in many ways a “universal man” of the classic Renaissance kind. He contributed prodigiously to both the physical sciences and the humanities, to botany, zoology, folklore, philosophy, education, language, literature, and history.
Moreover, he was a poet, who saw a basic unity and purpose to all systematic and organized knowledge, and who considered all of life and science to be infused with meaning and direction. Thus, although he was certainly not a “great” poet, he was “a poet of scientific thought” and “a poet of scholarship,” who was somewhat lyrical about everything that he wrote and everybody that he met.48Maksymovychs universal interests and curiosity had a bearing on how he approached both the physical sciences and the humanities, and, indeed, even politics. He gleaned his idealistic philosophy from Schelling and applied it to his popular works on botany and zoology; and he learned his scientific rigour in the physical sciences but also applied it to his works in literature, folklore, and history. He was a true Romantic in his interest in the past, religion, and the common folk, but, given his mild, accommodating nature, was very timid about questioning the autocracy and public order of Imperial Russia, about which he had many private doubts; it was left to a younger generation already moving from Romanticism to Positivism to completely sweep away the last vestiges of classicism and “enlightenment hierarchy,” if that is how, most generously, the tsarist system could be described.
Maksymovych stood at the crossroads. In his youth, European manners and morals, classical models, and the French and German languages had held unchallenged sway over elite Russian minds and feelings. In “Little Russia,” the socially conservative estate or local patriotism - and political autonomism - of the kind promoted by the Istoriia Rusov were very popular.
But it was Maksymovych and his generation who pioneered the concept of “nationality” in the Russian realm. In doing so, Maksymovych drew attention to the fact that “Russian” nationality existed in more than one form, and he raised new questions about the relations between Southern Rus' and Northern Rus', which during his time were becoming modern “Ukraine” and “Russia.” These questions concerned their Slavonic and national characters, their languages, histories, and literatures. By raising the status of Southern Rus' and putting it on an equal footing with the North, he unknowingly helped launch the eventual separation of the two and the emergence of modern Ukrainian and Russian national identities.But Maksymovych took only the first step. He did not accept the concept of mutually exclusive Ukrainian and Russian national identities that was to emerge later in his own century, or, even more clearly, early in the next century. For him there still existed a deep family kinship among the various parts of St Vladimir's Rus'. As late as his 1871 jubilee, he explained it thus:
As a native of Southern Kyivan Rus', under the land and sky of my forefathers, to the present day I primarily have belonged to her and I will belong to her, primarily dedicating to her my intellectual activity. But together with this, growing to maturity in Moscow, I also loved and studied Muscovite Rus' as the sister of our Kyivan Rus', and as the second half of that one and the same Holy Rus’ of Saint Vladimir, feeling and recognizing that in their ways of life and their understandings, one without the other is insufficient and one-sided.49
Deeply conservative in his instincts and interests, Maksymovych looked backward to the heritage bequeathed him by his Ukrainian forefathers. He was a true gatherer of a pre-national heritage. But in doing this, he aroused newer “national” feelings among members of the younger generation. Through his editions of Ukrainian folksongs, he stirred their interest in their native language and past; through his studies of Slovo o polku Ig- oreve he stressed the continuity of this Ukrainian past and deepened their Ukrainian feeling; and through his polemics with the Muscovite Pogodin
and the Pole Grabowski, he started a way of historical thinking that was to culminate in Kostomarov's innovative claim about the existence of “Two Russian Nationalities” and Hrushevsky's about the independence of the Ukrainian historical process from the Russian within the context not of “Russia,” but of the “Eastern Slavic” peoples, a term first coined and defined by Maksymovych himself.
Maksymovych's words quoted above indicate that he possessed a number of simultaneously held identities, some of which eventually became contradictory; that is, he identified widely with “Russia” as a whole, more narrowly with “Southern Rus',” and even more narrowly with “Ukraine,” or the Kyivan region together with the entire area east of the River Dnieper; and he did this in a way that was typical of the nineteenth century.
At the same time, as his correspondence with the Galicians showed, the area to the west of the Dnieper, stretching as far as Galicia (similarly a part of St Vladimir's Rus'), was also of a very special “national” interest to him, even though it was seldom marked as “Ukraine” in maps of his day and official Russia then had no political ambitions with regard to it.50However, as well, Maksymovych was in some ways different from both his immediate predecessors - the gentry autonomists, who admired the Istoriia Rusov and held certain very real grivances against Moscow - and his successors, whom he had already taught to think along “national” lines. These differences were etched out in his positive though relegated attitudes towards Russia, the result of his intense intellectual formation in Moscow, and also in his innovative concept of ancient Kyiv's significance, both unusual for his time. Both his older contemporaries from the former het- manate, those avid readers of the Istoriia Rusov, and the next generation, as represented by Shevchenko, Kostomarov, and Kulish, were centred more on Cossack Ukraine than on Kyivan Rus', and Moscow was completely absent from the education of the latter three. And this was to have enormous consequences with regard to Ukrainian national independence.
As the literary historian Serhii Yefremov aptly stated in the 1920s, although Maksymovych may have been very conservative and moderate in his ambitions for Ukrainian literature in “Russian Ukraine,” and thus also for the future development of Ukraine as a full-fledged modern nation with a language and a literature of its own, his advice to the Galicians to develop their literature as much as possible in their native language - basically what was happening in the rest of what he called “Southern Rus'” - returned to haunt both his memory and his spiritual children in “Russian Ukraine.” After all, it was he who initiated the process by which the terms “Russians” and “Little Russians” started to give way to “Eastern Slavs” and “Ukrainians,” and which ended two generations later in the deconstruction of the Russia into which he had been born and the extension of the term “Ukraine” to a vastly larger area, even west to Austrian Galicia and beyond.
That is, Yefremov believed that Maksymovych started a process that eventually went much farther than he had intended.51Moreover, as his ultimate heir, the influential Ukrainian historian Mykhailo Hrushevsky, pointed out to his countrymen some ten years after the great Ukrainian revolution of 1917,52 there were two conscious principles inspiring Maksymovychs work that resonated through Ukraine's future. Firstly, unlike some earlier works, such as the popular but gentry-oriented Istoriia Rusov, his own varied writings stressed “the people” as the subject and the goal of Ukrainian scholarship. This was clear not only in his work on Ukrainian folklore and history, but even in his popularizations of the natural sciences, especially his Book of Naum about God’s Great World. Secondly, he emphasized the continuity of Ukrainian culture throughout the centuries, extending even back to Kyivan Rus'. He traced this continuity in his studies of Ukrainian language, folk poetry, and history. The people and its millennium-old heritage, so argued Hrushevsky, as well as the names “Eastern Slavs” and “Ukrainians,” as pointed out in this chapter, were the lasting legacy of the gentle hermit of Mykhailova Hora, whose deep personal and political conservatism did not prevent him from becoming a close friend of the fiery rebel Shevchenko and, in politics, a revolutionary force in the modern history of his native land.