The image of Dmytro Vyshnevetsky in Ukrainian historiography
The image of Dmytro Vyshnevetsky in Ukrainian historiography

Summary/Abstract: The image of Dmytro Vyshnevetsky in Ukrainian historiography has followedthe changes in history as an academic discipline. At the time when the Cossack myth wascreated, historians’ romantic views of the Cossack past resulted in an image of the prince asa noble knight, the Cossack father-hetman, and the founder of the first Zaporozhian Sich.Once positivism made its way to historiography, the activities of the prince were subjectedto a more critical analysis, and historians began to question his role of the founder of thefirst Sich. However, it was not denied that the fortress built by the prince could have servedas a prototype for the Cossack Sich. During the Soviet era, three currents in Ukrainian his-toriography emerged: Soviet, Galician from the Interwar period, and foreign. An ideologicalconfrontation took place between Soviet and foreign historiography, in relation to the as-sessment of the prince’s activities and the view of the Cossacks. In the 1990s, censorship wasliftem and Ukrainian historians gained access to archives. This resulted in a large number ofworks on the Cossacks. Again, just like 70 years before, there was a need for the emergenceof national awareness (based on the Cossack myth), so in addition to purely academic in-vestigations with a critical attitude towards the work of the predecessors and the involve-ment of new source material, amateur researchers produced a number of works. By themid-1990s, the prince had been somewhat idealized in Ukrainian history which stemmedfrom a search for heroic figures among representatives of the Ukrainian elite in the youngUkrainian state. Since the early 2000s, Ukrainian researchers have been trying to assessDmytro Vyshnevetsky’s activities in a pan-European context, relying on newly availablesources, particularly abroad.

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