Kateryna Skarzhynska

Career

Philanthropy 1866–1905

When she turned 14, von Reiser set up a school for the former serfs on her grandparents' estate in Nikolskoye in the Vyshnevolotsky Uyezd and worked alongside the teacher she hired. She also established a hospital to treat local patients. In 1869, she became acquainted with Nikolai Georgievich Skarzhynsky, a nobleman, who became a major general in the Russian Army, specializing in providing horses for the cavalry. Skarzhynsky was descended of a noble-Cossack family of Polish-Ukrainian roots, through Ivan Mikhailovich Skarzhinsky, of the Lubny Regiment. His friends, who were part of the Russian intelligentsia, inspired her to continue with her education and she passed the exams for the women's gymnasium in Lubny. She then attended the Bestuzhev Courses in St. Petersburg, visiting cultural landmarks, such as the Hermitage Museum and the Russian Academy of the Arts. In 1874, she married Skarzhynsky at the Church of the Greatmartyr George in Kiev. The couple returned to St. Petersburg, where she continued her studies until 1879, when they were interrupted by her husband's transfer back to Ukraine.

Skarzhynska returned to her family estate at Kruglik, where she and her husband lived in separate houses. They had an open relationship, each able to have other relationships, without hostility between the couple. She and Skarzhynsky would have five children: Kateryna, Volodymyr, Olga, Alexander, and Natalia. Fascinated by the local folk art and handicrafts, she began collecting artifacts, with the help of historian Grigory Kiryakov. In 1880, Skarzhynska founded the first private museum in Ukraine, collaborating with the noted archaeologist and curator Fyodor Kaminsky on its organization. Kaminsky worked at the museum from 1881 to 1891 as the head curator. The museum was originally housed in a room in the Skarzhynsky's home, but later expanded to a two-story structure with a lobby and six exhibit halls, adjacent to a park and greenhouse. She corresponded with many scientists from throughout Russia and participated in archaeological seminars, as well as fact-finding trips. In 1883, Skarzhynska traveled to Moscow and St. Petersburg, visiting the Polytechnic Museum, Rumyantsev Museum and State Historical Museum to study materials and acquire knowledge and equipment for running her own museum. That year she also met with officials from the Moscow Archaeological Society and Kiev University Archaeological Museum.

Skarzhynska made archaeological excavations in the mountains near Lubny and led expeditions to dig in the Posulli grounds, an historic area covering the Sula River basin. She also paid for excavations by Kaminsky and others, and established a program where she would pay a reward for the recovery of iconostasis and other artifacts, details of the history of rural churches, and items of local historic interest. She amassed a large collection of Ukrainian folk art on Easter eggs known as pysanky. She tried to interest the city of Lubny in establishing a museum for her collection, but they felt the expense for such a luxury was unjustified. Skarzhynska went ahead and established the museum herself. Skarzhynska did not charge for entry to the museum, which contained over 35,000 items, including archaeological artifacts, coins, Cossack antiquities, personal archives and autographs of notable Ukrainian families, and 4,000 books, housed in a scientific library. Her activities on behalf of the museum resulted in her election to several scientific societies, including the Moscow Numismatic Society and the Society of Devotees of Natural Science, Anthropology, and Ethnography.

In 1891, Kaminsky left the museum, and died later that same year, after recommending hiring his assistant, Sergiy Klimentiyovich Kulzhynskiy as replacement curator. Kulzhynskiy had originally arrived at Kruglik in 1889, and upon Kaminsky's recommendation became the tutor for the Skarzhynsky children, Olga, Volodymyr, and Natalia. That year, Skarzhynska established an agricultural school on land owned by her husband in the village of Terny, donating the land to the local Zemstvo. She next established a school in the city jail at Lubny and then a girls' gymnasium. In 1898, she built a school on the estate, which had two classrooms, a laboratory, library, museum, and a recreation hall, as well as quarters for the instructor. She hired an instructor from Moscow, Victor Vasilyevich Simonovsky, to teach at the school and shared the expenses of its operation with the Zemstvo. The free, public, coeducational school offered courses for four grades in music, natural sciences, religion, Russian calligraphy and grammar, Russian literature, and Russian geography and history. She employed several former prisoners as clerk, night watchman, and gardener; in the 1905 revolution one of them became a local leader of the rebellion, and ordered her to be protected. Her husband had been made an honorary superintendent of the Lubny School District, and though he supported her collecting, he was not involved in her other philanthropic endeavors and did not support her publishing efforts or meetings with scientists. Skarzhynska and the tutor, Kulzhynskiy, began an affair. He was the father of her youngest son Igor. Her works in education were recognized by the Russian government with the gold medal and ribbon of the Order of Saint Anna.

Skarzhynska offered evening adult education courses at the museum. She continued collecting pysanky and by 1898, her collection contained more than 2,100 eggs. These were catalogued by Skarzhynska and published in 1899 by Kulzhynskiy in a book Description of the Collection of Pysanky (Ukrainian: Описаніе коллекціи народныхъ писанокъ). The collection attracted many visitors, both local people and visiting scientists. By 1901, there were up to 300 visitors a day. In both 1903 and 1905, Skarzhynska offered the museum to the city of Lubny, but her offers were refused. She began making plans to leave Russia in 1905, recognizing that a revolution would make maintaining it impossible. She operated the museum until she left for Europe, finally giving her collections to the Poltava Zemstvo in 1906, transferring over 37,000 objects in four railway boxcars. That year, the Museum of Natural History of Poltava Provincial Zemstvo made a second edition of her collection of pysanky, which included over 3,000 drawings. In 1943, the museum was looted and burned and only 458 specimens of her eggs survived.

