Description

This collection of fifteen articles written by Zenon E. Kohut between 1977 and 2002 is a fourth book in the series of Ukrainian-language historical monographs of the Peter Jacyk Centre for Ukrainian Historical Research at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies. It was published in Kyiv in cooperation with the Krytyka publishers. Although these essays were not written to form a single volume, they have a common thread that unites them. Whether dealing with fundamental problems of political history, historiography, or questions of historical memory, these articles touch upon the formation and reformulation of early modern and modern Ukrainian identity, hence the title of the collection, Roots of Identity. The book is divided into two parts. The first primarily deals with the development of Ukrainian identity in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. Unlike rigid modernists who believe that Ukrainian nationhood is simply a late nineteenth or twentieth century “invention.” Kohut sees the conceptualization of a “Little Russian Ukrainian Cossack nation (narod)” in the Cossack chronicles as a precursor to the idea of modern Ukrainian nationhood. At the same time, the Little Russian component of this identity had contradictory consequences both at one point stimulating and at other times delaying the development of modern Ukrainian consciousness. The second part of the book consists of essays mainly dealing with the emergence and development of Ukrainian national historiography in the nineteenth and twentieth century, particularly in challenging the All-Russian imperial and Polish narratives that denied Ukrainian nationhood. Other topics include Ukrainian historical discourse on identity formation in independent Ukraine as well as Ukraine’s relations with Russia.