The Details to the Prosopografic M.Hrushevskyi’s Portrait: From the Ethnographer V.Kravchenko’s Diary

Abstract

This publication, based on V.Kravchenko’s diaries kept at the Research Archive of Manuscripts and Phonographic Records of the M.Rylskyi Institute of Art Studies, Folklore and Ethnology NАS of Ukraine, reveals peculiarities of his work with M.Hrushevskyi, soffers a number of little-known details of M.Hrushevskyi’s life, such as elaboration by him in Zhytomyr as a Head of the Central Rada certain directives and advice to Ukrainian diplomats in Brest etc.

The methodological foundation of this publication comprises theoretical findings in the field of Ukrainian memoiristics, which grew into a separate special history discipline that regards diary records as a historical-cultural phenomenon, as ego-documents playing the role of a historical source.

Conclusions. The diary’s pages shed light on unknown details of the ethnographer’s work with M.Hrushevskyi, which began in 1894–1895. V.Kravchenko gives his own account of the historian’s work through the prism of recollections about concrete episodes of their meetings, contacts and work together. Not falling into pompous panegyrics, on the one hand, and not omitting M.Hrushevskyi’s political blunders, on the other, he highly praises Hrushevskyi’s efforts and points out his greatness as a scholar and a statesman. Details and circumstances of M.Hrushevskyi’s writing of the text of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, witnessed by V.Kravchenko, and a description of the Hrushevskyi family’s daily life in Zhytomyr in the winter of 1918, where the Central Rada was located at the time, are especially interesting.