Українознавство (Mar 2020)
“Looking under the Peasant’s Roof”: Songs as an Ethnically Authentic Phenomenon in the Research Practices of Zorian Dolenha-Khodakovskyi
Abstract
The development of domestic humanities in the first quarter of the 19th century had distinctively stated the exhaustiveness of the “intellectual proposals” enabled by historiography – the then key vector of Ukrainian studies. Despite all their latent opposition to the formal imperial discourse, social, cultural, and research strategies formed in the frame of the “Little-Russian autonomism” failed to cross the “growth borders” of the Hetmanate seniors’ ideology. First and foremost, this related to the administrative borders which were totally different from those of Ukrainians’ ethnic settlement (Left-Bank Hetmanate, which attracted the primary attention of almost all creators of the Ukrainian historiography monuments of the distinguished period, constituted only a part of our ethnic terrain), and denominational borders (Orthodoxy retained its leading status in marking the affiliation with the “Cossack-Rus people”, diminishing the interest in the history of those Ukrainians who professed Greek-Catholic Christianity, “Cossack clerks”, and their intellectual heirs). Neither Ukrainian literary texts of that time, encircled in the ghetto of Kotliarevsky’s writings, nor the newly emerged ethnography, which had not yet gained the capacity of the Ukrainian-centric thought, managed to have become dominant for the new, encompassing, confessional-pluralistic and territorial-consolidating Ukrainian ideology (Ukrainian studies being its worldview and scholarly representation). However, the process of the Ukrainian folk art development, in particular, the activity of Z. Dolenha-Khodakovskyi, who initiated systematic collection and contemplation of folk songs, pointed out the tendencies which served as messengers of new concepts for forming the communal identity of Ukrainians. The devoted work of Z. Dolenha-Khodakovskyi became an impetus for brining the collection and contemplation of oral folk language arts to the level of the worldview imperative of the intellectual search in the Ukrainian studies space.
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