Turning to History (1860-73)

In the early 1860s, Maksymovych lived quietly in the countryside, cor­responding with friends and colleagues and contributing to various Ukrainian publications. He collaborated in 1861 with Bilozersky, Kostoma­rov, Kulish, and the others on the journal Osnova (Foundation), in which he placed his famous “Letters on Bohdan Khmelnytsky.” He had long wanted to see a real scholarly journal of Ukrainian studies, and this was the first.

In these various publications and others, our scholar defended the Ukrainian character of Gogol's stories from an attack by Kulish, who had accused him of not really being in touch with the Ukrainian folk, penned several articles on Kyiv and other Ukrainian localities, and wrote more on Slovo o polku Igoreve, which he had now translated into both modern Ukrainian and modern Russian verse. He also prepared a new, revised edi­tion of his popular work on biology, The Book of Naum about God’s Great World. (The twelfth edition of what can be called only a nineteenth-century scientific “bestseller” appeared only much later, after his death.)³⁶ But more and more, he was drawn to history.

Isolated at Mykhailova Hora, he could not do intensive archival re­search, but still managed to write a great deal and also published analyses of the works of other historians. Indeed, his favourite genre became the friendly public “letter” to his scholarly subject, with some personal memo­ries of their experiences together and then a careful critique of their work. He used this technique with his old Moscow friend the Russian historian Mikhail Pogodin and the Polish writer Michal Grabowski, as well as the Ukrainians Kulish and Kostomarov.

Of course, Maksymovych tackled many of the most pressing questions of Ukrainian or Russian history. Thus he was critical of the Norman- ist theory of the origins of Rus' - that the Normans (Norsemen), a people whose relatives later ruled Normandy, England, and Sicily, created Kyivan Rus'. Maksymovych criticized the theory's supporters August Ludwig von Schlozer, Nikolai Karamzin, and his own friend Pogodin and stressed the native Slavonic origins of this polity.³⁸ Having long rejected a unitary origin of the languages and peoples of Kyivan Rus', he was appalled when Pogo­din, leaning on new arguments that evidence for the Ukrainian language was missing from surviving literary sources, theorized that it was the “Great Russians” who had originally populated this state, only to be driven north by the Tatars and replaced by the “Little Russians” immigrating later from the Carpathians. Maksymovych offered a three-pronged rebuttal: southern Rus' had always been populated by the Ukrainians and their direct ancestors, whose roots could be traced back to the Poliany, or pre-Christian tribes in the Ukrainian forests and steppes; the literary heritage of Kyivan Rus' had, unfor­tunately, been preserved only in the North (Muscovy) by monastic scholars who systematically edited out its South Russian elements; and the later Ta­tar devastation was never complete. Further, it was ancestors of the modern Ukrainians who had pushed west across the Carpathians, not vise versa.³⁹

Similarly, Maksymovych criticized Michal Grabowski for stressing the Polish claim to Kyiv and to Ukraine. Grabowski contended that Ukraine had been colonized anew by the Poles after the Mongol/Tatar invasion, and that Polish influences on Ukraine were on the whole beneficial.

Our many-sided scholar also wrote on other contentious historical subjects. Thus he was the first to explore the career of Hetman Petro Sa- haidachny (hetman 1616-22), who in alliance with the Poles had attacked Muscovy, renewed the suppressed Ukrainian Orthodox hierarchy, and captured the great Turkish slave emporium in Kaffa. He also wrote on Bohdan Khmelnytsky, correcting his former protege Kostomarov on many minor points and criticizing his innovative but somewhat uncritical use of Ukrainian folksongs and Polish chronicles as sources. He acknowledged his friend's artistry and beautiful exposition, as well as his unrivalled knowl­edge of the subject, but advised him to rework his monograph. The writer took the criticism to heart and did exactly that.⁴¹

Maksymovych was the first to write seriously on the Haidamak rebel­lions against Poland (1734, 175θ> 1768), especially on the Koliivshchyna, or “Rebellion of the Pikes,” of 1768, in which the common Cossacks - the so- called Haidamaks - massacred many Polish nobles, Catholic priests, and Jewish “estate bosses” or stewards. Polish legends depicted the Cossacks as simple thieves and brigands, but Maksymovych saw in them a natural reac­tion against Polish oppression, especially the “forced” Church Union. Even though he stressed religious and not social factors, his work on the 1768 uprising was so unsettling to the socially conservative authorities that it was banned by the Russian censor and published only after the author's death.⁴²

In general, Maksymovych was very critical of the dominant Ukrainian histories of his time, the anonymously written Istoriia Rusov (History of the Ruthenians), Bantysh-Kamensky's Istoriia Maloi Rossii (History of Little Russia), and Markevych's Istoriia Malorossii (History of Little Russia).

Therefore he sought out as many new sources as he possibly could (given his delicate health) and published many of them. Perhaps his rediscovery of Sakovych's poem eulogizing Sahaidachny was his greatest new find, but he also did much critical work on the chronicle of Hrabianka and the new Cossack chronicles and other sources discovered in his time, and, as well, did some archaeological work on ancient arrowheads, and on Kyiv and its architecture, which had implications for Ukrainian history as a whole.⁴³ His attention to detail and to the particular make his works heavy reading but sustains their scholarly value.

The Ukrainian intelligentsia in Kyiv celebrated the golden jubilee of Maksymovych's literary and scholarly career in 1871, and the next year his friend and companion of his last years, the bibliographer and book collector Stepan Ponomarev, published a short biography of him. He was at long last elected a corresponding member of the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg, and the Ukrainian scholars Volodymyr Antonovych and Olek- sander Kotliarevsky were preparing the large, three-volume edition of his Sobranie sochinenii (Collected Works) cited so many times in this chapter.

Also in 1872, an institution that Maksymovych had long dreamed of, the His­torical Society of Nestor the Chronicler, was finally founded in Kyiv, and he was immediately elected an honorary member. Moreover, the Kyivans, much to his delight, were arranging a great archaeological and historical congress for 1874. In the midst of all this activity, the elderly scholar, who was still living at Mykhailova Hora, quietly passed away. He was buried at his beloved country home and mourned by three generations of Ukrainians for whom he had been an esteemed mentor, courteous colleague, and faithful friend.