Folklore as the “Great Other”: Worldview of the Ukrainian Opposition at the End of the Cossack Era

Abstract

The historical tradition of Hetmanate in the 18th century, especially its second half, when the political institutions of the Cossack state were systematically ruined by Russian centralism along with the formation of the qualitatively new dimensions of the Ukrainian ethnocultural singularity in the consciousness of its political and intellectual elite, is also determined by the evolving interest in the phenomenon of the Ukrainian folklore. This phenomenon, uncontrolled in its core by the Russian absolutism, began to stand out in the discourse of the era as the “great Other”, whose reality proved the potential possibility to establish the worldview of the Ukrainian anti-imperial opposition. The metatext of the “Cossack chronicle” became an important stage in this process; its records, substantially corrected by the artistic vision of the folk duma and historical song, established the intellectual paradigm fundamentally oppositional to the Moscow-centric one. The establishment of the scientific Ukrainian studies in the declining years of the Cossack era as an integral complex of directions for system learning of Ukraine and the Ukrainian world (as well as a form of social presence of the national idea) allowed conceptualization of this worldview system, its analytical and aesthetic coordinates, whose space shaped the folklore phenomenon with the prospect for its adequate comprehension. The unfolding of the Ukrainian studies intensified the interest of the intellectual elite in the creative production by means of the real vernacular language (O. Lubasevych) resulting in the new stage of the national cultural and literary development – “Eneida” by I. Kotliarevskyi. The defined context caused the emergence of the then creative landmark by Ya. Markovych “Notes on Little Russia, Its Citizens, and Creative Works” (1798), which, for the first time in the Ukrainian cogitative tradition, considered folklore as a theoretically significant attribute of national being. This served as the ground for the realization of the ideological complex, which provided a possibility for the intellectual revolution started by M. Maksymovych and an integral formation of the Ukrainian National Liberation War in the first third of the 19th century.