Mykhaylo Maksymovych - Life

Life

Maksymovych was born into an old Ukrainian Cossack family which owned a small estate in Poltava Province (now in Cherkasy Oblast) in Left-bank Ukraine. After receiving his high school education at Novhorod-Siverskyi Gymnasium in Ukraine, he studied botany and philology at Moscow University, graduating with his first degree in 1823, his second in 1827, and his third in 1832; thereafter, he remained at the university in Moscow for further academic work. He taught biology and was director of the botanical garden at the university. During this period, he published extensively on botany and also on folklore and literature, and got to know many of the leading lights of Russian intellectual life including the Russian poet, Alexander Pushkin, and the Ukrainian-born writer, Nikolai Gogol, and shared his growing interest in Ukrainian history with them.

In 1834, he was appointed professor of Russian literature at the newly created Saint Vladimir University in Kiev and also became the university's first rector. (This university had been established by the Russian government to reduce Polish influence in Ukraine and Maksymovych was, in part, an instrument of this policy; the rapid growth of Ukrainian national feeling was its unintended consequence.) Maksymovych elaborated wide-ranging plans for the expansion of the university which eventually included attracting eminent Ukrainians like Gogol, Mykola Kostomarov, and Taras Shevchenko to teach there. After a short time, however, the pressures of the reactionary Imperial government, which feared political conspiracies among the largely Polish student body, and ill health, forced him to retire both from his rectorship and also his professorship. Maksymovych tried to protect the Poles on faculty and the Polish students from political repression but had little success in this and Tsar Nicholas I actually shut down the institution for one whole year. Thereafter, Maksymovych lived quietly at his estate at Mykhailova Hora in central Ukraine and published extensively on Ukrainian folklore, literature, and history; he made several attempts to return to university teaching, but the Imperial Ministry of Education, fearing his Ukrainophile views, prevented this from happening.

In 1847, he was deeply affected by the arrest, imprisonment, and exile of the members of the Ukrainophile and Pan-Slavic Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius, many of whom, like the poet Taras Shevchenko, were his friends or students. Thereafter, he buried himself in scholarship, publishing extensively.

In 1853, he married, and in 1857, in hope of relieving his severe financial situation, went to Moscow to find work. In 1858, Shevchenko returning from exile, visited him in Moscow, and when Maksymovych returned to Mykhailova Hora, visited him there as well. At this time, Shevchenko painted portraits of both Maksymovych and his wife, Maria.

During his final years, Maksymovych devoted himself more and more to history and engaged in extensive debates with the Russian historian, Mikhail Pogodin and the Ukrainian historian, Mykola Kostomarov.

Despite his isolation in the Ukrainian countryside, Maksymovych participated in the work of many scholarly societies and shortly before his death was elected a corresponding member of the Imperial Academy of Sciences. At the time of his death, the Ukrainian historian, Volodymyr Antonovych, and the Ukrainian literary figure, Oleksander Kotliarevsky, were preparing a great three volume edition of his collected works.