Mykhailova Hora and Moscow (1847-60)
The following years were very difficult for our former professor. His health was still not good; he was isolated in the countryside without books or friends and lived in great poverty.
Nevertheless, he worked whenever he felt strong enough and turned more and more towards history and philology. He wrote a brief history of Kyiv (Ocherk Kyiva) and worked with the Kyiv Archaeographic Commission. His Nachatki russkoi filologii (Principles of Russian Philology, 1848) was very well received; the Russian lexicographer Vladimir Dal praised it, and it influenced the development of Russian philology. In 1849, Maksymovych felt strong enough to go to Moscow to find work and consorted with his old friend Gogol and with Sergei Aksakov, an early figure among the conservative Moscow slavophiles, who had not yet turned against the Ukrainian awakening. Maksymovych discovered in the papers of his friend Mikhail Pogodin the long-lost 1622 poem of Kasi- ian Sakovych in honour of Petro Konashevych Sahaidachny, hetman of the Zaporozhian army. In June 1850, he returned to Ukraine in the company of Gogol.28His misfortunes, however, continued. In 1851, his father died, in 1852 Gogol did too, and the next year he lost to marriage his beloved sister, who had long cared for him. Finally, at forty-nine, he married a neighbour's daughter. Mariia Vasylivna turned out to be his saviour. She was a cheerful, warm, sensitive, and charming woman who played the piano well and knew a great many Ukrainian songs. She quickly became the light of his life and bore him both a son and a daughter. This marriage helped transform Ukrainian culture.29
In 1856, the slavophile Moscow journal Russkaia beseda (Russian Conversation) published the first part of Maksymovych's Dni i mesiatsy ukrainskogo selianina (Days and Months of the Ukrainian Villager). This wide-ranging work summed up his many years of observing “Ukrainian” peasants, more particularly those of the Kyiv and Poltava regions, especially near Mykhailova Hora.
It laid out the folk customs of the Ukrainian village according to the calendar year.30 The published parts of the work earned very positive responses, and the following year Maksymovych (with his new wife) went to Moscow to edit Russkaia beseda. He also released the first number of the almanac Ukrainets (The Ukrainian) - note the auspicious title - a continuation of his earlier almanac, Kievlianin. It included works on Ukrainian history and a Ukrainian translation of the Psalms and of the twelfth-century Slovo o polku Igoreve (The Lay of Igor's Campaign).31In Moscow, Maksymovych reunited with many old friends, both Russian slavophiles such as Sergei Aksakov, and Ukrainian scholars interested in Slavdom and the national awakening, such as Osyp Bodiansky. (Maksy- movych's long-time and absorbing correspondence with the latter has been preserved.32) Shevchenko returned from exile and with a friend went to visit Maksymovych and his wife. On 18 March 1858, Shevchenko, quite taken with Mariia Vasylivna, confided in his diary:
We found him busy at work over Russkaia beseda. His wife was not at home. She was at church and fasting. But soon she appeared and the gloomy cloister of the scholar began to lighten up. What a beautiful sweet thing she is! And what is most charming about her is that she represents the pure and innocent feminine type of my countryman. She played several songs on the piano for us in such a pure and unaffected way that more than one great artist could hardly match. Where did that old antiquarian dig up such sweet pure goodness?33
On 25 March Maksymovych held a dinner in honour of Shevchenko, which included his old friends Pogodin and Shevyrev, and recited a verse he had composed in honour of the poet. He praised Shevchenko as a true poet of his people, who had returned unbroken by his hard experiences and would soon “sing new songs of human freedom.”34
The poet and the scholar did not meet again until June 1859, at Mykhai- lova Hora. They were together for over a week, and Shevchenko painted memorable portraits of both his hosts. Mariia Vasylivna was also supposed to try to find a wife with similar qualities to her own for the poet, but fate intervened. Within a year and a half Shevchenko was dead, and Maksy- movych pronounced a farewell verse at his funeral at Kaniv, almost across the Dnipro from Mykhailova Hora.35