“Ukraine and its last troubadour”. An unexpected story about Ukraine in the Spanish press of the XIX century

Abstract

The article examines the perception of the Spanish reading public about Ukraine in the third quarter of the XIX century. For this, two groups of journalistic materials were analyzed - "Letters from Russia" (1856–1857) by Juan Valera and the article with a continuation "Ukraine and its last troubadour", published in the official publication "Gaceta de Madrid" in 1878, which was first introduced in scientific circulation. The content of these publications is defined as a turning point in the perception of Ukrainian lands. This was influenced by the spread of the ethnographic approach, which required the study of peoples instead of states and offered a systematic historical and cultural image of the population of the southwestern provinces of the Russian Empire. In the "Letters" of J. Valera, there is still an established until the beginning of the 19th century, the dichotomy of the negative and positive image of the Cossack; on the other hand, in the materials of "Gaceta de Madrid", the story about the Cossacks fits into the broader context of the past and present population of the modern Ukrainian lands, for which the author mainly uses the term "Ukraine" (Ukrania) and much less often "Little Russia" ( la pequeña Rusia). This allows us to state that thanks to the ethnographic approach, there was a transition from the idea of ​​the semi-wild lands of the Cossacks and Tatars, lost in the not-so-wide expanses of Eastern Europe, to a clearly defined ethnographic territory, which in the modern era took the name of Ukraine.