A short History of Ukraine

As with many peoples who return to political life late in life, history, the guardian of the past and the inspiration of the present, has played a role in the Ukrainian renaissance that cannot be overstated. Throughout the 19th century, a host of writers and scholars devoted their energies and time to delving into the annals of the nation; they wanted to bring before the eyes of their compatriots the heroic struggles of their ancestors, to seek out the ideas that had sustained them in their sorrows, to find the thread that connects the mentality of today with that of the past, to show their precursors to the new apostles. Many of these historians, whether distinguished by their literary qualities or by the solidity of their science, have made themselves known to the literate world of Europe above all by their writings in Russian, German or Polish. But never a work which claimed to expose clearly the general history of Ukraine appeared in any of the great European languages. And yet Voltaire was struck by the original features of our nation in his time. Already in the 17th century our great national struggles for freedom had aroused the interest of the civilised world and were the subject of a host of memoirs in Latin, French, Italian and German. We shall only quote those of Beauplan, Chevalier, Vimina and Grondski, which gave their contemporaries a fairly accurate idea of what was then happening in Eastern Europe. It is therefore surprising that Ukrainian scholars have not made the results of their work on the history of our nation accessible to the widest possible audience. From the point of view of the interest it can inspire, both to the sociologist, the historian of law and morals, and to the curious person interested in “human documents” and the simple lover of…