Markovych, Oleksander

Markovych, Oleksander [Маркович, Олександер; Markovyč], b 31 July 1790 in Svarkove, Hlukhiv county, Novhorod-Siverskyi vicegerency, d 3 December 1865. Nobleman, historian, and civic figure in the Chernihiv region; brother of Yakiv M. Markovych. He graduated from Kharkiv University and then worked in Chernihiv gubernia as a registrar (1807–12), county judge in Hlukhiv (1820–1), general justice (1827–30), and marshal of the nobility (1826–7, 1832–8). In 1852 he submitted a proposal to the tsarist government for the emancipation of his 979 serfs and their right freely to purchase his land, but his request was refused. After the abolition of serfdom in 1861, he took an active part in implementing peasant reforms in Chernihiv gubernia. He built and funded a school for the peasants in Svarkove, paid their taxes, and maintained a hospital for syphilitics that was established by his grandfather.

Markovych wrote a socioeconomic, historical, and statistical study of the gentry in Left-Bank Ukraine as an estate (see Estates) and their properties in Chernihiv gubernia, based on the archives of the Chernihiv Gentry Assembly (published in a book of the Ministry of the Interior's materials on the statistics of the Russian Empire [vol 2] in 1841 and separately in 1894); a historical description of Hlukhiv (excerpts published in Oleksander Lazarevsky's work on Old Little Russia, vol 2, 1893); a history of the Hamaliivka monastery in Hlukhiv county (published in Filaret Gumilevsky's history of Chernihiv eparchy, 1873); and a novelette about the 18th-century Cossack starshyna, ‘Malorossiskaia svad'ba’ (Little Russian Wedding, published in Kievskaia starina in 1897). Markovych also published nine historical documents from his family's archive in Ukrainskii zhurnal (1824) and a condensed version of the diary of his grandfather, Yakiv A. Markovych, in Russian translation (2 vols, 1859).

Arkadii Zhukovsky

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