Word as a Proof: Ethnic Identity Problems in the Discourse of “Philological Ukrainian Studies” of 1800—1825

Abstract

Having conceptually embraced the communal identity problem in the space of the early 19th-century Ukrainian Studies discourse, and having analyzed the specifics of forming the concept of the Ukrainian singularity in the historiography of senior autonomists and language art studies of the early 19th century, we can make a substantiated conclusion that the European revival of national movements, influenced by the French Revolution and Napoleon invasions, faced Ukrainian intellectuals with the question to which the system of “senior autonomy” didn’t have an answer. It is worth mentioning that even “History of the Rus” – a kind of a political manifesto of the most radical autonomists’ wing – still remains in terms of the Little Russian discourse instead of the national one: the denominational factor plays for its author one of the crucial parts; peasantry appears beyond the “political nation”; the emperor’s right for owning Cossack terrains stays out of question. The first attempts to analytically comprehend the Ukrainian language arts (the collection of dumas, preserved in V. Lomykovskyi’s papers, O. Pavlovskyi’s “Grammar of the Little Russian Dialect”) testified the establishment of the scientific interest in the Ukrainian language and language arts as a specific and singular phenomenon. This interest intensified under the influence of Herder’s philosophy, which considered folk songs as the implementation of the authentic people’s being. An important stage of this way was marked by the release of “Experience of Collecting Old Little Russian Songs” by M. Tserteliev – the first published collection of Cossack dumas, whose author lifted the vernacular-heroic epos of Ukraine to the level of an aesthetic ideal. Such an approach foreboded radical changes not only in the methodology of Ukrainian studies but also in the entire system of the communal Ukrainian identity concept, which later included M. Maksymovych’s “Little Russian Songs”.