Mykhaylo Maksymovych - History

History

From the 1850s to the 1870s, Maksymovych worked extensively in history, especially Ukrainian history. He was critical of the Normanist Theory which traced Kievan Rus to Scandinavian origins, preferring to stress its Slavic roots. But he opposed the Russian historian, Mikhail Pogodin, who believed that Kievan Rus originally had been populated by Great Russians from the north. Maksymovych argued that the Kievan lands were never completely de-populated, even after the Mongol invasions, and that they had always been inhabited by Ukrainians and their direct ancestors. As well, he was the first to claim the "Lithuanian period" for Ukrainian history. (His predecessor Dmytro Bantysh-Kaminsky had largely ignored it.) In this way, he anticipated the general scheme of Ukrainian history elaborated by Mykhailo Hrushevsky at the beginning of the twentieth century. Maksymovych also worked on the history of the city of Kiev, of Cossack Ukraine, of the uprising of Bohdan Khmelnytsky, the Haidamak uprisings against Poland, and other subjects. In general, he sympathized with these various Cossack rebels, so much so, in fact, that his first work on the Haidamaks was banned by the Russian censor. Many of his most important works were critical studies and corrections of the publications of other historians, like the Russian, Mikhail Pogodin, and the Ukrainian Mykola Kostomarov.