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“НАШЕ ЖИТТЯ”, КВІТЕНЬ 201 3 WWW. UNWLA.ORG 25 BOOK REVIEW : The Cossack Myth Serhii Plokhy, The Cossack Myth: History and Nation hood in the Age of Empires. Cambridge University Press. 2012. Serhii Plokhy, the Mykhailo Hrushevsky Professor of Ukrainian History at Harvard Un i- versit y, did it again. The last among his other scholarly publications was a fascinating and hig h- ly acclaimed new an alysis of the Yalta Conference (2010). This w ork offers tremendous insight into the formation of the modern Ukrainian national identity whi ch occurred within the Russian E m- pire (the 2 nd half of the 17 th , the 18 th and the 19th centuries). The “he ro”, so to speak, of this 402 - page long story is the book entitled The Hi s- tory of Rus’ , attributed to an 18 th century Arc h- bishop Heorhii Konysky . Its manuscript was first discovered in 1818 , found in the library of the Bezborodko family, one of the Chernihiv provinc e Cossack nobility families. It soon became o bvious that the real a u- thor of The History of Rus’ was definitely not H. Konysky. Then who was it and why was the real author anonymous? And why did this book wa r- rant so much research and disputes among seve r- al generations of Ukrainian historians? According to Ivan Drach, who translated The History into Ukrainian for a new edition (published in 1991 in an astonishingly high print run), “ The History of Rus’ is the first stage of the rocket that launched you and me into the cosmic immensity of the history of nations and states.” In 1894 Mykhailo Drahomanov declared: “ The History of Rus’ must be recognized as the first manifestation of U krainian political lib eralism... and the author was a great political patriot of his “Little Russian” fatherland .” Obviously, at that time Ukraine was officially “Little Russia” and the official language was Russian. In his History of Rus’ , while discussing the affinity of “Grea t” and “Little” Russians , th e anonymous author argued that “... primacy in that r e lationship belonged to his compatriots, who happened to be direct descendants not only of heroic Co s sacks but also of the glorious princes of Kyiv. As such they were not merel y equal to Great Russians but superior to them .” D r. Plokhy’s work summarizes the life e x- periences, ideas and aspirations of the leading Cossack elite fam i lies of the era. His heavy labor of scrup u lous r e search (which took a quarter of a century), going a d fontes on every single name (and there are hu n dreds), is mirac u- lously light - weight reading. It is w ritten in the gu ise of a dete c- tive story, which makes it easy to digest the ma s sive wealth of i n fo r mation and prods the reader to keep turning pages not me rely due to interes t- ing places, pe o ple, and situations, but also because one is co m pelled to discover “whodunit .” And that is the uni que talent of Pr o fessor Plokhy — to make a scholarl y histor i- cal tre a tise accessi ble to the ave r age reader. One of the amazin g aspects of that period, at least for me, was the scale of the integration of Ukrainian Cossack elites into the governing m a- c hine of imperial administration, after the abol i- tion of the Hetmanate in 1764. P eople like Teofan Prokopovych and Oleksandr Bezbor odko were involved in it, as well as thousands of Ukrainian intellectuals, b ur eaucrats and medical doctors, who at one point made up more than two - thirds of all the empire’s physicians. To give just one e x- ample, Oleksandr Bezborodko, son of one of the high est officials in the Hetmanate, born in the Chernihiv province, served as top diplomat in the court of the Russian Empire for 24 years a nd earned the title of ‘prince’ . He was “the principal architect of Russian foreign policy ,” b ut he stron g ly favored and defended Cossack families , granting them nobility status, and support ed the restoration of Cossack military formations after the liquidation of the Hetmanate. He remained a patriot of his homeland till the end. The Mykle - shevskys, Shyrais, Poletykas, Rozu movskys and numerous others who represen ted the Cossack nobility clans were also involved in the wo rkings of the e mpire. There were different interpretations of The History of Rus’ . Taras Shevchenko , for i n- stance, clearly understood it as a quest for Ukra i n ian national liberation from Russia, which inspired thousands to fight for the freedom of their country. In the words of a Unive rsity of Cambridge reviewer: “... significant scholarship is rarely so engaging .” Nadia Deychakiwsky
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