page_title: Nikolay Kostomarov
section_title: Cultural politics
hierarchical_section_title: Nikolay Kostomarov / Cultural politics
caption_attribution_description: English: N. Kostomarov, Stamp of Ukraine
context_page_description: Nikolay Ivanovich Kostomarov was one of the most distinguished Russian Imperial historians, a Professor of Russian History at the St. Vladimir University of Kiev and later at the St. Petersburg University, an Active State Councillor of Russia, an author of many books, including his famous biography of the seventeenth century Hetman of Zaporozhian Cossacks Bohdan Khmelnytsky, the research on the Ataman of Don Cossacks Stepan Razin and his fundamental 3-volume Russian History in Biographies of its main figures.
  Nikolay Kostomarov was also known as a Ukrainian folklorist and an author of works on Ukrainian history; he was a member of Ukrainian national revival society best known as the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius, which existed in Kiev from January 1846 to March 1847. Kostomarov was also a poet, ethnographer, pan-slavist and promoter of the so-called Narodniks movement in the Russian Empire.
context_section_description: He was considered by many to be a leading intellectual of the Narodniks. Nikolay Kostomarov was important in the history of both Russian and Ukrainian culture. The question of whether he was more "Russian" or more "Ukrainian" first arose while he was still alive and is still a matter of some dispute. Kostomarov was active in cultural politics in the Russian Empire being a proponent of a Pan-Slavic and federalized political system. He was a major personality in the Ukrainian national movement, a friend of the poet Taras Shevchenko, a defender of the Ukrainian language in literature and in the schools, and a proponent of a populist form of Pan-Slavism, a popular movement in a certain part of the Russian intelligentsia of his time. In the 1840s he founded an illegal political organization called the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius in Kiev (for which he suffered arrest, imprisonment, and exile). After that he moved to Saratov. From 1847 to 1854 Kostomarov, whose interest in the history of Little Russia and its literature made him suspected of separatist views, wrote nothing, having been banished to Saratov, and forbidden to teach or publish. But after this time his literary activity began again, and, besides separate works, the leading Russian reviews, such as Old and New Russia, The Historical Messenger, and The Messenger of Europe, contained many contributions from his pen of the highest value.
  In 1862, he was forced to resign from his post as chair of department of history of the University of Saint Petersburg, because he had sympathized with the revolutionary movement of liberals, progressives, and socialists.
  After his arrests, he continued to promote the ideas of federalism and populism in Ukrainian and Russian historical thought. He had a profound influence on later Ukrainian historians such as Volodymyr Antonovych and Mykhailo Hrushevsky.
caption: 1992 Postage Stamp of Kostomarov
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