Hryhorii Oleksandrovych Machtet

Hryhorii Oleksandrovych Machtet, writer and publicist, was born on September 3 (15), 1852, in the city of Lutsk. His father, a nobleman of the Volhynia Governorate, was a judge. In August 1876, Machtet was arrested for participating in the preparation of an escape from a pretrial detention cell by two political prisoners, the revolutionary Narodniks S.F. Kovalik and P.I. Voynaralsky. He spent more than a year in the Peter and Paul Fortress, and in 1877 he was exiled under police supervision to the town of Shenkursk, Arkhangelsk Governorate. A year later he attempted to escape, but was detained the very next day after the attempt. Punishment was not long in coming: he was to be exiled to Yakutia, from where he had no hope of returning. Thanks to the intercession of friends, his fate was “mitigated”: in 1879 Machtet was exiled to the town of Tyukalinsk, Tobolsk Governorate, and in 1880 transferred to Ishim. In the late 1890s, Machtet often published feuilletons in the Zhytomyr newspaper "Volyn." He was still under covert police surveillance and was forbidden to live in Petersburg. In his second marriage he had two children—a daughter, Tetiana, and a son, Taras. The family lived in poverty; his service exhausted all his strength, demanded great nervous strain, and left him almost no time for creative work. In 1900 he finally managed to obtain permission to move to Petersburg, where he hoped to realize all his creative ideas and plans. But on August 14 (26), 1901, while vacationing in Yalta, Hryhorii Oleksandrovych died suddenly. The publicist and literary critic M. K. Mykhailovsky wrote in an obituary that Machtet’s life, from his gymnasium days almost until the very end, had been a whole series of adventures, but no misfortunes ever separated him from the ideals of his youth. Nataliia Pushkar