The urgency of the topic of this dissertation is conditioned by those challenges that confront Ukraine today. The questions of the faith and of the church, of the language and of the native speaker of this language, of the ethnic Ukrainian and of the political Ukrainians over and over again bring us back to our past. Especially, to the years when in Ukraine these issues were raised for the first time in their fullness and sensitivity. We are talking about the second half of the nineteenth century – the first quarter of the twentieth century, when the first serious and scientific-based studies of the history of Ukrainian literature were made; when the tsarist made attempts to limit the functioning of the Ukrainian language and the best intellectuals spoke in defense of it; when the views of society in their search for their identity turned to antiquity and antiquities, and especially to the church antiquity and to the church antiquities; when the history of this church was actualized in the struggle for the Ukrainian state and the Ukrainian church; when, finally, during the great upheaval and civilization breaks Ukrainian Academy of Sciences was being originated; when historical figures emerged and powerfully manifested themselves in each of the above processes.
Among these figures was M. I. Petrov. But he was involved in all these processes at the same time. Russian by birth, he became the author of the first scientific history of Ukrainian literature (no matter how critical it was).
A scientist who grew up and became famous within the framework of academic science in the Russian Empire, he was among the first academicians of founded in the stormy 1918 Ukrainian Academy of Sciences.
Not surprisingly, after his death his creativity and his personality were studied from different positions. In the time of Tsarism and in today's Russian historiography – as “a Russian scholar, church historian”; in Soviet times – as “Ukrainian literary critic, corre-sponding member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences (1916) and academician of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR (1919). Since 1876 he has been a professor at the Kiev Theological Academy (so in “The Great Soviet Encyclopedia”); at the time of the first and second gaining of independence by Ukraine – as “historian of Ukrainian literature and Ukrainian science, ethnographer, church historian, literary critic, art historian, archeologist, local historian, public figure, a keeper of the museum of Kiev Theological Academy (so in the Ukrainian version of Wikipedia). But a simple acquaintance with the list of published works of M. I. Petrov proves the obvious fact: the vast majority of his work, and therefore the area of his interests, are one way or another, but are related to church and historical issues. The conclusion, however, is as follows: in order to understand and correctly evaluate the work of Petrov as well as his personality in history, we need to continue the study of his intellectual biography. The basis of this biography should be the formation of Petrov as a historian of the church and his role in the activities of the Church and Archeological Society and the Church and Archaeological Museum at the Kiev Theological Academy. Our dissertation is dedicated to this.
