Martos, Ivan R.

Martos, Ivan R. (Мартос, Іван), b 1760 in Hlukhiv, Nizhyn regiment, d 4 April 1831 in Trudoliub, Myrhorod county, Poltava gubernia. Government official and writer; cousin of Ivan P. Martos. He studied at the Kyivan Mohyla Academy and served as Hetman Kyrylo Rozumovsky’s cabinet secretary. After joining the Russian imperial civil service in 1778, he held posts in Ukraine, Belarus, and Saint Petersburg, including those of secretary of the Senate Department from 1802 and director of a department in the Ministry of Justice in 1815–16. An active Freemason and a friend of Vasyl Kapnist, he wrote studies on bath construction as described by Nestor the Chronicler (1809) and on orchard cultivation at the Kyivan Cave Monastery. Oleksander Lazarevsky published Martos’s correspondence in Kievskaia starina (1896, nos 6, 10–11; 1897, nos 7–8; 1898, nos 6–8) and separately (1898), and his biography of Martos appeared in that journal (1895, no. 10).

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 3 (1993).]