The public service of Mykhailo Hrushevskyi in the late imperial period, in the scholarship of diaspora historians during the postwar decades

Abstract

The goal of the article is to identify the specific features of the reception of Mykhailo Hrushevskyi’s pre-revolutionary socio political activity in Ukrainian diaspora historiography of the 1940s through the first half of the 1960s. The material presented allows us to conclude that Ukrainian diaspora intellectuals during the second half of the 1940s through the first half of the 1960s demonstrated sustained and intensive interest in the Lviv period of Mykhailo Hrushevskyi’s socio-political service. Overall, interpretations of the scholar’s public initiatives were predominantly favourable, as historians consistently emphasised the unifying (sobornist) imperative underlying both the socio-political and the cultural-scholarly activities of the author of History of Ukraine-Rus’. In their reconstructions of Hrushevskyi’s political biography, however, diaspora Ukrainian studies were largely not original, as they generally relied on the historiographical tradition of jubilee and memoir-based Hrushevskyi studies produced during the first third of the twentieth century. At the same time, diaries and memoirs of Mykhailo Hrushevskyi’s contemporaries who were able to emigrate to the West in the postwar period introduced a substantial amount of new factual material and original interpretive models. Thus, the historiographical achievements of the postwar two decades made possible the emergence of Hrushevskyi studies as an interdisciplinary field in the year marking the centenary of the Great Ukrainian.