Historiography and Creativity of Hanna Kyrylivna Shvydko (1944-2022)

Abstract

The purpose is to reveal the role and place of historiography as a scientific discipline in the work of the outstanding Ukrainian historian Hanna Kyrylivna Shvydko and her personal contribution to Ukrainian historiography over the last fifty years.

The methodology is based on a combination of bio-historiographic, historiographic, and bibliographic methods. This made it possible to distinguish from the great creative output of H. Shvydko’s historiographic works and present them as a complex of bio-historiographical, problem-thematic, and disciplinary studies, determine their problematic, spatial and chronological orientation, the evolution of the author’s attitude to historiographical studies, the use of the methodological potential of historiography to solve the tasks of specific historical studies. The identification of historiographical texts made it possible to determine their relationship with the total amount of scholarly works of the historian, thereby es tablishing the degree of their priority. The historiographical method was used to include the work of H. Shvydko in the general context of the history of historical science of the last half-century. This all owed imagining the place of her work in the historiographical process, a contribution to the formation of modern Ukrainian historical science.

Main results. Historiography, as a branch of knowledge and a scientific discipline, quickly took an important place in the creative laboratory of H. Shvydko. This is evidenced by her dissertation works, monographs, and articles in which historiography appears in two guises: as a goal and a research tool. H. Shvydko convincingly demonstrated the effectiveness of the historiographical method for the implemen tation of specific historical tasks. The identification of debatable spaces and unresolved, insufficiently developed problems opened up a wide research field and made it possible to choose consciously effective scientific strategies. Special attention to bio-historiographical issues testified to an understan ding of the theoretical and methodological potential of historiography as a source of experience in studying the creative laboratory of its predecessors and contemporaries. Using fundamental historiographical and source studies training, H. Shvydko took a leading position in Ukrainian historiography, and in the regional context, she became a recognized leader. Her works and the works of her students over the past half-century have radically expanded and fundamentally changed the views of the history of Southern Ukraine and laid a powerful archeographical, source-scientific, and historiographical foundation for further studies in the directions determined by her.