Malorossiiskie pesni (Little Russian Folksongs, 1827)
During the late 1820s, when Maksymovych was most active in botany, zoology, and the other physical sciences, he was still attracted to literature and the humanities. Thus in 1827, when defending his master's thesis in botany, he published a non-science collection: Malorossiiskie pesni (Little Russian Folksongs).
He researched this book in his spare time and during a summer gathered songs in Ukraine and read the Slavonic grammar of Josef Dobrovsky and Vuk Karadzic's collection of Serbian folksongs. The stirring opening lines of Maksymovych's Introduction were a manifesto of the new national spirit:The time has arrived to recognize the real value of nationality (narod- nost); the desire has arisen to create a truly Russian poetry!... In this regard, the monuments in which nationality is most fully expressed deserve our attention. Such are the essence of songs revealing spirit and feelings, and tales which show the fantasy of the people... “Stories are sweet, but songs are truth itself” says the proverb... In particular, this can be said of Slavonic songs, which we see are characterized by their grace. This grace can be a clear proof that poetry is the natural quality of the human spirit and that true poetry is its own creation.
But why Little Russian folksongs in particular? Maksymovych continues: “Thinking along these lines, I turned my attention to this subject in Little Russia and for the first time I am publishing a selection of the songs of this country, proposing that they will be interesting and in many respects useful for our [Russian] literature (slovestnost). I am completely convinced that they have an indubitable value and occupy one of the first places among the songs of the Slavonic peoples.”
Cossack traditions were particularly strong in his homeland. “Arising like a comet,” Maksymovych tells us, “Little Russia has long made its neighbours tremble.” Its history was stormy; its people made up of Slavs, other Europeans, and Asiatics, who loathed slavery and thirsted for independence and the heroic.
The stormy life of the Ukrainian steppe raiders, the simple life of the pastoralists, and the settled life of agriculturalists, he maintained, are all embedded in their national character and are reflected in their songs, which are preserved especially well by the women. Ukrainian songs, he observed, like the Ukrainian language, are intermediate between Polish and Russian songs. While Russian songs are deep, despondent, and submissive, Ukrainian songs are natural, passionate, almost like “conversations with the wind.” In “Russia,” it is the men who sing; but in Little Russia, it is the women (see Figure 3).9Maksymovych's collection contained 127 songs, including historical songs and “dumy” (a term [duma sing.] the author coined for reflective epic songs), songs about everyday life, and ritual songs. He printed the volume in his proposed new etymological orthography for Ukrainian. It was not the first modern work on Ukrainian ethnography, history, or language - Kalynovsky's descriptions of Ukrainian wedding customs had been published in 1764, Bantysh-Kamenskys history of Little Russia in 1822, and Pavlovsky's grammar in 1818 - or even the first assemblage of Ukrainian folksongs - that was Prince Tsertelev's (1819). Yet Maksymovych's was by far the most extensive collection yet and the first to contain ordinary non- historical songs, to analyse and classify the material, and to go beyond mere antiquarianism or simple historical interest and invoke the new principle of nationality, which was now coming to the fore.10
Indeed, Maksymovych's little book was to raise new questions about Little Russia and its relation to Russia as a whole. His ideas were still ambiguous. He used the terms Russkii (Russian) and Malorossiiskii (Little Russian) and distinguished them as we do, Russian from Ukrainian. But he also applied Russkii as a generic term for both Russian and Little Russian, where we today say “Eastern Slavs.” Nowhere in his Introduction does he apply the then-common term Velikorusskii (Great Russian) to northerners or Ukraintsi (Ukrainians) to southerners.
Thus the youthful Maksymovych (he was only twenty-three) raised the question of nationality in Russia, and more specifically in Little Russia. His little book of folksongs was merely the first step in a decades-long process.It had a profound effect on Maksymovych's contemporaries and on the development of national relations in Russia and what was to become modern Ukraine. The reviews were generally good. For example, in Syn otechestva (Son of the Fatherland) Orest Somov, who was Ukrainian-born, praised Maksymovych's knowledge of Little Russia and called this poetic, sunny, southern country “a Russian Italy.”11 Pushkin read the songs with interest; he soon met Maksymovych at the home of Count Uvarov, who complimented the botanist for his gift with words, to which Pushkin said: “We have known Maksymovych for some time and consider him [not only a scientist but also] a literary man (literatorom). He has given us the Little Russian songs.”12 In Pushkin's poetic hymn to Russian glory, Poltava (1829), the folksongs clearly inspired the figure of the Ukrainian woman, Mariia Kochubei, “one of the first living Russian female personalities” in Russian literature.13
Maksymovych's songs electrified “Ukrainians.” In November 1833, Gogol, thinking of writing a history of Ukraine, wrote to Maksymovych: “Ah my joy, my life, the songs! How I love you! What are these soulless chronicles that I am ploughing through compared to these sonorous living chronicles!”14 Meanwhile, in far-away Austrian Galicia, where the local Ukrainian intelligentsia was just rising from its slumber, the “Ruthenian Triad” - Markiian Shashkevych, Ivan Vahylevych, and Yakiv Holovatsky - read Maksymovych's collection with enthusiasm - Holovatsky even copied it out by hand - and, following his example, published a collection of Galician songs in the Ukrainian vernacular of that region, which was to be a lasting and profound example.15 Also, the songs stirred younger inhabitants of the region.
The young Kostomarov later testified that he got hold of them in the late 1830s: “I was struck and then carried away by the sincere beauty of Little Russian popular poetry. I had never suspected that such elegance, such depth and fresh feelings could be found in the creations of the common people who were so close to me and about whom I unfortunately knew nothing.”16 Given such positive reactions, Maksymovych released Ukrainskie narodnye pesni (Ukrainian Folksongs, 1834) and Sbornik ukrainskikh pesen (A Collection of Ukrainian Songs, part 1, 1849). His use of the term “Ukrainian” may relate to the publication in 1832 of the Russian translation of Beauplan's famous map Description d’Ukraine (1639), which used “Ukraina” and “ukrainets” quite frequently, unlike Beauplan himself, who usually spoke only of “Cosaques.”17 At any rate, Maksymovych's turn to things Ukrainian and his eventually liberal use of the term “Ukrainian” were to resonate profoundly.