Maksym Korostash was a Ukrainian folklorist, composer, and teacher. He was a member of the ethnographic commission of the VUAN. As a teacher, he played a significant role in the life of the sculptor, painter and ethnographer Ivan Honchar.
Maksym Korostash was born in the village of Lypianka (now Cherkasy region). While studying at school, he participated in a drama club, sang well, and recorded folk songs.
Later, he studied in Kyiv at the Mykola Lysenko State Music and Drama Institute (teacher Lev Revutskyi, Department of Choral Conducting and Playing Folk Instruments), as well as at the Pedagogical Institute (Department of History and Geography and Department of Chemistry and Biology).
He worked as a music teacher at the First Labour School.
In 1927, during his stay in his native village, he met a talented graduate of the village school Ivan Honchar, whom he invited to Kyiv to study and helped him enter the Art Industrial School, became his guardian, educator and adviser. Ivan Honchar called him his spiritual father.
His apartment at 37 Hoholivska Street was frequented by prominent figures of Ukrainian culture, including ethnographer Danylo Shcherbakovskyi, poet Mykola Voronoi and his son Mark. At his home, Maksym Borysovych introduced Ivan Honchar to Klymentiy Kvitka, a famous musicologist, folklorist, and husband of Lesya Ukrainka, and her mother Olena Pchilka.
Maksym Borysovych was a member of the Ethnographic Commission at the Academy of Sciences. He participated in numerous expeditions to collect and record musical folklore. He collaborated with Mykhajlo Hrushevsky. He made presentations and participated in discussions during the meetings of the Historical Section of the Ukrainian Universal Academy of Sciences chaired by Mykhajlo Hrushevsky, in particular in 1929.
The archives of the Institute of Art History, Folklore and Ethnology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine contain fragments of his recordings made in his native village in the early twentieth century. Only 25 melodies and 10 lyrics out of more than 200 songs he recorded have survived.
In 1934, he worked in Belarus, which helped him avoid repression. In 1938 (according to other sources, in 1940), Maksym Korostash was arrested on a standard charge for those times. According to the recollections of his niece Lukia Koval (daughter of his older sister), after Maksym Borysovych's arrest, the family had no information about his fate.
Reports at the Academy of Sciences
Korostash M. On the organisation of an ethnographic choir (1928).
Texts of a Moldovan wedding from the Moldovan colonies in the Kherson region (1928).
