Martos, Oleksii

Martos, Oleksii or Aleksei (Мартос, Олексій), b 12 December 1790 in Saint Petersburg, d 25 August 1842 in Stavropol, Caucasia gubernia, Russia. Historian; son of the sculptor Ivan P. Martos. A graduate of the Engineering Corps in Saint Petersburg (1806), he worked as a military engineer in Kyiv and took part in the Russo-Turkish War of 1806–12 and the war of 1812 against Napoleon Bonaparte. From 1821 he worked as a civil servant in various places in Russia and Siberia. Martos wrote a five-volume history of Little Russia to the end of the Hetman state. Although the work was esteemed by scholars, its publication was not allowed by the tsarist censors, and the manuscript subsequently was lost. Only two chapters from vol 3—accounts of the Battle of Berestechko and Tymish Khmelnytsky’s marriage and death—were published, in Severnyi arkhiv (1822, nos 13–14; 1823, nos 6, 12–13). Martos’s memoirs and diary of the years 1806–16 were published in Russkii arkhiv (1893, nos 7–8). Oleksander Lazarevsky’s biography of Martos appeared in Kievskaia starina (1895, no. 2).

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