Overview

As with many peoples who return to political life late in life, history, the guardian of the past and the inspiration of the present, has played a role in the Ukrainian renaissance that cannot be overstated. Throughout the 19th century, a host of writers and scholars devoted their energies and time to delving into the annals of the nation; they wanted to bring before the eyes of their compatriots the heroic struggles of their ancestors, to seek out the ideas that had sustained them in their sorrows, to find the thread that connects the mentality of today with that of the past, to show their precursors to the new apostles. Many of these historians, whether distinguished by their literary qualities or by the solidity of their science, have made themselves known to the literate world of Europe above all by their writings in Russian, German or Polish. But never a work which claimed to expose clearly the general history of Ukraine appeared in any of the great European languages. And yet Voltaire was struck by the original features of our nation in his time. Already in the 17th century our great national struggles for freedom had aroused the interest of the civilised world and were the subject of a host of memoirs in Latin, French, Italian and German. We shall only quote those of Beauplan, Chevalier, Vimina and Grondski, which gave their contemporaries a fairly accurate idea of what was then happening in Eastern Europe. It is therefore surprising that Ukrainian scholars have not made the results of their work on the history of our nation accessible to the widest possible audience. From the point of view of the interest it can inspire, both to the sociologist, the historian of law and morals, and to the curious person interested in ""human documents"" and the simple lover of dramatic situations and glorious exploits, it is in no way inferior to that of other peoples. Unfortunately, it was only available in a fragmentary state and, in a way, as an appendix to the history of Russia or Poland. In order to fill this obvious gap, the Ukrainian Sociological Institute, which is currently being organised and whose purpose is, among other things, to inform European society about the scientific movement in our country, has considered it one of its most important duties to publish this summary of Ukrainian history, which will give the European reader an opportunity to gain an idea of the results achieved in our country by historical studies. The author, who for twenty years taught national history at the University of Lviv and is a member of the Academies of Sciences in Cracow and Prague, has published several works on this subject in Ukrainian. First of all, the great ""History of Ukraine"", which he was able to complete before the war, up to 1650, and which already includes eight large volumes in octavo, and abridgments in Ukrainian and Russian for the school and for the population, copies of which have been distributed to several hundred thousand. He could have been satisfied with translating one of these works, but, in order to respond more accurately to the intentions of the Sociological Institute, he preferred to put into the hands of the foreign reader a book in which he could easily find an answer to the questions that might interest him. He will consider his task accomplished if he has been able to arouse in the public a desire for further information, and he has placed in the appendix an index to his great ""History of Ukraine"" to facilitate any research that may be deemed useful. He knows that the public is not very familiar with the subject of his book and especially with geographical names or proper names of persons, although the fights of these last years have unfortunately put many of them in the limelight, which the press has not failed to spell with a certain fantasy. We have taken care not to change the spelling of those who have long been established...

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