Mykhailo Drahomanov

Mykhailo Petrovych Drahomanov (Ukrainian: Михайло Петрович Драгоманов; 18 September 1841 – 2 July 1895) was a Ukrainian intellectual and public figure. As an academic, Drahomanov was an economist, historian, philosopher, and ethnographer, while as a public intellectual he was a political theorist with socialist leanings, perhaps best known as one of the first proponents of Ukrainian nationalism. For Drahomanov, ethnographic studies had a deep influence on his political ideas, and his politics in turn motivated study of particular areas of Ukrainian folk literature.

Biography

Early life in Poltava (1841-1859)

Mykhailo Drahomanov was born on 18 September [O.S. 6 September] 1841, into a Zaporozhian Cossack minor noble family of Greek ancestry in Hadiach, a town in the Poltava Governorate of the Russian Empire. The family descended from a Greek dragoman who served in the chancellery of Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky.

His family's status meant Drahomanov was closely acquainted with the ideas of progressivism from an early age. His father, Petro Drahomanov, was influenced by the liberal ideas of the Enlightenment and provided legal aid to serfs and military conscripts. His uncle, Yakiv Drahomanov, was a member of the Society of United Slavs and a sympathiser of the Decembrists.

Mykhailo Drahomanov became an avid learner, enrolling at the Poltava Classical Gymnasium in 1853, where he was exposed to the works of the socialist Alexander Herzen and the historian Friedrich Schlosser. At the Gymnasium, he also began his career in journalism, editing his secret club's handwritten journal.