Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the Context of Its Historical Relations with Ukraine in Omeljan Pritsak's Academic Research
Authors: POTULNYTSKYI Volodymyr , POTULNYTSKYI Heorhii 
Published: March 2020

Analyzing the creative heritage by Omeljan Pritsak on the history of Poland, the authors concludes that the historian began to explore the issues of medieval and early New Poland as early as in the pre-war period, the earliest period of his formation as a scholar, and continued into his American and Ukrainian periods. Based on the number of archival documents and printed works, the authors of the article claims that while in his pre-war period the scholar was engaged in debunking the mythical legends existing in Polish historiography about Hetman Ivan Mazepa and wrote several reviews on the works by Polish historians, in his American period, the scholar wrote a range of papers of historiosophic character. Pritsak concludes that these were the Lithuanians who caused the changes in the leadership elite and the interruption in the historical tradition of Ukraine, and that with the transition of Ukrainian lands from Lithuania to Poland, for the first time since the Kyiv period, Ukrainian territory began to produce its own, conscious political rights and privileges. It was during the Polish times, according to Pritsak, that a new political phenomenon, namely the homeland of Rus, began to emerge. Demythologizing the myths about the destructive nature of the Mongols and the Ukrainian character of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Pritsak characterizes the Ukrainian "registry" Cossacks as a new type of Ukrainian elite.

In his lectures written in the American period, the scholar constructs a historiosophical synthesis of syllabic ties in the context of exploring the role played by Poland in Eastern Europe and examines the peculiarities of the economic and socio- political situation of the Ukrainian lands under the Polish domination. In this respect, he estimates the special significance that such phenomena as reformation, counter-reformation, mercantilism, the Magdeburg law, and the creation of Polish literary poetry by Mikołaj Rej and Jan Kochanowski had for the Polish literary language. In his Ukrainian period, Pritsak supplemented Harvard lectures with new material and visions of the Commonwealth in the context of its relations with Ukraine. It substantiates four major groups of problems that caused the fall of the Commonwealth as a state and emphasizes the special role of counter-reformation and the Jesuits, as well as the manorial economy with special functions of magnates and Jews, which, in his opinion, eventually caused the uprising led by Bohdan Khmelnytsky.

Thus, Pritsak examined the history of Poland and the Polish people during three periods of his life: pre-war, American and Ukrainian. The subjects he touched upon in the articles differed, since the scholar set various goals in different periods. It is important to emphasize that almost all research papers on the history of Poland were not conducted by the historian outside the Ukrainian context. Pritsak’s historiosophic vision of the key problems of the history of the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and of modern Poland is an important contribution to the study of the essential aspects of the common subjects of the Polish and Ukrainian history in Eastern Europe.

Keywords
research heritage, main trends of research activity, Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the myths of Polish historiography, historiosophical synthesis, syllabic ties, mutual relations.