Pavlo Yeremieiev (Sustaining Ukrainian Scholarship, Oct ’24 – Jul ’25) will present the topic:

The Images of Ukraine in Russian Church Historiography of the Long 19th Century

on 10 October 2024 (Thursday), at 16:30.

Moderated by: Gil Ribak

Abstract: At the turn of the 18th–19th centuries, church historiography was established as a separate discipline of historical knowledge in the Russian Empire. The church historians of the ‘long’ 19^th century constructed the grand narratives of Russian ecclesiastical history, symbolically labelled the events and processes of the past as parts of the history of the Russian church. The problem of characterising Ukrainian lands as “own” or “alien” was relevant to them.

The transformation of Russian church narratives about Ukrainian history will be examined from a broad perspective, including the history of colonialism, nationalism studies, and new imperial history. The characteristics of the Ukrainian lands in church historiography were influenced by the historians’ personal theological, historiosophical, and socio-political views, changes in methodological approaches to studying history, and general cultural trends of the era (Enlightenment, Romanticism, etc.). The church historians often combined the local loyalties with the all-imperial, Russian-centered, pan-Slavic and Orthodox consciousness.

The meanings of the terms “Ukraine” and “Little Russia” varied in the church historiography according to the general principles of the “language games” described by Jean-Francois Lyotard. The changes in the scenarios of power (in terms of Richard Wartman) and the invention of traditions (in terms of Eric Hobsbaum) played a crucial role in constructing images of Ukrainian lands by Russian church historians. In their description of the Ukrainian lands, the church historians often polemicised with the Ukrainian and Polish national movements. The images of Jews in Ukrainian lands were also crucial for the Russian church historians. The representatives of church historiography actualised Biblical images and medieval concepts (the Second Jerusalem, etc.) to characterise Ukrainian religious history. Banalisation and reinterpretation of metaphors took place in church descriptions of Ukrainian history.