Markevych, Andrii

Markevych, Andrii [Маркевич, Андрій; Markevyč, Andrij], b 21 November 1830 in Pryluky county, Poltava gubernia, d 24 March 1907 in Saint Petersburg. Jurist and music ethnographer; son of Mykola Markevych. An official of a juridical department in Saint Petersburg, he attained the rank of full councilor and the office of senator. He was an assistant of the curator of the Imperial Philanthropic Society and vice-president of the Russian Music Society. He became acquainted with Taras Shevchenko in 1858 in Moscow and corresponded with him. From 1898 he presided over the Shevchenko Society in Saint Petersburg, which supported poor Ukrainians studying in the city. Markevych obtained permission to use Shevchenko’s manuscripts in the archives of the police’s Third Section for the first full publication of Kobzar (edited by Vasyl Domanytsky, 1907). He arranged the music to 25 Ukrainian folk songs, which appeared in Panteleimon Kulish’s Zapiski o Iuzhnoi Rusi (Notes on Southern Rus', vol 2, 1857), and compiled the collection Narodnye ukrainskie napevy, polozhennye na fortepiano (Ukrainian Folk Melodies Arranged for Piano, 1860).

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