Funded by Nobles and Merchants: Kharkiv’s Karazin University, Opened in 1805

On November 17, 1804 (November 5 in the Russian calendar then in use), a charter (Стверджувальна грамота) authorizing a university in Kharkiv was signed. The university opened the following year, on January 29, 1805 (January 17 in the same calendar), and it is today’s Kharkiv National University (named after Karazin). It was the first university on Ukrainian land ruled by the Russian Empire.

Vasyl Karazin, the Man

Vasyl Karazin (Василь Каразін), whose name the university bears, was born on February 10, 1773, near Bohodukhiv in Slobidska Ukraine, and died on November 16, 1842, in Mykolaiv, according to the Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine (published by the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, CIUS, at the University of Alberta; hereafter IEU). He studied mining and metallurgy in St. Petersburg, and secretly traveled to Western Europe to continue his studies.

According to the IEU, Karazin sent letters and memoranda to the emperor and senior officials, advocating constitutional monarchy and the abolition of serfdom. From 1801–04 he worked at the Ministry of National Education to reform the school system along Western European lines, and he persuaded the nobles and merchants of Slobidska Ukraine to fund a university in Kharkiv. His ideas later fell out of favor, and he was imprisoned in the Shlisselburg Fortress in 1820–21. He was also a man of wide-ranging learning, setting up weather observatories and inventing agricultural machinery.

Why a University in a Small Town?

According to the university’s own website, Karazin outlined his plan for the university in a letter to a Kharkiv priest on May 2, 1802. At the time, Kyiv, Sumy, Poltava, and Chernihiv were also candidates for the university’s location, and Kharkiv’s population was smaller even than Okhtyrka’s. Karazin himself described Kharkiv as “one of the most modest of the provincial capitals, without much of a population.”

Even so, when Karazin presented his plan at a gathering of Slobidska Ukraine’s nobility in late summer 1802, the nobles pledged to raise funds, and merchants soon followed. The decision to establish the university was made in January 1803, and the Kharkiv Educational District, centered on the university, was also created. Even before the university opened, preparations were under way for a botanical garden (1804), a library, and a printing house. According to the university’s website, its botanical garden is the oldest in Ukraine.

Kharkiv already had a place of learning before this. The university’s website calls the school that moved there from Belgorod in 1726 (later the Kharkiv Collegium) “the forge that trained the people of the future university,” and notes that the philosopher Hryhorii Skovoroda taught there beginning in 1759 (see our article on Skovoroda).

The First 30 Years After Opening

According to the IEU, the early university enjoyed broad autonomy, with the faculty council electing both the rector and all professors. The educational district was overseen by the Polish noble Severyn Potocki, and the university’s first rector was the linguist Ivan Ryzhsky. Many of the professors in its first decade were invited from abroad, especially from Germany. The university opened with four faculties: ethics and politics; language and literature; physics and mathematics; and medicine (per the university’s timeline).

Around the university, the first periodicals in eastern Ukraine were born. The IEU cites the Kharkiv Weekly (1812) and the Ukrainian Herald (1816–19), among others. In the 1830s, professors and students at the university formed the “Kharkiv Romantic School,” which took an interest in Ukrainian folk songs and traditions. The IEU writes that in its first 30 years, the university was an important cultural force, bringing in Western European ideas and recognizing the cultural significance of Ukrainian folk culture.

This autonomy did not last long. New regulations in 1835 strengthened the power of central bureaucrats, and by 1848 all publications, even lectures, were subject to censorship. New regulations in 1863 restored the faculty council’s authority, and the IEU calls this period a “golden age” of research.

Lectures in Ukrainian, and Who Taught There

According to the IEU, in 1905, through the efforts of professors Mykola Sumtsov and Dmytro Bahalii, among others, the faculty council issued a memorandum calling for an end to censorship of Ukrainian-language publications. That same year, the university awarded honorary doctorates to the historian Mykhailo Hrushevsky and the writer Ivan Franko (see our article on Ivan Franko). After the Ministry of National Education rejected the creation of courses in Ukrainian history and language in 1906, Sumtsov began lecturing in Ukrainian the following year, 1907.

Among the main professors the IEU lists from before 1917 are the linguists Izmail Sreznevsky and Oleksandr Potebnia, the folklorist Amvrosii Metlynsky, and the mathematician Aleksandr Lyapunov. The composer Mykola Lysenko also studied the natural sciences here (see our article on Lysenko).

On Nobel laureates, the university’s website describes itself as “the only university in Ukraine where three Nobel laureates studied and worked,” naming the biologist Ilya Mechnikov, the economist Simon (Semen) Kuznets, and the physicist Lev Landau. The IEU’s account is a little more precise: Mechnikov studied here, Landau worked here, and Kuznets studied either at Kharkiv University or at the Kharkiv Commercial Institute, where many of the university’s faculty also taught.

A University Whose Name Kept Changing

During the Soviet era, Kharkiv was the capital of Soviet Ukraine. According to the IEU, research into Ukrainian history, literature, and language flourished in the 1920s, but from the late 1920s into the early 1930s, most scholars of Ukrainian studies were arrested; in the department (institute) of Ukrainian cultural history alone, 25 people were repressed. As for the 1936 addition of Gorky’s name, the IEU writes that Gorky had no connection whatsoever to the university. In 1965, of 777 lecturers, only 104 (13%) taught in Ukrainian.

The Question of Being “the Oldest”

The words used to describe Kharkiv University differ depending on who is speaking.

• IEU: “one of the oldest and most important universities in Ukraine,” the first university on Ukrainian land ruled by the Russian Empire
• Great Ukrainian Encyclopedia (VUE): the oldest university in Ukraine after the university in Lviv
• The university’s own website: one of the oldest universities in Eastern Europe

The answer depends on which schools are counted as “universities.” Kyiv already had an academy (Академія) in the 17th century (see our article on the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy). Kharkiv University can be described as the first modern university established on Ukrainian land under the Russian Empire’s university regulations.

Damage Since 2022

According to the university’s website, within the first month of Russia’s full-scale invasion, the building of the Faculty of Economics on Myronosytska Street was destroyed by a missile. The main building, the north wing, the physics and engineering building, dormitories, the natural history museum, and the old building of the central library were also damaged; the university has recorded the dates of damage from March 1 to March 18, 2022. According to the university’s website, classes resumed at the end of March.