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May 6, 1840

Mykola Petrov, one of the first scholars in the Russian empire to write about Ukrainian literature, was born in Voznesenskoye, Kostroma gubernia, in Russia on May 6, 1840. Having graduated from the Kyiv Theological Academy in 1865, he taught at the Volhynian Theological Seminary (until 1870) and then at his alma mater (until 1911), where he established and directed its Church History and Archaeological Museum. He became a full professor there in 1876, with doctorates in theology (1875) and Russian language and literature (1907).

Initially, Petrov focused on the literary scholarship and writing at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, then broadened his purview to studies of Ukrainian literature as a whole in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Petrov wrote a pioneering work on the history of Ukrainian literature as a "self-sufficient branch." Individual writers whose works he analyzed included Hryhoriy Skovoroda, Ivan Kotliarevsky and Nikolai Gogol (Mykola Hohol).

As an ethnographer, he devoted articles to the folkloric elements in Gogol's early works, Ukrainian songs and legends, Ukrainian folk celebrations, old theater and vertep traditions.

He was a full member of the Ukrainian Scientific Society (1907), the Shevchenko Scientific Society (1911) and the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences (1918), and a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences (from 1916). Mykola Petrov died in Kyiv on June 20, 1921.

Source: "Petrov, Mykola," Encyclopedia of Ukraine, Vol. 3 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993).

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, May 5, 1996, No. 18, Vol. LXIV

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