NARRATIVIZATION OF THE UKRAINIAN PAST IN THE LATE 19TH – EARLY 21ST CENTURY: IS OVERCOMING POSSIBLE?

The basic strategies for constructing the framework of the Ukrainian national historical and historiographic narratives in the late 19th and early 20th centuries are analyzed in the first part of the paper. The nationalization of Ukrainian history and historical writing and the decisive role in forming the Ukrainian project of the pre-modern Little Russian nation are shown. The main mechanisms of the process are revealed, such as the historiographic expansion of the Little Russian intellectual range, the consolidation and ethnicization of regional history of the metropolises, the building of linear, teleological constructions, and the anthropologization of the ethnic community. Attention is paid to the technology of forming images of neighbors as contouring enemies. The authors demonstrate the methods for implementing the basic principles of constructing a national narrative in the practice of historical writing. Three competing strategies for creating large Ukrainian national histories that have had a decisive influence on the algorithms of modern didactic, affirmative and analytical historiography are presented. In the second part of the paper, contemporary approaches to the modernization of the traditional national narrative determined during the discussion of 2012−2014 are identified: 1) the deconstruction of national narrative, the rejection of the «tyranny» of asynchronous territoriality, and the development of dual research optics (the methodology of regional history and the integration of national history into the contexts of large cultural communities); 2) the decorative updating of the national narrative through the implementation of a multinational approach; 3) the middle position of «pluralistic indifference», consistent with the arguments of the extreme parties. It is noted that the current socio-political situation has formed an increased demand for the modernization of the ethno-national narrative of the early 20th century, which threatens to discard Ukrainian historiography to the standards of historiography at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.