Turning the pages back... January 27, 1837 (01/24/93)

Turning the pages back...

January 27, 1837

Volodymyr Lesevych, a philosopher and community leader, was born in Denysivka in the Poltava region on January 27, 1837. He was the descendant of a line of Kozak officers, and after graduating from the St. Petersburg Military Engineering School in 1855, served as an officer in the Caucasus for three years before entering the Academy of the General Staff. Lesevych retired from the army in 1861, and divided his time between his estate in Denysivka and the imperial capital.

A populist by conviction, he was committed to the Ukrainian national revival, and spoke out in defense of the Ukrainian language within the Russian empire. In St. Petersburg he co-founded the Philanthropic Society for Publishing Generally Useful and Inexpensive Books. Back in his native Denysivka, he established one of the first elementary schools for peasants with Ukrainian as the language of instruction.

Lesevych also projected his influence beyond the Russian empire. He underwrote many of the political thinker Mykhailo Drahomanov's publishing and political activities in Geneva, as well as those of the Ukrainian Radical Party in Galicia.

His involvement with revolutionary circles brought him under the scrutiny of the Okhrana, and he was exiled to Siberia in 1879- 1881, and forbidden to return to St. Petersburg until 1888.

As a philosopher, Lesevych was one of the founders of positivism within the Russian empire. According to Lesevych, philosophy's role was to combine the results of all the sciences into a scientific worldview. Although he did not manage to produce a systematic work that accomplished this, he did publish a survey of the development of the idea of progress, and a critical study of the principles of positive philosophy.

He bequeathed his library to the Shevchenko Scientific Society (of which he was a full member) in Lviv. Lesevych died in St. Petersburg on November 26, 1905.

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