Українознавство (Jul 2020)
From “Little Russian Songs” to Ukrainian Consciousness: The Intellectual Revolution of 1827
Abstract
The release of the collection “Little Russian Songs Published by M. Maksymovych” in 1827 became the event that led to revolutionary changes in the advance of the Ukrainian national liberation movement of the first third of the 19th century. The preface to this book, outlined both as the manifesto of Ukrainian romanticism and the first declaration of Ukrainian studies, based on the dominant idea of the “universal nation”, initiated the processes of new conceptualization of the common identity of Ukrainians. Two next collections by Maksymovych – “Ukrainian Folk Songs” and “Collected Ukrainian Songs” – also became important in establishing a new methodological paradigm of the complex of sciences about Ukraine and Ukrainians: the totality of their metadiscursive modalities witnessed the formation of ideological models characterized not as Little Russian, but genuinely Ukrainian consciousness, directed towards the “horizon” of worldview imperatives of folk verbal culture. For the first time, such ideological transformations resulted in the literally mass movement of the Ukrainian intelligentsia, who began coordinating their efforts around the practices and theoretical modalities of the common national cause – the collection of Ukrainian songs. Perceptions of the social “nature” of Ukrainians as a separate ethnic community began to change rapidly: the division into gentry and Cossacks, on the one hand, and into peasantry deprived of any political subjectivity, on the other hand, was no longer perceived as axiomatic. The same songs heard throughout the entire Ukrainian ethnographic territory caused the emergence of the first modern concepts of the national territorial unity; a new understanding of the history of Ukraine based on the ethos and historiosophy of the heroic melodious epic was also being formed. Although M. Maksymovych did not question the integrity of the empire in his legacy, objectively the ideas and strategies of the Ukraine-focused school that he conceptualized had a revolutionary character and significantly influenced the processes of forming the communal identity of Ukrainians.
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