"We know about him mainly thanks to Taras Shevchenko"
Ukrainian historian and Harvard professor Serhiy Plokhiy considers Mykola Kostomarov the most underrated figure in Ukrainian .
Plokhiy recalled that Mykola Kostomarov is the intellectual author of the first Ukrainian modern national project (“The Book of the Existence of the Ukrainian People”, fragments of which were first published in the magazine “Voice of the Past” in 1918).
The scientist noted that Ukrainians know about Kostomarov mainly thanks to Taras Shevchenko. "Shevchenko was a very talented interpreter and relayer of the ideas of Kostomarov and the Cyril and Methodius Brotherhood. It seems to me that Kostomarov is one of the most underestimated figures in Ukrainian history," Plokhiy said.
Mykola Kostomarov is a prominent Ukrainian historian , ethnographer, prose writer, romantic poet, thinker, public figure and ethnopsychologist. He was born in 1817 in the settlement of Yurasivka, in the territory of the modern Voronezh region of Russia. Once there was an Ostrogozh Cossack Sloboda regiment here, but after the abolition of the Cossack system in Slobozhanshchyna, these lands were transferred to the Voronezh province, and thus became part of Russia.
Kostomarov was a co-founder and active participant in the Slavophile-Ukrainian Kyiv association "Cyril and Methodius Brotherhood", wrote its programmatic work - "The Book of the Existence of the Ukrainian People". In 1847, for his participation in the Ukrainophile brotherhood, Kostomarov was arrested and transported from Kyiv to St. Petersburg, where he spent the rest of his life.
