Image of the West in the views of G. P. Galagan

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.15421/272106

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to reconstruct Galan’s ideas about the West. The urgency of the topic is due to its disciplinary dimension – «new spatial history», «new historical biography», imagology, social history and the choice of personality, which serves as the purpose and means of studying ideas, as Grigory Pavlovich Galagan, famous philanthropist, public figure, representative of the Left Bank community Ukraine before the local and central government, was at the same time a representative of the aristocratic culture of his time. The study of spatial representations of individuals or social groups provides an opportunity to look at the process of intercultural interaction in terms of its participants and the comparison of «own», «foreign», «other», which is closely related to the problem of self-knowledge, self-identification, collective identity, including national. The methodological basis was the principles of science and historicism, which orient to study the era and man of a certain era, taking into account the peculiarities of contemporary culture, general scientific methods (analysis and synthesis) and methods of historical science (chro Balyshev, M. A. Development of astronomy in Kharkiv at the beginning of the XX century (1900 – 1917)nological, historical-genetic, historical-comparative, historiographical, source), and also the approaches of the «new spatial history» with the focus on the study of social space and the «new historical biography» with its focus on the study of the «second person». The main results are to find out the place of travel in the formation of spatial representations of the social elite. The primary attention is paid to foreign travels, which became an important component of the aristocratic culture of the first half of the nineteenth century. Based on the analysis of the source complex, presented by the diary-magazine of the young G. P. Galagan and private correspondence, which contain extensive reflections on the impressions of foreign travels of 1841–843, 1850–1851, 1861, 1866, revealed changes in the perception of countries and peoples of Western Europe, attitudes to Western civilization and the small country, as well as features of its self-identification.

Published

2021-06-01