Maksym Berezovsky's Marriage. Review of Documentary Materials: on the Issue of His Creative Work

The purpose of the article is to reconstruct the real events of Maksym Berezovsky’s life based on a thorough analysis of documents as to the marriage of the outstanding composer. In the course of the work, the author of the article mainly used empirical research methods, such as logical and analytical analysis, observation, description, generalisation, assumption, comparison. Scientific novelty. Today, the search for new musical works continues, and well-known documentary data on the life of M. Berezovsky is carefully studied. Previously published documents about his marriage depicted a picture of the composer’s happy married life, but a closer analysis revealed a number of misunderstandings that questioned the official version. The article analyses six handwritten documents (from August 1763 to January 1778) from the archives of St. Petersburg. One document is published for the first time, and images of two archival manuscripts are also published for the first time. Conclusions. The article contains all known documents (including recently found) concerning the marriage of M. Berezovsky and reveals important discrepancies in the documents about the marriage of the court singer Maksym Berezovsky with the court dancer Franzina Uberscher. Probably, this fact is explained by different faiths of the newlyweds, but their marriage affected the interests of high-ranking officials of the Russian Empire. The involvement of previously unpublished documents helps to clarify some details of the marriage, to introduce the name of the actor Vasyl Chernikov (who was Maksym’s groomsman) to scientific circulation, to find out the name and patronymic of Berezovsky’s second wife - Nadiia Matviivna. The article analyses various versions, among which two opposite ones are considered as possible in this situation. Introducing new data helps to expand the search for documents on the life of Maksym Berezovsky