THE ETHNOGRAPHIC ACTIVITIES OF NYKANOR DMYTRUK IN THE 1920s–THE LATE 1930s

This paper focuses on the activities of Nykanor Dmytruk as an ethnographer in the 1920s – the late 1930s. The study applies general scientific and special historical methods, in accordance with the basic principles of historical research: historicism, scientificity, objectivity, and consistency. The principles of historicism and scientificity help to reconstruct Nykanor Dmytruk’s extensive ethnographic research in the context of that time. The principle of objectivity aids in examining the scholar’s ethnographic activities, considering objective historical regularities and critical analysis of literary and historical documentation. The principle of consistency serves for building a holistic picture of the researcher’s ethnographic activities in the 1920s – the late 1930s. The article adopts the interdisciplinary approach, implemented through the use of terminology and research tools of other social sciences and humanities. This article is the first comprehensive study of Nykanor Dmytruk’s research activities, carried out on the extensive source base. The author proves that Nykanor Dmytruk conducted episodic ethnographic studies as a student. His ethnographic research took on a systemic character when the scholar started collaborating with the Ethnographic Commission of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. Nykanor Dmytruk’s ethnographic interests included a wide range of issues relating to the material and spiritual culture of the Ukrainian people. Moreover, the researcher was also concerned

Key words: Nykanor Dmytruk, ethnographic research, the Ethnographic Commission of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, the Volyn Museum of Local History.
Introduction. Ethnography in Ukraine experienced rapid development and afterward actual decline in the interwar period. In the early 1930s, free creative initiatives, specialized ethnographic institutions, and targeted research programs, started with in the policy of Ukrainization, were curtailed; the ideological offensive and repressions began. Nykanor Dmytruk is a well-known Ukrainian ethnographer. In the 1920s -the late 1930s, he researched the material and spiritual culture of the Ukrainian people. However, despite his significant contribution to the development of ethnography in the 1920s -the late 1930s, the researcher was subject to oblivion for a long time. Repressed by the communist regime in the times of the «Great Terror» and later rehabilitated during the «Khrushchev Thaw», Nykanor Dmytruk remained unknown and his creative heritage fell out of the scientific discourse until the early 1990s.
In 1926, Nykanor Dmytruk sent a letter to Victor Petrov, the Head of the Ethnographic Commission of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, with a questionnaire designed for collecting materials on the famine in Ukraine, 1921. The program included 17 questions relating to social and economic problems of the post-revolutionary villages, national customs, beliefs, legends, and retellings about the famine in 1921. Stepan Muzychenko noticed: "He was practically the only one of the contemporary ethnographers, who came to the conclusion about the artificial class divide of the Polissya peasantry, created by the military communism politics and brought up by the ideologists up to the level of the driving force of social development. The poor harvest and deformed class policy in the village resulted in the famine in the early 1920s, caused by the confiscation of bread from the majority of the rural population" (Muzychenko, 1990, pp. 61-62).
Nykanor Dmytruk's active research in Korosten was highly appreciated by the scholars. Thus, in 1927 at the invitation of the Ethnographic Commission of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, the ethnographer together with Viktor Petrov, Volodymyr Bily, Mykhaylo Tarasenko and others examined pilotage in the area of the Dnipro hydroelectric power station construction. The research materials from this expedition became the basis for the collection «Materials for the Study of Industrial Associations: the Dnipro Pilots», which was published in 1929 (Andrieiev, 2012, pp. 86-87;Muzychenko, 1990, p. 62). The study of the Dnipro pilotage by the Ethnographic Commission of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences was motivated by several reasons. Firstly, at that time the construction of the Dnipro hydroelectric power station started. The flooding of the Dnieper rapids and the surrounding territories put pilotage at risk of disappearance. Secondly, in the mid-1920s the Ethnographic Commission developed a plan for a thorough examination of the vestiges of the professional associations in Ukraine, including pilotage (Andrieiev, 2012, pp. 85-86).
One of the biggest ethnographic projects conducted by Nykanor Dmytruk was a stationary ethnographic study of the village Didkovychi, Korosten Region, which he started in 1927 and continued with some breaks until 1930. Although the study of Didkovychi was held within the activities of the Ethnographic Commission of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, we believe that it was initiated personally by Nykanor Dmytruk. At the final stage, in 1930, the scholars from the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, Kyiv and Volyn Museum of Local History, and some teachers of the region joined the team of ethnographic study in Didkovychi (IASFE named after M. T. Rylsky of NAS of Ukraine. F. 1-4. D. 219. L. 1-42).