Life abroad 1905–1914

The financial collapse and chaos preceding and during the 1905 Russian Revolution, led Skarzhynsky to suffer a mental breakdown. Placing her husband in a private asylum in Kiev, Skarzhynska and the tutor, Kulzhynskiy, took the youngest two children, Igor and Natalia, and a foster child, Olga Kiryakova, to Italy for their education. For five years, they moved throughout Europe living in various cities, like Budapest and Vienna, before settling in Lausanne, Switzerland. Her husband died in 1910 and Skarzhynska sold her remaining land holdings, donating a portion to the continuation of the agricultural school. Between 1906 and 1907, many Russians emigrated in the wake of the Revolution out of fear of persecution for their political beliefs or activities. Many of these emigrants realized that they would have to live abroad indefinitely. To assist them, Skarzhynska purchased a four-storey house, known as the Russian Home, and made it available to any Russian immigrants and refugees needing a place to stay, while they sought housing or employment. She opened schools for Russian students, bringing in educational materials from Moscow. In Geneva, she founded the Union of Russian Emigrants, where Russians could meet and help each other. She established canteens in various Swiss cities, established a sanatorium for Russian tuberculosis patients in Davos, and set up Russian printing houses in Brussels, London and Paris. In Russian circles, she became widely known as the central contact person for assistance to Russians living abroad.

Skarzhynska's activities helped many political dissidents, drawing attention from the Swiss gendarmes and the Russian intelligence. Among her acquaintances and correspondents in Switzerland were both Lenin and Stalin. She published a magazine in Russian, Зарубежом (Abroad), which carried articles of interest, like the forced exodus of Georgians from their homeland and information on the Balkan Wars (1912–1913). She pressed the federal government of Switzerland to provide a nursery for the orphans of Bulgarian, Greek, Serbian, and Turkish soldiers who were killed during the Balkan wars and raised the funds to finance it. Though she was apolitical, her journal carried evaluations of various revolutionary movements, including from leaders of both the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, in an attempt to explore the ideological thought of her time. In 1913, she broke off all relations with revolutionaries, believing they had used her dreams of improving education to advance their own agendas.

Return to Ukraine 1914–1932

With the outbreak of World War I, Skarzhynska and Kulzhynskiy returned to Ukraine. She initially went to Kiev and then moved to Poltava, before finally settling in Lubny in 1916. She set about collecting books to establish children's libraries for Poltava and Lubny, but she had to abandon the project, when she lost her fortune during the chaos of World War I and the Russian Revolution. In 1918, one of the military units occupied the coeducational gymnasium operated by Skarzhynska's daughter Olga, where Kulzhynskiy was teaching, and looted the premises, stealing the personal belongings and identity papers of the students and staff. In July 1923, the employees of the museum which she had founded, then known as the Poltava Proletarian Museum, sent her a one-time donation of ₽1,000 while the employees of the Poltava Central Archive sent her a further ₽500. The head archivist wrote a letter to the Russian Academy of Sciences the following year, asking for the "government of the proletariat" to grant a pension to Skarzhynska, who had worked so long on behalf of common people. The plea was successful as Lenin's Soviet government granted her a personal pension. In the late 1920s, the death of Lenin and the curtailment of his influence, along with her former noble status, resulted in the pension's cancellation. Kulzhynskiy, who was working as an assistant professor of physics and headed the physics and mathematics department at the Institute of Social Education in Lubny (Ukrainian: Інституту соціального виховання в Лубнах), provided for her care in her final years.

Death and legacy

Skarzhynska died in the summer of 1932, during the Holodomor, though accounts differ as to where she died or where she was buried. There is a plaque located on the house at 10 Gogol Street in Lubny which marks her residence there during the 1920s and 1930s. Her activities had a "significant impact on the development of cultural and scientific life in Ukraine in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries". Her oldest daughter and namesake Kateryna Nikolaevna Skarzhynska died of starvation soon after her mother. Many years after her death, in 1989, a street in the city of Lubny was named in her honor. Her papers, including her books, historical documents, and manuscripts are housed at the Poltava Museum of Local History, in Poltava, Ukraine.

The elementary school Skarzhynska founded on the Kruglik estate, operated until 1943 and her daughter, Olga Skarzhynska (later Klimova), followed in her footsteps. Olga founded "one of the first Ukrainian-language high schools in Luben" (Lubny), open to students of any nationality or gender. The agricultural school Skarzhynska founded in Terny became an agricultural and technical college in 1917. Students were trained in blacksmithing, coopering, and carpentry, in addition to studying farming techniques. In 2005, the school was transformed into the Lubny Forestry College, a leading institution in Ukraine for training in forestry production. Her daughter Natalia was a romantic interest of the English composer Arnold Bax and his May Night in the Ukraine was dedicated to her. He also wrote about her and her family in his memoir, "Farewell My Youth", published in 1943.