Mykhaylo Maksymovych - Slavistics

Slavistics

With regard to Slavic studies, Maksymovych remarked upon the various theses of the Czech philologist, Josef Dobrovský and the Slovak scholar, Pavel Jozef Šafárik. Like them, he divided the Slavic family into two major groups, a western group and an eastern group. But then he sub-divided the western group into two further parts: a north-western group and a south-western group. (Dobrovsky had lumped the Russians together with the South Slavs.) Maksymovych particularly objected to Dobrovsky's contention that the major eastern or Russian group was unified, without major divisions or dialects. This eastern group, Maksymovych divided into two independent languages, South Russian and North Russian. The South Russian language, he divided into two major dialects, Ukrainian and Red Russian/Galician. The North Russian language, he divided into four major dialects of which he thought the Muscovite the most developed, but also the youngest. In addition to this, he also seems to have considered Belarusian to be an independent language, intermediate between North and South Russian, but much closer to the former. Writing at the beginning of the twentieth century, the Croatian scholar, V. Jagic, thought Maksymovych's scheme to have been a solid contribution to Slavic philology.

Maksymovych also argued in favour of the independent origin of the spoken Old Rus languages, thinking them separate from the book language of the time which was based on Church Slavonic, and, of course, he traced the antiquity of the differences between Ukrainian and Russian to Kievan Rus.

Maksymovych also made some critical remarks on Pavel Jozef Šafárik's map of the Slavic world, wrote on the Lusatian Sorbs, and on Polish proverbs. Of course, a large part of his historical work dealt with the mutual relations between the Ukrainians and the Russians and the Ukrainians and the Poles.

Maksymovych, as well, wrote a brief autobiography which was first published in 1904. His correspondence was large and significant.