THE HISTORICAL IMAGE OF POLAND ON PANELEIMON KULISH’S CIVILIZATION MAP

Abstract

The purpose of research is to analyze the historical views and civilizational ideas of Panteleimon Kulish. Here his interpretations of the problem of Poland’s civilizational affiliation has been explored. The influences of the scientist’s civilizational ideas on his interpretation of the history of Poland and Ukraine have been traced. His role in the process of studying the history of Polish- Ukrainian relations has been clarified. The contribution of Panteleimon Kulish to the Ukrainian historiographical process has been outlined. The methodology of the research is based on the mental maps as the means of cognitive reflection of the geographic and spatial entities in the intellectuals’ consciousness. A signifcant component of the methodological basis of the study is also the imagelogy as the strategy of looking into the images of «native» and «alien». The deconstruction of Orientalism (a specifc way of perceiving and describing the concept of the East by the Western «intellectual thought» representatives), carried out in the researches by E. Said and L. Vulf, also serves as the theoretical basis of the article. The scientifc novelty of the research lies in the fact that the paper is the first attempt of a special historiographical reflection on Panteleimon Kulish’s civilizational representation. The conclusions are as follows: Kulish’s reception of Poland’s civilizational status went a bit beyond the boundaries of the Ukrainian historiographical tradition, and at the same time substantially deepened it. The scientist considered Poland to be a country that chose the western path of civilizational development. At the same time, he did not deny the role of the Slavic foundations in its historical genesis. Although in P. Kulish’s papers there is no vivid Slavophilist thesis about the «betrayal» of the Slavs, there still can be traced a great number of assertions about the Poles’ acquisition of non-Slavic phenomena and attributes. It is important to mention that Kulish differed significantly from his predecessors in the interpretation of this problem. For him, mastering Western foundations by Poland (or preserving its Slavic identity) was not a self-suddicient fact, but an indicator of such values as level of culture, education or civilization in general. They predetermined his contradictory assessment of the historical image of Poland and Polish-Rus’ relations.