The directory «Plots»

Markevych (Маркевич) Mykola Andreevich
(1804—1860)

Historian, ethnographer, poet, musician, and composer. He studied in Saint Petersburg at the boarding school of the Pedagogical Institute (1817–20), where he befriended M. Glinka. He served as an officer in the Russian army (1820–4) and later studied piano and composition under J. Field in Moscow. Markevych was close to the literary circles of the Decembrist movement (eg, Aleksandr Pushkin, Kondratii Ryleev). In 1829 his collections Elegii i evreiskiia melodii (Elegies and Jewish Melodies) and Stikhotvoreniia eroticheskiia i Parizina (Erotic Poems and [a translation of Byron's poem] Parisina) were published in Moscow, and in 1831 his collection of Romantic ballads about Ukraine's heroic past, Ukrainskiia melodii (Ukrainian Melodies), was published there. From 1830 Markevych lived on his estate in Turivka and collected materials on the history of Ukraine, particularly those found in archives in Chernihiv gubernia and Poltava gubernia, and Ukrainian folklore and folk songs. In 1836 he published the first volume of a historical, mythological, and statistical dictionary of the Russian Empire.

The then unpublished Istoriia Rusov had a significant impact on Markevych's major work, the five-volume Istoriia Malorossii (History of Little Russia), published in Moscow in 1842–3. Vols 3–5 contain valuable documentary addenda, notes, source descriptions, lists of regiments, the General Officer Staff, and colonels in the Hetman state, of companies at the Zaporozhian Sich, and of the Ukrainian higher clergy, and chronological tables. In his monograph Markevych approached the history of Ukraine as an independent, uninterrupted process from earliest times to the late 18th century. Markevych's history greatly influenced 19th-century Ukrainian historiography and his Romantic contemporaries, particularly his friend Taras Shevchenko. Among Markevych's other historical writings the most noteworthy are on Hetman Ivan Mazepa (Maiak, 1841), the hetmancy of Yakiv Barabash (Russkii vestnik, 1841, no. 2), the first Little Russian hetmans and official documents explaining the history of Little Russia (Chteniia v Moskovskom obshchestve istorii i drevnostei rossiiskikh, 1848, no. 8), and the Cossacks (ibid, 1858, no. 4).

Ukraine, 2004.02.07, Sumi. Mykola Markevych

Ukraine, 2004, Mykola Markevych