In the late 1920s, the activities of the specialized ethnographic institutions, including the Ethnographic Commission of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, became restricted. The Commission was liquidated in 1933 and some of its members were repressed. On July 11, 1933, in the newspaper «The Communist», the official press media of the Central Committee of the Communist Party in Ukraine, the article entitled «In Captivity of the Class Enemy» appeared. This biased ideological publication severely criticized the activities of the Ethnographic Commission of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, in particular, the collection of articles about the Chumaks (Kostrytsya, 2006, p. 150). Publication of materials about the Chumaks, who traditionally associated with entrepreneurship, freedom, and Ukrainian traditional culture, could not have gone unnoticed by the proponents of the communist values. But the attack against the members of the Ethnographic Commission of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences was rather a reason to start repressions. Consequently, due to the described socio-political conditions, in the late 1920s -early 1930s, Nykanor Dmytruk significantly slowed down his ethnographic activities.
In  Volyn. October 28, 1935;Soviet Volyn. October 29, 1935). In the newspaper article from October 29, 1935, he wrote: "The October Revolution shattered the chains of national oppression and opened up great opportunities for national minorities to have their schools, clubs, reading rooms, where they and their children learn to build a new cultural life" (Soviet Volyn. October 29, 1935).
It is also known that in that period Nykanor Dmytruk worked on the essays about the history of Zhytomyr region (ZhMLH. RМ. 5656/1-34. L. 35). However, the manuscript of this research could not be found.
Since 1925, part of Nykanor Dmytruk's ethnographic research was published in the journal «The Ethnographic Bulletin», for example, the articles «On the Miracles in Ukraine in 1923Ukraine in » (1925, «From a New Life» (1926, vol. 2, p. 31-37), «The Famine in Ukraine, 1921» (1927, vol. 4, p. 79-87), «Miracles in Poltava Region in 1928» (1928 (Muzychenko, 1990, p. 61-62). Nykanor Dmytruk also published scientific and journalistic materials in Korosten and Zhytomyr newspapers.  1-9). In the first article, Nykanor Dmytruk provides information on the history of the harvesting customs and rituals of the village Luka, Zhytomyr County, recorded by his mother in July 1923. The goal of the article, according to the ethnographer, was to "collect exhaustive data about the harvest; the description of all the harvesting works and all the folklore material, but it was only possible to get folklore information, though incomplete" (IASFE named after M. T. Rylsky of NAS of Ukraine. F. 1-4. D. 210. L. 1).
In the second unpublished article «Something About the Outlaws», the researcher analyzes differences between pre-revolutionary and postrevolutionary prisoners' songs «to understand the psychology of the "outlaws" and help the public re-educate prisoners» (Muzychenko, 1990, p. 63).
For a long time, Nykanor Dmytruk's article about Vasyl Kravchenko («45 Years of V. G. Kravchenko's Ethnographic Research») remained unpublished. The study was issued in the journal «The Folk Art and Ethnography» at the initiative of Stepan Muzychenko in 1990(Dmytruk, 1990. In this article, the researcher In addition, Nykanor Dmytruk wrote: "Soviet ethnography is one of the forms of active participation of the masses in socialism building, in research work and in a comprehensive study of the region to assist the Soviet planning and operational authorities, it is one of the best forms of self-equipment of the masses with the method of scientific analysis" (IASFE named after M. T. Rylsky of NAS of Ukraine. F. 1-4. L. 1).
Could he have written differently at that time? The scholar was aware that without such clarifications his ethnographic studies would not have spread. In 2019, the manuscript «The Monographic Study Didkovychi Village in Volyn Polissya» was issued as a separate print publication by the author of this article (Dmytruk, 2019).
