From history to politics: Prince and king of rus Danylo Romanovych in narodnyk’s historical imagination

Abstract

The article is devoted to the study of the history of the image of Prince and King Danylo Romanovych in the Ukrainian cultural memory of the second half of the 19th century. The choice of the suggested segment of memory studies in Ukrainian history was chosen due to the ideological and, to some extent, the political context of the creation and subsequent construction of the image of Danylo Romanovych as «Prince Danylo Halytskyi» was not investigated in historiographical tradition. Also, some of the features of the creation of historical myths and pseudo-scientific names should be discovered around the ruler’s biography in the process of forming a national identity. The image of Danylo, deprived of a real background, has led to the formation of a limited perspective of historical research, which reduces the cultural and spatial influence of his figure to the Western Ukrainian region and does not fully reconstruct the period of transformation of the Galician-Volyn state into the kingdom of Rus.
The author substantiates the main methodological principles of work, reviews the state of study of the scientific problem in the literature, and describes the sources used to realize the goal and objectives. Suggested studies about King Danylo Romanovych were hold due to the methodological constructs of the phenomenon of memoria in Western European researchers. An important role is devoted to understanding the basic terms of memory discourse, which became the core of the implementation of the ideas of the author in the work. Among them, we distinguish the concept of memory and its forms, the phenomenon of the nation, collective and cultural identity, social and individual consciousness.
The author highlighted the peculiarities of the intellectual history of the representatives of the Ukrainian national movement – M. Dashkevych and M. Kostomarov, who borrowed to their historical narrative the Russophile «Danylo Halytskyi». This researchers tried to use this image to form their conception of Ukrainian history of Rus.