"The Komarov Family: A Portrait Against the Backdrop of an Era": What We've Forgotten About Ukrainian Odessa

With this publication, Intent continues its series of reviews dedicated to contemporary Ukrainian publications. The reviews for Intent as part of this project are written by Maria Galina—a Ukrainian writer, poet, and literary critic, and winner of several literary awards.

In late August, the Odessa Literary Museum hosted the official presentation of the exhibition and publishing project “The Komarov Family: A Portrait Against the Backdrop of an Era” (author and editor Daria Garmider, published by the Odessa Literary Museum, 2026). The publication is dedicated to a somewhat significant anniversary—2024 marked the 180th anniversary of the birth of Mykhailo Komarov (I quote: “an outstanding figure whom his contemporaries called ‘the advocate of the Ukrainian word’”). The electronic version of the book is freely available online. Incidentally, the book is intended for an English-speaking audience (the preface and introductory article are bilingual), which makes the print version a great gift for English-speaking colleagues. Especially since, to be honest, it is more of an illustrated historical and regional studies album than a monograph—albeit one that includes a bibliography of sources and an index of names. But right now, our intention is not so much to promote sales as to highlight a certain phenomenon that undoubtedly pertains to this publication. It is, I would say, a revision of the pantheon.

It was in Odesa during the Soviet era that a stable list of iconic figures took shape, one that, to put it mildly, differed somewhat from the all-Ukrainian list. This was partly due to the fact that it was here, in the 1920s, that a powerful constellation of Russian-speaking writers and poets emerged, who significantly influenced all Russian-language literature in the new empire —a phenomenon that actually still requires unbiased research. This can be partly explained by the fact that Odessa, perhaps more than other Ukrainian cities, found itself under imperial cultural pressure, which shaped its simplified, caricatured image. As a result, everything related to Odessa’s cultural image and cultural history has been—how shall I put it tactfully—somewhat one-sided.

Now, names that were silenced during the Soviet era are resurfacing, and it turns out that Odessa’s cultural history is not limited to its Russian-speaking community but is complex and diverse. And the Ukrainian cultural community rightfully has its place here.

The empire consistently promotedthe Russification of Odesa, as well as of Ukraine as a whole, in all its forms. At the same time, the author of the foreword, Ihor Stambol, draws attention to a unique phenomenon of resistance—“the Ukrainian family as a steadfast factor in countering Russification.” This phenomenon is entirely understandable, and its underlying factors are clear as well: when the government banned public expressions of national identity in the second half of the 19th century, it was the families of the Ukrainian intelligentsia that became the centers of cultural resistance and the revival of the Ukrainian movement. The Komarov family, Stambol writes, upon moving to Odessa—which was then arguably the most important city in the imperial South—became one such center of Ukrainian identity for the city’s residents. “Like the Hrinchenkos, Kosachs, and Chykalenkos, the Komarov family became a model for other families who were torn between imperial assimilation and Ukrainian cultural tradition.”

So what, exactly, is the Komarov family? Let’s take a look at the history of Ukrainian identity through the lens of family history.

First, our protagonist’s very origins raise an important question: what does it actually mean to be Ukrainian? Komarov’s father, an ethnic Russian, quite consciously chose a Ukrainian identity already in his later years. Mykhailo’s mother, née Hanna Boiko, was Ukrainian. Second, geography plays an important role, as it also seems to “divide” the Odessa community. Mykhailo Komarov was born in the village of Dmytrivka in Pavlohrad County, Katerynoslav Governorate. He studied at the Katerynoslav Classical Gymnasium and later at the law school of Kharkiv University. It was during his college years that he became interested in ethnography and began collecting folklore material. In particular, he attended lectures by Oleksandr Potebnia, who encouraged students to pursue such research. Later, Mykhailo taught at rural schools. “I taught literature, arithmetic, sacred history, and all subjects in the natural sciences entirely in Ukrainian.”

He worked as a lawyer in Ostrogozhsk—once one of the centers of Sloboda Ukraine—and wrote and published popular science books for young people. Here, a brief note on his early marriages: “…in Ostrogozhsk, Mykhailo met 15-year-old Lyubov Boleslavivna Grabovska, from a German-Polish family, and married her in 1869. To do so, he even had to obtain permission from the archbishop. She became his faithful wife for the rest of his life. There, in Ostrogozhsk, the couple had four daughters—Margarita, Galina, Lyubov, and Vera.” I see no point in keeping this quiet. But it’s worth remembering that back then, everyone—both boys and girls—matured much earlier. And, accordingly, they aged sooner: how old were Ostap and Andrii’s mother? Somewhere around forty…

Then came the move to Kyiv, involvement with the “Stara Hromada,” interactions with Volodymyr Antonovych, ethnographer Oleksandr Rusov, Mykhailo Starytskyi, Mykola Lysenko, and Olena Pchilka, and conducting his own research. The birth of his son Bohdan (and later another son, Yurii). A move to Uman, and the opening of his own notary office.

