Mykhailo Hrushevskyi's path to the chair of Ukrainian history at Lviv university: an attempt at reconstruction

Abstract

The purpose of the study is to reconstruct the circumstances of Mykhailo Hrushevskyi obtaining a professorship at Lviv University. The methodological basis of the research is an interdisciplinary approach. Particular emphasis is placed on the structural and functional systematic analysis of historiographical facts and the comparative historical method, based on the principles of objectivity and historicism. In the study there have been also used methods of periodization, classification and typologization. The scientific novelty of the article consists in an attempt to reconstruct the process of M. Hrushevskyi’s appointment to the Department of History of Ukraine at Lviv University in a holistic manner. Conclusions. In conclusions, it is noted that M. Hrushevskyi’s appointment to the Department of Eastern European History at Lviv University was made possible by the successful coincidence of many objective and subjective factors. The former includes a sufficiently high level of cultural development and political self-organization of Galician Ukrainians, who in the second half of the 1880s and at the beginning of the 1890s articulated and brought to the public domain the issue of opening a university department for the history of their people, and managed to implement it despite numerous difficulties. The second is dominated by a personal factor: both the initiators of this educational campaign and the applicants for the chair were fully aware of the uniqueness of the historical chance, and therefore did not hesitate to put national duty above private interest. The situation was especially difficult for V. Antonovych, who, while realizing the importance of his personality at the beginning of the action, also understood that the challenges of the Lviv professorship were too much for him to bear. Skillfully playing a triple game (with Galician people’s representatives, Viennese bureaucrats, and Kyivan community members), he “delayed” the opening of the department until his student received his master’s degree. The considerable risks of this feat and the stormy emotions that raged among those involved were rewarded by M. Hrushevskyi’s phenomenal work in Galicia. Moreover, as a result of this project, the Ukrainians entered the era of war and revolution conscious of their cultural identity and historical unity as a nation.