The Family Tree of A Great Traveler

Nikolai Miklukho-Maklai (Miklouho-Maclay) (1846-1888) needs no introduction. A world-famous anthropologist, ethnographer, physician, botanist, zoologist, and world traveler, he was widely acclaimed as a classic of global science during his lifetime. The governments of European states had to reckon with his opinion, while leading scientific, primarily geographic, societies considered it an honor to bestow memberships on him. In a letter dated September 1886, Leo Tolstoy had the highest praise for Miklukho-Maklai’s scholastic pursuits and especially his moral attitudes, saying, “As far as I know, you are the first to prove by way of an irrefutable experiment that man is always human, i.e., a kind and open-hearted being with whom one must communicate through kindness and truth alone, not by means of guns and alcohol. And you proved this by performing an exploit of true courage — a thing that occurs so rarely in our society that our people do not even understand it.”

Tolstoy’s words are still relevant today. Moreover, we can assert that humanity is in dire need of not so much Miklukho-Maklai’s specific scientific discoveries, which still await proper appraisal and further development, as his ethics. For the latter exemplify the behavior of a modern civilized individual in a polyethnic and multicultural world, which calls for the rejection of all manifestations of racism, ethnic superiority, and especially exceptionality and hatred. But for the moment we are more interested in another aspect of this great achiever’s life story. It is common knowledge that Miklukho-Maklai was a Russian scientist. Naturally, he also considered himself as such, although his attitude to Russia, and its history and culture, was in no way unambiguous; this question will be discussed further on. At the same time, the great traveler knew his family tree and was well aware that among his paternal ancestors there were many generations of ethnic Ukrainians, i.e., Zaporozhian Cossacks. All the fascinating facts mentioned below (perhaps still unknown to the public at large) were taken from the autobiographical notes that the gravely ill Maklai dictated in the last months of his life to his Australian wife Margaret Robertson, the daughter of an ex-premier of New South Wales. Robertson reminisced that Miklukho-Maklai had intended to complete this work by corroborating the basic facts with relevant documents. Certain facts have already been established with the aid of essays written by the French historian Gabriel Monod, who had several long conversations with the great scientist.

The distant forebears of the prominent Ukrainian — and we have every right to claim this — bore the name of Makukha. One of them, the gallant Cossack Okhrim Makukha, was an ataman in the 1630s. All his three sons, Omelko, Nazar and Khoma, had also taken up arms to fight the Polish nobility. But his middle son, Nazar, who had fallen in love with a charming noble girl when the Cossack army was laying siege to a Polish fortress, betrayed his comrades and for this was condemned to death. His father personally carried out the sentence. At any rate, this is what the family legend says. Interestingly enough, the future scientist’s uncle Hryhory, a student at the Nizhyn lyceum and a friend of Nikolai Gogol’s in 1824-1828, often recounted this legend and to the end of his life was absolutely convinced that the literary genius used it to describe one of the most dramatic episodes in Taras Bulba.

But let us continue our story. Stepan Makukha, the great-grandson of Okhrim and the great-grandfather of Nikolai Miklukho-Maklai, did not disgrace the traditions of his glorious Cossack origins. In 1769-1774, Stepan, the son of a village blacksmith named Karpo Makukha, who was a brave swashbuckler in his younger years, fought in the Russian- Turkish War, displayed exceptional gallantry in combat, and even managed to capture Saffar-Bey, a high-ranking Turkish commander. In recognition of Stepan Makukha’s military exploits, Field Marshal Pyotr Rumyantsev, the commander-in-chief of the Russian army, promoted him to the rank of captain and later, after the Battle of Ochakiv, to ensign. Rumyantsev also petitioned that Stepan be granted hereditary nobility. Unbelievably, in his youth Stepan Makukha was nicknamed makhlai, meaning “nitwit” or “floppy-eared.”

In any case, when the time came to sign the official papers naming him a hereditary nobleman and ensign, Stepan Makukha decided to “refine” his last name by replacing the ill-sounding Makukha with Miklukha and Makhlai with the rather incomprehensible Maklai, both words being hyphenated.

Nikolai’s father, Nikolai Illich, was considered a nobleman of Starodubsky district, Chernihiv province. But the “noble” Miklukhas, who were practically penniless and landless, had to earn a living by serving in the army or holding petty bureaucratic positions. The prominent traveler’s grandfather, Illya, was also a soldier: he fought in the 1812 war as an officer in the Nyzovsky Regiment, achieved the rank of premier-major, and retired after being seriously wounded in the Battle of Berezina. His son Nikolai aspired to a technical education and went to St. Petersburg with absolutely no money. He was down and out for some time until by chance he met Aleksei Konstantinovich Tolstoy, the future outstanding Russian writer. Born and raised in Ukraine’s Chernihiv province, Tolstoy came to his fellow countryman’s assistance. In the 1850s Nikolai Illich Miklukha was the director of St. Petersburg’s passenger railway station. One year before he died in 1856, he was dismissed from his position and narrowly escaped arrest for mailing 150 rubles to Taras Shevchenko, who at the time was languishing in exile. The fact that Miklukho-Maklai’s father always kept a portrait of Taras Bulba, his symbolic ancestor, on the table clear indicates what Ukraine meant to this family.

Miklukho-Maklai had every reason to claim that “my personality is a vivid example of how three originally hostile forces could unite in harmony. The hot blood of the Cossacks peacefully blended with that of the Poles, their seemingly implacable and proud enemies, and was diluted with the blood of the cold Germans.” Indeed, there were Germans and Poles on his mother’s side (Kateryna, nОe Becker). But what did Miklukho-Maklai consider himself? Emphasizing that he was a Russian scientist (“I love my father’s homeland very much,” he wrote), the traveler nevertheless gave a harsh and quite impartial analysis of the “Russian idea” and statehood.

He wrote: “If we follow the history of the Russian state from Ivan the Terrible until now, we will see that, perhaps with the exception of Peter I’s epoch, Russia has not only not permitted, under pain of death or imprisonment, the holding of different opinions but even doubting something that is accepted and well-established in the state. A savage Asiatic horde, with its ferocious cruelty, scorn for spiritual values, and division of society into slaves and masters, brought and engrained in the Russian state a situation whereby the right to think was only granted to those representatives of the lower classes who could rightly guess the wishes of their leader.” Describing a different aspect of this problem, he wrote: “Yet, even under a system that begets overall stupidity, vital Russian thought, in spite of all the violence and reigning moral obscurity, is still sprouting up and bearing excellent fruits, as the whole world looks on in amazement.”

Even this small quotation shows that Miklukho-Maklai was not only an outstanding humanist but also a profound social thinker. Positioning him as a great Ukrainian compatriot of ours, let us quote the well-known Australian scientist and politician William John Macleay: “A time will come when our little Europe will no longer be able to decide anything by force of weapons, while the natural right of man to life, food, and free determination of his destiny will be a true regulator of relations among peoples. And in this distant future the authority of Macleay among the non-white part of the global population will grow immensely, for he managed to do what all the world’s humanists strove for but failed to reach — he turned humanist ideas, which were just good intentions, into a science that asserts in strict logic the equality of all nations and races.”