St Vladimir University (1834-47)
Despite his great success in Moscow in biology and literature, Maksymovych was not happy there. The severe northern climate was hard on his delicate health, intensive work with microscopes was bothering his eyes, and academic politics and the jealousy of some of his colleagues were a challenge.
His mother had long advised him to return home, he longed to do so, and shortly after her death the government announced its plans to create a new Russian university in Kyiv, so Maksymovych showed interest in the project. His “Russian” patriotism had earned him the confidence of Minister of Education Count Uvarov, who was formulating his ideology of “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality,” and Maksymovych would have liked to have been named professor of biology at the new institution, but in May 1834, after a certain amount of hesitation, he accepted positions there as professor of Russian literature and dean of the Faculty of Philosophy and, in October, “rector,” or president. The new university, founded in 1834, was named after Grand Prince Vladimir/Volodymyr of Kyiv (c. 958-1015), a founder of Kyivan Rus'.18Tsar Nicholas I, Count Uvarov, and Russian governing circles in general were planning a new and thoroughly “Russian” institution, to replace Polish institutions in Ukraine and other parts of the Russian/Polish borderlands that had bred Polish patriotism prior to the Polish insurrection of 1830-31. It was meant to solidify the new, supposedly “Russian” character of Kyiv and strengthen Russian claims to this city, which had for several hundred years been subject to the grand dukes of Lithuania and then the kings of Poland. His local roots and ostensible Russian patriotism made Maksymovych the perfect instrument of this policy.
He titled his public lecture at the university of 2 October 1837, which he delivered in the presence of Count Uvarov and other dignitaries, “On the Participation and Significance of Kyiv in the General Life of Russia.” He proposed three phases of Russian history: religion (i.e., Orthodoxy), national independence, and autocracy, corresponding to Uvarov's policy of “official nationality.” He saw Prince Vladimir (reigned 980-1015) as the enlightener of “Russia,” Ivan III (reigned 1462-1505) as “gatherer” of the Fatherland, and Peter the Great (reigned 1682-1725) as its “transformer,” but through it all, including the Lithuanian and Polish periods, Kyiv, with its old churches, its Orthodox Cossacks, and its famous theological academy (founded 1632), retained its place as the most ancient and holy repository of Orthodox Rus', hence the naming after the great enlightener himself, Prince Vladimir.
Count Uvarov was so impressed that he rushed to the podium to shake the lecturer's hand on his very last word. Maksymovych's interpretation seemed to fully coincide with official policy on Russian nationalism and Russia's claim to Kyiv, but it hinted at major, unresolved differences.19Government pressure to conform to official policy on the national question was one thing, but all was not well at the University of Kyiv. From its very founding in 1834, it had run into difficulties: there were many Poles with suspect loyalties on faculty, the student body was mostly Polish, and the government kept a close watch on both professors and students. The new rector had developed far-reaching scholarly plans for the university - including an encyclopaedia of what he called “Southern Rus',” a dictionary of the Ukrainian language, a scholarly journal, and further editions of Ukrainian songs - but few of these were realized. Maksymovych invited Gogol to come and teach, but this too did not work out.
The atmosphere of suspicion and the constant denunciations of university members took their toll. Maksymovychs delicate constitution and frayed nerves simply could not take it. By the end of 1835, he resigned his rectorship. He continued to teach and to care for the welfare of the university, but at thirty-one he was already partly retired to his country home at Mykhailova Hora (Michael's Mountain), south of Kyiv and overlooking the Dnipro River.20
However, the university's troubles continued. In the mid-1830s, a wide conspiracy among the Poles led by one Szymon Konarski was discovered and many students were implicated. In May 1837, the tsar himself arrived in Kyiv and threatened both faculty and students with severe reprisals for any disloyalty. This was the prevailing atmosphere when Maksymovych lectured before Uvarov and the others in October.
It did not help. All of his efforts to protect the university and its faculty and students from the imperial authorities were in vain.
