The thesis is researching the activities of representatives of Merinhs family in many aspects of social, political, charity, cultural and scientific life of the Ukrainian lands in the second half of the 19th – early 20th centuries. A comprehensive study of the activities of representatives of the Merinhs family in Ukraine provides an opportunity to significantly expand information on national history.
Thesis materials will be useful for creating scientific reference biographical publications, during excursions, as well as for local history research in places related to the life and activities of the Merinhs family, particulary in Kyiv and the village of Stara Pryluka in the Vinnytsia region. Historiographic model for researching the history of the Merinhs family is represented by three periods: The Imperial (19th century – 1917), the Soviet (1917 – 1991), and the modern (1991 – 2018).
The author of the thesis comprehensively reviewed the multifaceted activities of Friedrich Merinh, especially his scientific, social and political activity. He was the eminent scientist with different scientific interests, talented teacher, physician, and public statesman, amateur of park building, businessman, philanthropist and patron of art the Honored member and Deserved professor of Kyiv University of St. Volodymyr. There are developed his first steps in medicine, main stages of primary service in the Kiev depth, on Poltavschina and Chernigovschina region, work in the Petersburg 1th land hospital under the running of Nikolay Pirogov, ascent of scientific and teaching professor career on the Departments of State Medical Conducting, hospital and faculty therapies of medical faculty of the Kiev University. The looks, scientific conceptions and priorities of F. Merinh are analyzed in a view of different fields of therapy, general hygiene, forensic medicine, physiology, pharmacology, nervous diseases and history of medicine, which was inalienable part of creative character of the Professor for years.
The role of the descendants of F. Merinh in public, political, and entrepreneurial life of Ukraine was analyzed in detail, after analyzing their diverse activities. Further study of this problem has significant research prospects and reserves of self-development. First of all, important are the works dedicated to the problem of life and activities of the next generations of Merinhs family. Representatives of the family were in high government positions, were entrepreneurial, charitable and scientific activities, occupied an honorable place in the life of the city of Kyiv and the Russian Empire. The study is aimed at the implementation of historical justice, the reconstruction of the memory of Merinhs family and the search for descendants abroad. The information of reprisals against some members of Merinhs family during the 1930s has been extended.
The thesis is for the first time: a complex of materials discovered in the archives of Kyiv, which reveal little-studied pages of life and activities of representatives of the Merinhs family, is involved in the scientific circulation; the reconstruction and complex analysis of diverse activities of representatives of the Merinhs family was carried out on the background of their scientific and socio-political activity of the second half of the 19th and first third of the 20th century; the life and activities of representatives of the Merinhs family in the period of the Bolshevik repression in Ukraine were investigated; the role of the descendants of F. Merinh in the public, political and entrepreneurial life of Ukraine in the second half of the 19th – early 20th centuries was determined.
Improved, systematized and generalized: historiography and archival sources of the Merinhs family; based on the use of the available source base, an analysis of Friedrich Merinh scientific, social, political, and charitable work was carried out, which made it possible to more fully reproduce his biography.
Further developed: theoretical and methodological problems of a complex historiographic study of the history of the first half of the 19th – the first decades of the 20th centuries; promising further searches for little-known archival materials about the family of the Merinhs, especially the family members in emigration scattered across the archives of Europe; A new light on certain aspects of the life and activities of the Merinhs can also spill out the study of the numerous unpublished family epistolary.
The cultural, social and political life of Merinhs family during the liberation movement wasn’t investigated in detail. For the first time an effort of a complete reconstruction and comprehensive analysis of diverse activities of Merinhs family has been made under the assimilation pressure of imperial power.
