SUMMARY:

This review of the Ukrainian edition of Mark von Hagen’s collected historical essays examines a transformative approach to Eastern European studies that challenges traditional, linear storytelling. By promoting the decentralization of the historical narrative, von Hagen sought to strip away the dominance of imperial perspectives and move beyond teleological models that treated historical outcomes like the rise of the Soviet Union as inevitable. The review discusses von Hagen’s concept of Eurasia as an anti-paradigm – a framework that rejects rigid civilizational hierarchies in favor of viewing the region as a complex space of possibilities where diverse cultural and political identities intersect. The text highlights von Hagen’s commitment to an epistemological decolonization, encouraging scholars to recognize Ukraine not merely as a peripheral object of Great Power diplomacy, but as a self-sufficient historical subject with its own unique intellectual and political agency.