The unpublished and recently published manuscripts of research studies by Nykanor Dmytruk are now stored in the funds of the Institute of Art, Folklore and Ethnology Studies named after M.T. Rylsky in the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in Kyiv. Other ethnographic materials collected by the researcher at different times are also kept there. They are an integral part of the collection of materials of the Ethnographic Commission of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, which was active during 1921 -1933. It should be noted that part of the ethnographic materials collected by Nykanor Dmytruk has been lost. For example, the documentary base of the research on the village Didkovychi (1927), collected by Nykanor Dmytruk and other researchers, is stored not in full (IASFE named after M. T. Rylsky of NAS of Ukraine. F. 1-5. D. 402. L. 2, 20, 22-23, 33-35, 48-59, 67-85, 121, 135-140, 167; IASFE named after M. T. Rylsky of NAS of Ukraine. F. 1-5. D. 403. L. 96). The so-called «standstills», recorded by Nykanor Dmytruk in Didkovychi (1927), are the only best-preserved documents (IASFE named after M. T. Rylsky of NAS of Ukraine. F. 1-5. D. 469. L. 1-62). It is possible that further searches in the archives and museums of Ukraine will reveal previously unknown studies by Nykanor Dmytruk, as well as by other scholars from the Ethnographic Commission of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, who conducted the ethnographic study of the village Didkovychi.
In 1937, the Stalinist regime strengthened measures to detect and destruct the so-called «enemies of the people». Unfortunately, Nykanor Dmytruk, the Head of the History Department in the Volyn Museum of Local History then, did not avoid that notorious campaign. On September 30, 1937, the article «Who Works at the Zhytomyr Museum?» appeared in the Soviet Volyn newspaper, where the workers of the Museum's History Department were accused of anti-Soviet nationalist activities. The article stated: "There is practically no department in the Museum left unreached by the dirty hands of this brood, that built a safe dent in the cozy walls of the Museum. But mostly the "nationalist scrapers" hacked up in the History Department. Until recently, the portraits of the sworn enemies of the people were displayed in the most prominent places. In the section where the period of 1917 is to be exhibited, the researcher Snigur hostilely distorted V. I. Lenin's April theses. This "historic exposition" was displayed in the Museum with the blessing of the Head of the History Department N. K. Dmytruk and the Museum Council headed by Lukyanovich" (Kostrytsya, 2006, p. 151;Soviet Volyn. September 30, 1937).
On November 29, 1937, Nykanor Dmytruk was arrested by the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs. Accused under Articles 54-10 and 54-11 of the Criminal Code of the USSR, the researcher was charged with involvement in the «Ukrainian military-rebel nationalist organization» and as its member, since 1936, he «actively worked on organizing the rebel underground with the aim of the armed revolt to overthrow the Soviet regime». Nykanor Dmytruk was also accused of belonging to the anti-Bolshevik Volyn Rebel Army, which he allegedly joined in 1922 (State Archives of Zhytomyr Region. F. R-5013. Op. 2. D. 1337. L. 424). It is likely that Nykanor Dmytruk's accusation of belonging to the Volyn Rebel Army is due to the fact that in spring, 1922, the village Didkovychi, Korosten region, was one of the Army's centers. Earlier, in November 1921, the Volyn group of the Second Winter Campaign of the Army of the Ukrainian People's Republic passed through Didkovychi. And, as noted above, this settlement was the main object of Nykanor Dmytruk's ethnographic research in the late 1920s.
The groundlessness of those accusations was later recognized by the Communist authorities when Nykanor Dmytruk was rehabilitated.  19,1957). According to the resolution, the decision of the Zhytomyr Regional Directorate of the NKVD against Nykanor Dmytruk on May 10, 1938, was canceled and the criminal case against him was terminated in the absence of a crime (State Archives of Zhytomyr Region. F. R-5013. D. 1338. L. 362-363).
Conclusions. Nykanor Dmytruk carried out ethnographic research in the 1920s -the late 1930s, and it was largely based on a personal creative initiative of the researcher. He undertook episodic ethnographic studies as a student. After the researcher started collaborating with the Ethnographic Commission of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, his ethnographic studies became systematic. The ethnographic interests of the scholar included a wide range of issues on the material and spiritual culture of the Ukrainian people. Nykanor Dmytruk was also concerned with the ethnographic study of the settlements in Zhytomyr region. Today, part of the scholar's research is in the form of manuscripts, stored in the funds of the Rylsky Institute of Art Studies, Folklore and Ethnology at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in Kyiv. We should also point out that Nykanor Dmytruk was the victim of the Stalinist totalitarian system, aimed at destroying any manifestations of the Ukrainian national life, including free development of ethnography in Ukraine.
The article was received 09.07.2019 Article recommended for publishing 10.08.2019