«DO YOU REQUIRE OUR RESPONSIBILITY TO GENTRY TIMES?». Ukrainian intellectuals’ of the 19th – the beginning of the 20th century opinions about the role of the heritage of the polish-lithuanian commonwealth in the creation of modern ukrainian nation

Abstract

European historiography changed considerably during the nineteenth century. Formation of historical source study as a separate science, on the one hand, and awareness of the connection between the historical narrative of the past with political interests, on the other hand, gave impetus to the writing of historical works on national history, the so-called grand narratives. They relied on historical sources, but chose what served the actual political interests, and ignored or interpreted otherwise what they did not fi t. The territorial organization of living space has become a priority task of national development in the nineteenth century, and the recognition of land, borders, and people as own should have been historically grounded. The diffi  culty for Ukrainians was that the traces of Ukrainian-Russ statehood were lost in ancient times, while the neighbors, primarily Russians and Poles, tried to draw both the territory and the past of Ukraine into their own concepts of the creation of modern nation. The creation of the Ukrainian grand narrative was infl uenced by external factors: the division of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the collapse of its once unifi ed political, cultural and intellectual space, and the policy of the Russian authorities, aimed to separate «Little Rus’» from western civilization. Russian censorship successfully removed memory of Polish-Ukrainian ties from historical works and replaced it with the image of the invading Poles. The traumatic, post-war experience, idealization of images of Cossack soldiers was the favorable ground for this. As a result, in Ukrainian historical grand narrative the «Polish-Lithuanian» period was interpreted as an external occupation, a break in the «correct» history of Ukraine. The whole complex of everyday life, cultural and political infl uences of Ukrainians in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth remained beyond history. Its main content was recognized by the Polish-Ukrainian confl icts. The views on the legacy of the Commonwealth in the Ukrainian society of the nineteenth century can also be analyzed from the perspective of the intellectual biographies of their creators and take into account the experience of relations with the Poles, the private image and repression of the Russian government. An unbiased rethinking by professional historians of the past of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth from the point of view of the interactions of various cultural spaces in the nineteenth century was not a matter of time.