SUMMARY:

Mykhaylo Gaukhman surveys the history of development of a new historical canon in independent Ukraine from 1991 to summer 2022. It was June 2022 when a group of Ukrainian historians came up with the concept of a “multifrontier” as the best way to structure the narrative of Ukrainian history. Gaukhman characterizes this concept as metamodernist in the sense of its combining modernist nation-centrism with the postmodernist deconstruction of any rigid identity politics. The latter point seems to be shared by leading Ukrainian historians, who insist on prioritizing a commonality of values over a single normative cultural identity as the foundation of Ukrainian society. They criticize ethnoconfessional particularity as delegitimizing the modern Ukrainian state project that embraces a regionally and culturally diverse society. In this respect, a “multifrontier” perspective fits the bill by combining a multitude of situational arrangements with the singular and all-embracing mode of their interpretation. Following Serhii Plokhy, Gaukhman prefers to speak of a new metanarrative as a new national history that transcends the ethnonational historical canon and engages in dialogue with the global, transnational, multiethnic, and regional histories.