Mykhailo Petrovych Drahomanov (; 18 September 1841 – 2 July 1895) was a Ukrainian intellectual and public figure. As an academic, Drahomanov was an economist, historian, philosopher, and ethnographer, while as a public intellectual he was a political theorist with socialist leanings, perhaps best known as one of the first proponents of Ukrainian autonomism. For Drahomanov, ethnographic studies had a deep influence on his political ideas, and his politics in turn motivated study of particular areas of Ukrainian folk literature. Biography Early life in Poltava (1841-1859) Mykhailo Drahomanov was born on , into a minor noble family of Zaporozhian Cossack ancestry, in Hadiach, a town in the Poltava Governorate of the Russian Empire. His family's status meant Drahomanov was closely acquainted with the ideas of progressivism from an early age. His father, , was influenced by the liberal ideas of the Enlightenment and provided legal aid to serfs and military conscripts. His uncle, , was a member of the Society of United Slavs and a sympathiser of the Decembrists. Mykhailo Drahomanov became an avid learner, enrolling at the Poltava Classical Gymnasium in 1853, where he was exposed to the works of the socialist Alexander Herzen and the historian Friedrich Schlosser. At the Gymnasium, he also began his career in journalism, editing his secret club's handwritten journal. When he took the side of a fellow student against mistreatment by a school inspector, he was expelled from the Gymnasium before he could graduate, only managing to finish his secondary education following the intervention of the liberal pedagogue Nikolay Pirogov. Scholarship and activism in Kyiv (1859-1876) In 1859, Drahomanov enrolled in the University of Kyiv, where he studied history. He quickly joined a radical student circle that participated in the early stages of the "Going to the People" campaign, establishing some of the first folk high school in Ukraine, before their suppression by the Russian government in 1862. He was present during the transfer of Taras Shevchenko's remains from Saint Petersburg to Kaniv in 1861, giving a speech over his coffin when the funeral train stopped in Kyiv. He also spoke in defense of his mentor Pirogov, who had been dismissed from his post for his liberalism, praising him for his educational reforms, particularly his abolition of corporal punishment. As a result, Drahomanov was censored by the university administration, but also brought him closer to his liberal professors, with one recommending him to