Military Attributes in the Family Collections and Assemblies of the Ukrainian Cossack Elite

Abstract

The purpose of the study is to analyze the causes of the emergence, formation and development of the so-called museum need, the satisfaction of which involved the selection, preservation and use of artefacts in family collections and collections of the Ukrainian Cossack elite.

The methodology of the research was based on the use of a set of principles and methods of cognition, the application of which was carried out with the reliance on interdisciplinary approaches to discovering the purpose of the research. The basic methods were historical cognition as historicalgenetic, historical-comparative, historical-typological and historical-systemic, on the basis of which the scientific and source base of the article was worked out.

The scientific novelty. On the basis of a wide range of published and unpublished archival documents, a new form of pre-museum forms of military-historical museuming – family collections and collections of the Cossack elite – was investigated. It is established that most of these collections, formed during the 17th –18th centuries. Do not correspond to the content of the scientific term "collecting", but they became the basis of purposeful and systematic collecting (private collecting) of objects of museum importance, which preceded the emergence of military museums. Family collections were formed for the needs of the family of a specific representative of the Cossack elite, who himself was a participant in military events, a historical figure. These collections were diverse, with military attributes, awards, portrait collections, family archives, book collections, items of daily use and more.

Conclusions. Private collecting has gained a high level of development during the study period. Its main feature is the desire to collect and preserve the Cossack era monuments. This concerns collections of famous collectors, including V.Tarnovskyi, O.Pol, K.Skarzhynska. Archaeological sites have been presented in the collection of Count O.Bobrinskiy and other collectors. It should be noted that most of them not only created their own museums, but also acted as the founders of many museums in the Dnipro Ukraine. In Western Ukraine, part of Austria-Hungary, military-historical collections and museums were formed mainly by representatives of the Polish intellectual elite. The military-historical collections of all museums were dominated by Western European weapons of the 15th – 19th centuries.