Franciszek Duchiński

Franciszek Henryk Duchiński (1816 – 13 July 1893) was a Polish ethnographer and historian, often described as Ukrainophilic.

Duchiński was president of the Société d'Anthropologie et d'Ethnographie Polonaise de Paris, and moreover a member of the French Société d'Anthropologie de Paris and vice-president of the Société d'Ethnographie. He also co-organised exhibitions of anthropological sciences. Today he is mainly known as the author of the theory of the non-Slavic origin of the Russians.

Biography Duchiński was born in to an impoverished Polish noble family of Franciszek Duchiński and Zofia Bojarska, in the Right-Bank Ukraine. After father's death, his mother worked to support the family as a governess for the Tyszkiewicz counts. He attended schools in Berdychiv and Uman. He then settled in Kiev, where he worked as a private teacher in the homes of Polish aristocrats. According to his own account he started studies at the Historico-Philological Faculty of the Kiev University. In 1846, he left Ukraine for Paris, where he became associated with the political and intellectual circles of Prince Adam Czartoryski and published in the "Trzeci Maj" journal.

During the revolution of 1848, he served as Czartoryski's plenipotentiary in Italy, moving to Istanbul a year later. It was during this period that he began writing his first amateur works on Russian and Ukrainian history. He lived there until 1855, when he settled again in Paris. He then developed his journalistic activities, working as a teacher at the Higher Polish School. Due to the intervention of the Russian embassy in 1865, he could not give public lectures, so he limited himself to writing. He became a member of the French geographical and ethnographic societies, the latter of which he became vice-president in 1871. He co-edited the journal Actes de la Société d'Ethnographie. In 1872 he moved to Switzerland, where he became director of the Polish Museum in Rapperswil. He failed to take up a chair at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. He published in Polish and Ukrainian journals and founded the ephemeral Przegląd Etnograficzny. In 1878, he was one of the founders and became a president of Société d'Anthropologie et d'Ethnographie Polonaise de Paris, and co-organised the Polish exposition at the Exposition Universelle in Paris. In 1885, he celebrated 25 years of scientific work in Lviv. Duchiński died on 13 July 1893 and was buried at the Polish cemetery in Montmorency.

On 26 November 1864 he married Polish poet and translator , they didn't have children.

Theory on the non-Slavic origin of the Russians Duchiński was born in Ukrainian lands, and spent much of his life in Kyiv, with which he was deeply connected; he even used the nickname Kijowianin (Kyivianin). He was among the Ukrainophiles, Polish intellectuals who studied and promoted Ukrainian culture. An important goal of his research was to work for the liberation and unification of Poland and Rus'/Ukraine.

In Duchiński's writing, the thesis of the non-Slavic anthropological origin of the Russians occupied a prominent place as a kind of idee fixe. Duchiński rejected the division of peoples into large groups in terms of language, and postulated the use of anthropological features. Duchiński divided the white race into two groups of Aryans and Turans. The former included Slavs, Germans and Latins , and were to be characterised by a sedentary lifestyle, love of freedom and homeland, farming as their main occupation, respect for the law, creativity, a rational approach, and respect for women. The Turans, on the other hand, which he included the Turks, Finns and Mongols, had no love of the land, were passive, fanatical, organised in a military way, and the position of women in their societies was low. According to Duchiński, peoples of Turan origin, although seemingly leading a civilised, sedentary lifestyle today, nevertheless retained the tendencies of the nomads of old.

The Russians, whom he called Muscovites , Duchiński considered to be representatives of the Turans. They had nothing in common with the Ruthenians, having only undergone a ruthenisation during the Kievan Rus' period, which was brought to an end by the Mongol invasion (1237–1242), which united the Turan peoples living on both sides of the Urals, and also separated the Turans from the European-Aryans. He believed that the Muscovites were physically different from the Ruthenians and that it's not possible to Europeanise Russia.