Thie Impact of His Legacy
Where does Maksymovych stand in the development of the Ukrainian language and the history of Ukrainian literature? His Malorossiiskie pesni of 1827 was a landmark in both. It turned attention to the Ukrainian vernacular shortly after the Napoleonic Wars, when the literary elite was still somewhat enamoured of the French language and western European models.
The innovative etymological orthography he crafted to print it was, as he himself argued, a way of presenting the Ukrainian vernacular without fully breaking with the Ukrainian past and its Church Slavonic-influenced book language. Furthermore, as he also argued, because it looked so similar to the written Russian language of the North - the language of Pushkin - Russians too could read it, provided a glossary was added.44Nevertheless, it was a step backward from Pavlovsky's phonetic orthography of 1818; many of his Ukrainian contemporaries thought that it did not capture spoken Ukrainian. When he persisted in using it, he was criticized. Petro Hulak-Artemovsky wrote to him in French some time later, “Please allow me, kind sir, to say to you in all sincerity, which arises out of a deep respect for you, that this orthography, in my opinion, does not appeal to the taste of our countrymen, or to the spirit of the language itself. The Russians will read it as Russian, and the Ukrainians will have difficulties making out what it says.”45 In the end, it was rejected in favour of a more phonetically accurate system devised in the 1850s by Panteleimon Kulish - the basis of modern written Ukrainian.46
Maksymovych's literary views befell a similar fate. Although he staunchly defended the independence of the Ukrainian language, and almost worshipped the fiery and melancholic Shevchenko, his views on its development were very modest. For him, as for a great many people of that time, it was the language of the common people and seemed to him appropriate only for writings about them - primarily belles lettres and poetry - but not for scholarship or other such pursuits. He did not, it seems, expect Ukrainian literature in Russia to develop into a full field of literature.
Many in the younger generation could not understand why Ukrainian could not move from poetry and song to literary, scholarly, and eventually scientific prose. Indeed, the talented Kulish was soon translating into Ukrainian not only the Psalms, as Maksymovych had already done, but pretty much the whole Bible, as well as Goethe, Byron, and Shakespeare. Moreover, Maksymovych advised the Galicians, who were trying to stave off polonization of their tongue, but were free to choose their written language, to write everything in the Ukrainian vernacular and use the achievements of the Ukrainians in the Russian Empire. Consequently, there was a certain amount of equivocation in Maksymovychs views on literature.47