Sudiienko, Mykhailo

Sudiienko, Mykhailo [Судієнко, Михайло; Sudijenko, Myxajlo], b 1803 in Novhorod-Siverskyi county, Chernihiv gubernia, d 8 September 1874 in Novhorod-Siverskyi (buried in the Cathedral of the Transfiguration in Chernihiv). Benefactor, historian, and archeographer belonging to the Sudiienko family of the Cossack starshyna. He was a marshal of the nobility for Novhorod-Siverskyi in 1835–41; a patron of the Novhorod-Siverskyi Gymnasium and gymnasiums in Chernihiv (to which he donated 30,000 rubles) and Bila Tserkva; and head of the Kyiv Archeographic Commission (1848–57) and the Chernihiv Gubernia Committee for Improving the Lot of Landlords’ Peasants (1857–8). On his estate in Ochkynia he had a large library and a valuable collection of archival material pertaining to the 17th- and 18th-century Hetman state, which was bequeathed to Kyiv University by his heirs (later housed in the Manuscript Division of the National Library of Ukraine). Sudiienko published Materialy dlia otechestvennoi istorii (Materials for the History of the Fatherland, 2 vols, 1853, 1855) and Opanas Shafonsky’s Chernigovskogo namestnichestva topograficheskoe opisanie (A Topographical Description of Chernihiv Vicegerency, 1851) and contributed to the publication of the Chronicle of Samiilo Velychko (1848–55). A sympathizer the Decembrist movement, he was the brother-in-law of Oleksander M. Myklashevsky and a friend of Aleksandr Pushkin (whose letters to Sudiienko were published in Russkii arkhiv, 1895).

Arkadii Zhukovsky

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 5 (1993).]