These historic words of Iziaslav of Kyiv to Yury of Suzdal during the famous [twelfth-century] struggle for the sovereignty of Kyiv, quoted by Maksymovych to [his Russian friend] Pogodin as a summary of his polemic against him can serve as an epigram of the great historical feat [of Maksymovych and] Ukrainian historiography [1820-1920]: “We bow down before you! You are our brother! But go back to your own Suzdal!”

Mykhailo hrushevsky, “‘Malorossiiskie pesni'” (1927)

Mykhailo Oleksandrovych Maksymovych (1804-1873) was a gifted scientist and scholar at the start of the nineteenth-century Ukrainian national awakening.

He made solid contributions to botany and zoology, to philology, including the history of the Ukrainian and Russian languages and their contemporary development, and to folklore, literary studies, popular education, history, and archaeology. He was a contemporary and friend of both the Russian national poet, Aleksandr S. Pushkin, and the Ukrainian national poet, Taras Shevchenko (see Plates 9 and 10); he was mentor to the Ukrainian writer Panteleimon Kulish and the Ukrainian historian Mykola Kostomarov and, like his close friend the humorous novelist Nikolai Gogol/ Mykola Hohol, advanced both Ukrainian and Russian national cultures. At Maksymovychs death in 1873, the Ukrainian political figure Mykhailo Drahomanov, paraphrasing Pushkin on Lomonosov, characterized him as being “for Kyivan Rus' an entire learned, historical-philological institution and together with this a living national personality.”¹ Some hundred and twenty years later, the Kyiv University historian Volodymyr Zamlynsky acknowledged his predecessor as “the patriarch of Ukrainian scholarship” (patriarch ukrainskoi nauky).² But exactly who was Mykhailo Maksymovych, where did he stand in the history of Ukrainian-Russian national relations, and what was his role in the modern history of Ukraine?³ Mykhailo Maksymovych was born on 3 (15) September 1804 on the small homestead (khutir) held by his mother's family, the Tymkivskys, in Poltava province in left-bank (eastern) Ukraine, into a family of old Ukrainian Cossack officer lineage. Most members of the province's landowning gentry had similar ancestry, and many cultivated a local patriotism that esteemed the old Ukrainian hetmanate, or autonomous Cossack state.

The Tymkivskys were quite well educated, and early on Mykhailo's maternal uncles schooled him at home. He later studied at a nearby convent. From 1812 to 1819, he attended the Novhorod-Siversk Gymnasium, or High School, whose founder and director was his relative Ilia Fedorovych Tymkivsky. It is generally believed that the famous, anonymous political tract on Ukrainian national autonomy, the Istoriia Rusov (History of the Ruthenians, 1827), which circulated in manuscript widely in this region at the time, was somehow linked to this town. By the time Mykhailo graduated, he had imbibed much of the local or estate patriotism of “Little Russia,” and he seems to have taken this sensibility with him to Moscow University.⁴

Maksymovych stayed for a while in Moscow with his uncle Roman Tymkivsky, and after the latter's death he studied philology, then botany and medicine, at the university. One of his biology professors, Mikhail Pavlov, introduced him to Schelling's idealistic, spirit-oriented “Nature Philosophy,” which was to influence several of his important early works. He took his first degree in biology in 1823, his master's in 1827, and a doctorate in 1832. The Polish Romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz was present at his defence of his 1827 master's thesis, “O systemakh rastitelnogo tsarstva” (On the Systems of the Flowering Kingdom), in which, as he later noted, “botanical knowledge was filled out with the teachings of Nature Philosophy.”⁵ His first book, Glavnye osnovaniia zoologii ili nauka o zhivotnykh (The Principal Foundations of Zoology or the Science of Animals), was published in 1824, and Osnovannia botaniki (The Foundations of Botany) quickly followed. During this period, Maksymovych's work in the physical sciences was so pioneering that he had to invent a number of new scientific terms in the Russian language, some of which passed into common parlance and are still used today. These endeavours brought him to the attention of the Russian literary figure Prince V.F.

Odoevsky, who noted his work in the journal Syn otechestva (Son of the Fatherland), invited him to his home, and introduced him to Moscow literary circles.⁶

After receiving his doctorate in 1832, the young scholar was named professor of biology at Moscow University and director of its botanical garden. In the 1820s he had published in the newspaper Moskovskii telegraf (Moscow Telegraph), but by the 1830s he was drawing close to his fellow Moscow professor the literary critic N.I. Nadezhdin, whose journal, Teleskop (Telescope), printed many of his first notable philosophical statements.⁷ Another close friend whom he met late in this period was the Ukrainian folklorist and historian Osyp Bodiansky, with whom he shared interests in Ukrainian antiquities.

Many Russian intellectuals were beginning to challenge their colleagues' unthinking imitation of western European models in literature and politics and began to explore the native Slavonic and Russian elements in their culture. Narodnost (“nationality”) was in the air, and Maksymovych imbibed its general principles. He was not a Muscovite, however, but a native of “Little Russia” (central Ukraine), and he was to express the principle of nationality in his work not only in general “Russian” but also in specifically Ukrainian forms. Three publications reveal his thought processes of this time: his speech “On Russian Education,” delivered on 12 January 1832 at the University of Moscow, his “Letter on Philosophy” (Teleskop, 1833), and his Kniga Nauma o velikom Bozh’em mire (Book of Naum about God's Great World, 1833).

In the first of these, Maksymovych argued that Russian education must balance western European with native Russian elements and that service to Russia was also a service to humanity in general; in the second, reflecting Schelling's Nature Philosophy, he declared that true philosophy was based on love and that all branches of organized, systematic knowledge that strove to recognize the internal meaning and unity of things, but most especially history, were philosophy; in the third, he put these two principles to work in a popular exposition of nature, the solar system, and the universe, in congenial religious garb for ordinary laypeople. He wrote this last Book of Naum in Russian but used very simple language, and intellectual historian Aleksandr Pypin believed he intended it primarily for the common folk of his native Little Russia.⁸

<< | >>

↑

Source: Prymak T.. Ukraine, the Middle East, and the West. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press,2021. — 306 p.. 2021