Archeographical component of volumes IX-X of the "History of Ukraine-Rus" by Mykhailo Hrushevsky

Abstract

Summary. The purpose of the article is to reconstruct M. Hrushevsky’s archaeographic plan during the preparation and writing of the ninth and tenth volume of «History of Ukraine-Rus». The specificity of the chosen theoretical and methodological model of the study is to involve a complex of diverse tools (principles, methods, and methodical techniques) for the reconstruction of the archaeological activity of an outstanding scientist in the last Soviet period of his activity. The heuristic possibilities of comparative, hermeneutic, heuristic, statistical, as well as inductive and deductive methods are used in the research process. The scientific novelty lies in the fact that for the first time in Ukrainian historiography the archeographic component of the last volumes of «History of Ukraine-Rus» was discovered. Conclusions. Summarizing the archaeographic component of the recent volumes of «History of Ukraine-Rus» by M. Hrushevsky, it was noted that since then the amount of primary source material, introduced for the first time by the researcher to scientific use, increased significantly, which motivated him to publicize the found texts as a whole or in some most important fragments. Such an approach, fulfilling illustrative-proving tasks, also correlated with the methodological preferences of the scientist, in particular, the absolutizing of the role of a historical source as a kind of a mirror of the past. As a result, Ukrainian historiography received the fundamental history of Khmelnytsky, which had the character of the anthology. On this occasion, there are different opinions in the literature – from the persistent criticism of the architectonics of the latest volumes of «History of Ukraine-Rus» to a more balanced analysis. In our opinion, there are considerable reasons to agree with the thesis that due to this source-focus accent of late works of M. Hrushevsky, a layer of the unique source material is available to us, given the fact that a lot of it suffered irreversible losses during the turbulent historical events of the last century.