Historiographical study of the history of the nobility of left-bank Ukraine at the еnd of the 18th – the first half of the 19th century

Abstract

Since the end of the 20th century, the process of a total revision of the accumulated professional experience has begun in domestic historiography. This was due to several main factors. The emergence of independent Ukraine forced specialists to change the optics of regional historians, who in their works were oriented towards the interpretations of the research centers of historical science of the USSR, towards the identity of representatives of self-sufficient national historical science. The search for new scientific strategies posed the problem of choosing a wide range of methodological guidelines, from the modernization of populist archaism to the assimilation of theoretical proposals of world humanities. On this difficult path, one of the key problems was the rethinking of the role and place of social elites in domestic history. The images of the Ukrainian nobility as exploiters of the working people and traitors to the national cause, created by Soviet and populist historiography, have undergone significant corrosion through the efforts of modern Ukrainian historians over the past thirty years. Thanks to the intensive historiographical development of this issue, a significant body of professional research on the history of the nobility of various regions has been accumulated. Capital monographs, thorough archaeographic publications, dissertations, dozens of scientific articles and reviews have significantly changed the perception of the social, economic, educational and cultural activity of the ruling class. The presence of such a powerful historiographical work has caused a request for its expert analysis and assessment. The subject of the historiographical analysis has become the most representative studies that claim to be a holistic scientific representation of the nobility of Left-Bank Ukraine. It has been revealed that the problems of the history of the nobility, which in the early 1990s occupied a marginal place in Ukrainian historiography, in the 21st century. became one of the leading topics and one of the status subjects of research. The most developed and well-presented were such issues as the patronage, educational, public, and economic activities of the most significant representatives of this stratum. The issues of family and everyday life have been raised and are being actively developed. At the same time, a whole complex of directions remains out of attention, or is only outlined as promising, determined by the understanding of the tasks of new social history and the methodological possibilities of numerous historiographical turns of world historiography of recent decades. Among them are the role and place of the social elite in the region and the empire as a whole, the specifics of relations with other estates, social, mental, and economic differentiation of the regional nobility, private and sexual life, the history of leisure, reading, ideas, and emotions. The extensive expansion of information capabilities through archival heuristics and new archeographic projects also remains relevant. Without solving the identified problems, a deep understanding of not only the history of the nobility, but also an adequate perception of the «Ukrainian 19th century» as a whole is impossible.