SUMMARY:

In his article Georgii Kas’ianov focuses on dilemmas of writing of history in post soviet Ukraine. The author depart from a paradox of the contemporary Ukrainian political and intellectual elite’s reverting to the language of nation building of the 19th century. He analyzes the canons of Ukrainian writing on national identity and later layers of Marxist historiography and relates them to the political and intellectual conjuncture of the post soviet period to understand the growing domination of ethnocentric and nation-legitimizing approaches to the past. Working toward an explanatory model for understanding historiographic development and prevailing modes of construction of the past, Kas’ianov proposes to view those intellectual processes as the intersection of essentially incomplete modern agenda of nationbuilding and the post-modernist realities of the world, gravitating toward integration and globalization. Concluding his survey of innovative works on Ukrainian history and conceptual-institutional context of development of historical scholarship the author observes promising signs of renewal and diversification of contemporary Ukrainian historiography, especially under the impact of more sustained and systematic discussions of methodological aspects of historical scholarship.