Henryk Jakubanis (1879-1949), his life and intellectual legacy, have been in recent years the topic of research pursued by Mariam Sargsyan. In one of her papers, titled Henryka Jakubanisa (1879-1949) kijowski okres życia i twórczości historycznofilozoficznej (H. Jakubanis’ Kyiv Period of Life and Work in the History of Philosophy), she presented Jakubanis’ Kyiv years as fundamental and formative period of his intellectual biography. Her study has been published in Polish and can be downloaded here.

Kyiv period of Jakubanis’ life deserved a separate presentation, because our knowledge of his early career was far from satisfactory, not to mention some inaccurate or even false informations. M. Sargsyan was the first researcher who used Jakubanis’ documents from the University Library of the Catholic University of Lublin to such an extent, what was necessary to complete her task.

To present the life and academic activity of Jakubanis (on the right) in the Kyiv period in full, Sargsyan starts with his childhood and gymnasium education. Moreover, the history and philosophical traditions in the Saint Vladimir Imperial University of Kyiv are briefly sketched with an emphasis on Jakubanis’ study curriculum, the beginnings of his academic career and the personality of his supervisor, professor Alexei Gilarov. He was the professor who exerted the most significant impact on Jakubanis’ early works in the history of Greek philosophy.

To conclude, it was in Kyiv where Jakubanis’ career as a teacher of classics and a researcher in the history of ancient philosophy started. Some of his achievements from this period are still of significance in the Russian-speaking world, for he is still remembered as the author of a work on Empedocles and one of the pioneers in translating fragments of this ancient thinker into Russian.