Perhaps it was precisely because of his legal education that Komarov was interested in everything that could be organized and systematized. The result of this systematization, which he pursued throughout his life, included, in particular, the extensive work *Shevchenko in Literature and Art*, *Bibliography of Ukrainian Folklore*, “Bibliographic Index of Modern Ukrainian Literature (1798–1883),” the “Russian-Ukrainian Dictionary” in four volumes, the index “Ukrainian Drama: A Collection of Bibliographic Materials on the History of Ukrainian Drama and the Ukrainian Theater (1815–1906),” popular science brochures for the general public, and numerous translations of Russian classics. And as a foray into ethnography—“A New Collection of Little Russian Folk Sayings, Proverbs, Chants, Riddles, and Incantations.” For it was ethnography that he considered to be what truly defines a nation.

Finally, in 1887, the Komarov family settled in Odesa. Mykhailo Komarov’s notary office was located at the corner of Poshtova and Kateryninska Streets, at No. 25. The Komarovs lived right nearby—at No. 27 on Poshtova Street. It was here that Lesya Ukrainka often stayed during her visits to Odesa.

Thus, through the story of a single family, the book reveals a whole layer of the city’s history. Who, for example, knew that Kotsyubynsky worked in Odesa on the so-called phylloxera commission, and that it was precisely this experience that inspired his stories about the lives of Moldovan and Ukrainian peasants in the Danube and Dniester regions? I certainly didn’t. And I must admit, I didn’t even know about the phylloxera commission itself before. And the figure of Mykhailo Komarov (1844–1913)—a bibliographer, folklorist, lexicographer, literary scholar, and public figure—allows us to see not just isolated episodes, but the very milieu of Ukrainian Odesa.

Kyiv had its own Community, and Odesa had its own. It is telling that the Odesa Community included representatives of a wide variety of professions: teachers at gymnasiums and vocational schools, civil servants, lawyers, doctors, bank employees, and engineers. Among them were even government officials—primarily, as noted in the book, from the then-liberal Ministry of Finance. The Odesa Community seems to have cared not only about the development of Ukrainian culture but also about the city’s cultural environment itself. And this explains a great deal about Odesa at that time.

Unfortunately, today’s “city leaders” treat this heritage with far less care. Otherwise, Fesenko’s printing house —one of the main centers of Ukrainian book publishing in southern Ukraine in the early 20th century—would hardly have disappeared. Under Soviet rule, it was nationalized, and the building itself at 47 Richelievska Street stood until 2021, when it was demolished. With it, Odesa lost yet another tangible trace of its cultural history. Yes, it really does break my heart. But it’s my heart—and those of the city’s patriots—that aches, not the hearts of those responsible for preserving this landmark. The building was beautiful, after all.

And then there was the “Young Community”—the unofficial name of a circle that formed in the late 1880s and included the “Komarivna” sisters — Margarita, Lyubov, and Galina—as well as students from Odesa University and the children of members of the city’s intelligentsia, including Danylo Zabolotny, a natural sciences student who who later became an outstanding Ukrainian microbiologist and epidemiologist, an academician, and president of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR.

We will not delve into the subsequent fates of the large Komarov family (four sisters and two brothers, their wives and husbands, their achievements, and so on—each of them deserves their own story, and almost all of them are tragic), but let’s focus on this: Ukrainian identity in Odesa was inherent and entirely natural, not marginal—given the composition of the community and the number of figures iconic to Odesa, public figures, writers, and scholars associated with it.

But this raises another question: what, exactly, is a nation? Komarov believed that ethnography specifically confirms that Ukrainians are a people distinct from Russians. However, ethnographic characteristics can hardly be considered an unambiguous criterion: similar cultural traits are found among different peoples, and within a single people, regional differences can be striking. One need only compare, for example, the traditional attire of Pokuttia and Polissia.

Blood? Komarov, half-Ukrainian on his mother’s side and half-Russian on his father’s, married a woman born Grabowska from a Polish-German family, but who has done more for the Ukrainian cause than he has?

Language? Americans and Britons are undoubtedly different nations, even though they speak the same language.

Land? Of course: peoples whose land was taken away have disappeared throughout human history. But we know of a nation that preserved its identity and built a country for itself after nearly two millennia in the diaspora. And, by the way, not even a linguistic identity, since the language had to be revived almost from scratch. Just identity.

So what, then?

I believe it’s culture. Culture, at first glance, is a fragile thing. And not as important as, say, the military or heavy industry. I won’t even mention land. But. It is precisely culture that serves as the glue that binds individual people into a nation. And it doesn’t necessarily have to be literature. It’s that cataloging that ensures historical continuity; it’s theater (which, by the way, Komarov himself helped promote in Odesa); and, ultimately—forgive me—it’s pop music, songs that very effectively shape a system of memes. In general, defining culture as a system of memes would, of course, be too bold and too simplistic, but it is precisely the reaction to certain stimuli that marks one’s belonging to one group of people or another. And a nation is, well, a very large group of people with a certain unifying sense of identity. Viewed in this light , culture consists not only of objects but also of people. It is not a vertical hierarchy, but a network, a system of connections, where Komarov is one of the nodes that hold that network together.

Марія Галіна