Fashioning Modern Ukraine

The collection Fashioning Modern Ukraine: Selected Writings of Mykola Kostomarov, Volodymyr Antonovych, and Mykhailo Drahomanov presents for the first time in English a number of seminal texts by three major nineteenth-century scholars and leaders of the national movement in Ukraine. The first and third sections of the book feature respectively the writings of Mykola Kostomarov and Mykhailo DrahomanoÑdescendants of the Cossack middle stratum and members of an influential Ukrainian intelligentsia that arose from that stratum. The second section highlights the works of Volodymyr AntonovychÑthe most prominent member of a group of Polish nobles of Right-Bank Ukraine who professed democratic values and in the early 1860s declared themselves Ukrainian. In their day Kostomarov, Antonovych, and Drahomanov were leading Ukrainian historians, political theorists, and intellectuals, but their ideas continued to be significant even later, in the early twentieth century, when the Ukrainian national movement relied heavily on their writings for inspiration and direction.
About the Author: Serhiy Bilenky, PhD, is a historian specializing in nineteenth-century Ukrainian and Eastern European history. He completed his doctoral degree at the University of Toronto and has lectured extensively in his field, primarily at Columbia University and the University of Toronto. He is the author of Romantic Nationalism in Eastern Europe: Russian, Polish, and Ukrainian Political Imaginations (2012). Volodymyr Antonovych (1834-1908) was a prominent historian, archeographer, and archeologist. Professor of history at Kyiv University from 1878, editor in chief of the publications of the Kyiv Archeographic Commission, patron and head (from 1881) of the Historical Society of Nestor the Chronicler in Kyiv, and organizer of archeological conferences in Ukraine, Antonovych was one of the most important leaders of the Ukrainiphile movement of the second half of the 19th century. He was a major representative of the populist school in Ukrainian historiography. He founded the so-called Kyivan school of historians, which consisted of his students at Kyiv University (among them, Mykhailo Hrushevsky, Dmytro Bahalii, Petr Golubovsky, Mytrofan Dovnar-Zapolsky, and Ivan Lynnychenko). These historians laid the foundations of modern Ukrainian historiography. Antonovych wrote over 300 scholarly studies. Mykola Kostomarov (1817-1885) was a prominent historian, publicist, and writer. Professor of history at Kyiv University, in the 1840s he cofounded a clandestine society of Ukrainian intellectuals, the Cyril and Methodius Brotherhood, and wrote its programmatic text Books of the Genesis of the Ukrainian People. In 1847 he was arrested along with all the other members of the society, imprisoned, and later exiled to Saratov in Russia. In the later 1850s, Kostomarov became professor of history at Saint Petersburg University. Because of his political involvements he had to resign his university position in 1862 and could not accept offers from other universities. Kostomarov wrote a number of fundamental works on the history of Ukraine in the 16th-18th centuries and collected extensive documentary material on Ukraine which he partly published in Documents on the History of Southern and Western Russia in 10 volumes (1861-78). He also wrote a series of books on Russian history. He was the founder of the populist trend in Ukrainian historiography. He also published a series of ethnographic studies. As a writer, Kostomarov is classified as a member of the Kharkiv Romantic School. Mykhailo Drahomanov (1841-1895) was a prominent Ukrainian historian, ethnographer, civic leader, publicist, and political thinker. Dismissed from his position at Kyiv University in 1875, he was forced to emigrate. Entrusted by the Ukrainian Hromada of Kyiv with the mission to become its spokesman in Western Europe, he settled in Geneva in 1876. There he published the journal Hromada (1878-82), the first modern Ukrainian political journal. With Serhii Podolynsky and Mykhailo Pavlyk, Drahomanov formed the Geneva Circle, an embryo of Ukrainian socialism. In 1889 Drahomanov accepted a professorship at Sofia University in Bulgaria. Drahomanov was an outstanding Ukrainian political thinker. He dealt extensively with constitutional, ethnic, international, cultural, and educational issues; he also engaged in literary criticism. Drahomanov's ideas represent a blend of liberal-democratic, socialist, and Ukrainian patriotic elements, with a positivist philosophical background. Influenced by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Drahomanov envisaged the final goal of humanity's progress as a future condition of anarchy: a voluntary association of free and equal individuals, with the elimination of authoritarian features in social life. Drahomanov insisted on the priority of civil rights and free political institutions over economic class interests and of universal human values over exclusive national concerns. However, he believed that nationality was a necessary building stone of all mankind, and he coined the slogan Cosmopolitanism in the ideas and the ends, nationality in the ground and the forms.'s