Vasilii Babenko is particularly interesting as he was a village school teacher who became an autodidact archeologist as a result of his discovery of an enormous cashe of Khazar culture. He was especially active in museum work, including these smaller ones: Museum of the IRAO, the Museum of the Moscow Archaeological Institute, and the Museum of Fine Arts and Antiquity at Kharkov University.
Associated Region: Ukraine
Educated in the classics and serving as a professional soldier, Brandenburg found himself director of the Artillery Museum in St. Petersburg in 1872, a position he held til his death. Rising to the rank of Lt. General, he expanded his interest in displaying artefacts of artillery to the systematic excavation of numerous kurgans, especially on medieval battle fields. His greatest success came when he restored much of Staraia Ladoga, 1884-89.
Coincidentally, the small town in which Antonovich was born, Makhnovka, had been the property of the Tyshkevich family (of Vilna archeological fame) in the 15th century. His parentage was unconventional: though he was registered as nobility, when in fact, he was the bastard son of a Hungarian emigrant revolutionary, but carried his mother’s married name; she had been the governess in the home of a wealthy Polish shlakht (nobleman), and married the male teacher, Bontifatie Antonovich. A Catholic who converted to Orthodoxy, he is considered today a founder of Ukrainian independence, but he’s more complicated than that because he appears to have supported Little Russia as a unique culture within the larger complex of the empire. His personal life was as nearly complicated as his mother’s; married, he nonetheless carried on an affair with a student, Katerina Melnik, from the 1880s until they married in 1902.
The consumate Ukrainian, born in Kiev and educated there under V. B. Antonovich, Bagalei specialized in All Russian (vse-rossiiskaia) History, that is, Little Russia. Rising to become rector of Kharkov University, after 1917 he became a member of the Ukrainian Academy of Science and of the archival commission. Throughout his career he was one of those who connected the text to the artefact, and strove to make Kharkov the central such institution in Little Russia, not yet Ukraine. His lively papers at a number of congresses about the uniqe qualities of Little Russian prepared him to participate in the Ukrainization of the region.
From an Orthodox noble family that had fled the Poland-Lithuania Commonwealth to Sloboda Ukraine and registered with the Zaporozhian Cossacks, Evarnitskii became their most committed historian. After studying with Sumtsov at Kharkov University, he began excavating in the region of the Dnepr rapids when he wasn’t traveling to lecture on Cossacks. He taught briefly at Kharkov University where in 1885 he stood accused of advocating south Russian separatism. Moving to St. Petersburg to teach at the pedagogical institute, he made friends with renowned artist Ilya Repin, who used Evarnitskii as the model for the scribe in his painting “Cossacks write a letter to the Turkish Sultan” (pictured here). He landed a position at St. Petersburg University, from which he was expelled in 1891 for his Ukrainophilism, sent to Central Asia where he excavated for three years. In 1895 he began lecturing at the University of Warsaw, moving quickly to Moscow University. In 1902 the Ekaterinoslav zemstvo invited him to curate the archeological museum left to them by philanthropist-merchant A. N. Pol’, the driving force behind the iron industry in the area. Following the Bolshevik Revolution he organized a Department of Ukrainian Studies at the newly opened university in Ekaterinoslav. Today the museum is named for him. NB: He changed the spelling of his name to Iavor- when he discovered that his family had fled from that region.
The daughter of a Russian general, Natalia Dmitrevna lived through two world wars and exercised considerable influence as an historian of Ukraine. She graduated from the Fundukleevskaia-Mariinskaia Gymnasium, the empire’s first women’s gymnasium (I. A. Linnichenko’s father the first director), before moving to Higher Courses for Women at St. Vladimir’s University, where she worked under Mitrofan Dovnar-Zapol’skii. In 1916, she became a lecturer at the university and director of its archeological museum. In 1923 she married Nikolai Vasilenko, Minister of Education and Foreign Affairs in Ukrainian Republic; she served as professor at the Kiev Institutes of Geography, Archeology, and Art, and a Research Associate at the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. Vasilenko was arrested during the Purges, but she had him rehabilitated. During the Nazi occupation, she collaborated by working on the committee to change street names. She fled with the Germans, and ended up in Munich where she taught at the Ukrainian Free University. In the 1960s, she helped to establish the American-based Ukrainian Historical Association.
A graduate of St. Vladimir University in 1886, Pavlutskii had studied classical philology under Ia. A. Kulakovskii, and then continued his education in Berlin and Paris. One of the most influential scholars of religious architecture, he focused on the reciprical influences of Greek, Byzantine, Italian, and Russian churches, especially the latter around Kiev. Keeping art in archeology, he influenced a generation of young scholars.
Danilevich counted among the influential and politically active archeologists who had studied first under V. B. Antonovich at Kiev’s St. Vladimir University. After graduating in 1896, he taught history at numerous gymnasia around the empire: Baku, Iurev (Tartu), Revel (Tallin) until 1903, when he became a privat-docent at Kharkov University. Danilevich was renowned for using archeology to teach history, and his lectures became a textbook. He moved to St. Vladimir in 1907, and then to Warsaw University in 1915. In 1917 he supported socialism, if not necessarily Bolshevism. During Ukraine’s short-lived independence, he taught at the university in Kiev, and then in schools around the city following the advent of Soviet power. He directed the Archeological Commission at the Ukraine Academy of Science.
The son of a priest, Nikolai Fedotovich began his studies first in law in Kiev, where he came under the spell of B. V. Antonovich and turned his attention to archeology. After a brief stint in the Kiev courts in 1891, he moved to Moscow where he worked in the archives of the Ministry of Justice and then to state archives in Warsaw. Returning to Kiev and teaching at the Polytechnic Institute, he joined the editorial board of “Kievskaia starina” and became particularly active in museum work. In 1899 in concert with the convocation of the 11th Archeological Congress in Kiev Beliashevskii helped to build the Kiev Museum of Art and Science. Elected to the First State Duma from Kiev Province in 1906, he helped to organize the Kiev Society for the Protection of Monuments of the Ancient and the Arts in 1910; in 1918 he wrote the first Law of the Ukrainian Republic on the protection of monuments of history, culture and art and was active in the All-Ukrainian Committee for the Protection of Antiquities and Art in Ukraine. During the Great War, the Academy of Sciences dispatched him to Galicia and the Bukovina to protect the archeological finds behind the military front.
The extraordinarily prolific Ainalov taught at several universities, noteworthy as an art historian, whose expertise lay in many forms of religious art, from Italian mosaics to Kiev’s St. Sophia.