In 1839, the tsar closed the university down for several months and ordered many arrests. (Some students were actually sentenced to be executed, later commuted to long terms in prison.) Maksymovych's health only worsened. He had trouble lecturing, and his hands, legs, and eyes bothered him. In 1841, he retreated for two years to the countryside, and by 1845, at forty-one, he resigned from his professorship and fully retired.21However, Maksymovych's career at the university had solid results. The institution survived and steadily grew, and several of his scholarly projects were carried out in the following years. At one level, he developed a close working friendship with the rector of the Kyiv Theological Academy, the famous preacher Inokentii Borisov, who shared with him an interest in Kyivan churches and antiquities. (Maksymovych was later to write much on these subjects.) So close were the two men that as early as 1840 Maksy- movych confided to Borisov in writing his concerns about the oppression of the enserfed Ukrainian peasantry. This appearantly dangerous letter has not survived, but Borisov's reply, written in Latin to avoid police scrutiny, plainly remarked on Maksymovych's pained tears in this regard.22
Throughout his period as professor of Russian literature (slovestnost), Maksymovych deepened his knowledge of “Russian” (East Slavic) literatures and languages, and wrote extensively on these topics. Thus in 1837 there appeared his first major work on the famous Slovo o polku Igoreve (Lay of Igor's Campaign, late twelfth century), which defended the authenticity and antiquity of this questioned product of Kyivan Rus', compared it to the popular verse of Cossack Ukraine and northern Rus', and affirmed its “national” significance. Specialists usually note that he always stressed this work's “southern,” or Ukrainian, language and linguistic connections, which he believed a product of southern, not northern Rus', and that he was convinced that, in both spirit and content, it closely resembled the surviving popular poetry of Cossack and nineteenth-century Ukraine; in other words, he saw an almost-genetic connection between the heroic epic of Kyivan Rus' and popular Ukrainian folklore of his own time.23
Even more important was Maksymovych's Istoriia drevnei russkoi slovestnosti (History of Old Russian Literature; Kyiv, 1839), which explored both the oral and the written “word” (slovo) in its various manifestations.
He rejected the aesthetic method of classical criticism and used a historical-cultural approach that aimed to reveal the spirit and life of the people. He turned first to the national speech of Russia and placed it within its Slavonic context. Contradicting the Czech philologist Josef Dobrovsky, he argued that “Russian” was not a South Slavic language but rather formed a separate “eastern” group of languages with two branches (razriady), “South Russian” and “North Russian,” and that the former contained two dialects (vidoizmenenia), Ukrainian, or Little Russian, and Red Russian, or Galician. The North Russian branch he divided into two languages: “Great Russian,” with four dialects (narechie), of which Muscovite was the youngest but most developed and “Belarusan” or “Lithuanian-Russian” intermediate between it and South Russian, but much closer to the former. Dobrovsky, who usually focused on the written language, had completely overlooked this diversity of the “Russian” or “Eastern Slavic” languages. (Maksymovych used both terms interchangeably.) By contrast, Maksymovych's work concentrated on the vernacular, decentralized the question, and put language studies in closer touch with the life of the people. The argument that, to use today's terminology, Ukrainian, Russian, and Belarusan were part of a completely independent “Eastern Slavic” group of languages, which emerged before Rus' became a polity, was new and quite bold. Indeed, Maksymovych's researches facilitated the definitive emergence of the new term “Eastern Slavic.”24At the university quite aside from his work as a scholar, our professor had a profound influence on the younger Ukrainian intellectuals gathering in Kyiv. His very attractive personality certainly played a role. “The secret of Maksymovychs attraction as a professor, writer, and scholar,” wrote such a younger contemporary, “was hidden in the personal traits of his character. He was not only a very gifted person, but also of high moral quality, sympathetic, considerate, and sincere, with a poetic note to his speech and in his relations with people.”25
He met all three of the famous literary trio who stood at the very centre of the Ukrainian national awakening: the enserfed peasant boy turned fiery and melancholic poet and painter, Taras Shevchenko, the idiosyncratic and testy but very original writer Panteleimon Kulish, and the high-strung but prolific historian Mykola Kostomarov - all of whom had been influenced by Maksymovychs Malorossiiskie pesni.
Kulish was in the late 1830s his admiring student and in 1840 his co-author in his path-breaking almanac of ucrainica titled Kievlianin (The Kyivan); from 1843 on, Shevchenko became a close acquaintance and then friend who shared his interests in Ukrainian history and songs and who, with his full support, worked for a while for the Kyiv Archaeographic Commission, of which Maksymovych was a founder and guiding spirit; and Maksymovych also helped to bring Kostomarov to Kyiv, found employment for him, and, when Kostomarov was named professor of Russian history, avidly discussed Ukrainian history with him in the privacy of his own home. The four men shared many ideals, relating to the Ukrainian national awakening and the general Slavic renaissance. Together they planned to publish a journal in the various living Slavonic languages.26It was not to last. In 1847, an informer reported to the police seditious conversations held by the young men. A suspicious ukrainophile and slavophile society, the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius (patron saints of Slavdom), was discovered, compromising papers came to light, and all three young proteges, members of the group, were arrested, imprisoned, and sent off into punitive exile. The police reported:
From the papers of Kulish and [his colleague Vasyl] Bilozersky, several new names of people in the Slavic society have come to light: a bureaucrat from the office of the Kyiv Military Governor, Rigelman, the zealous partisan of Slavonic successes, the teacher from the Podolian Gymnasium, Chuikevych, Maksymovych, Bodiansky, and others. Although the main ideas of the love of Slavdom and, especially,
Little Russia, flow through their letters, it is still difficult to determine whether all of the named people took part in undesirable political activities or just shared in the scholarly work of these Slavophiles.27
The sickly Maksymovych was left more or less in peace, as two years before he had already retired to Mykhailova Hora.