The Mukachevo Basilian hegumen, historian, and writer Anatolii Kralytskyi’s OSBM (1835–1894) activity for popularizing of Mykola Kostomarov’s heritage

Abstract

The research aim is to investigate knowledge of Mykola Kostomarov’s works by Fr Anatolii Kralytskyi, a historian, ethnographer, journalist, writer, and hegumen at the Mukachevo Basilian monastery in 1869–1894. The author analyses Kralytskyi’s learning of Kostomarov’s ideas and describes hegumen’s activity in popularizing them. Research methodology. The article uses the methods of intellectual history to discuss Kostomarov’s heritage influence on Kralytskyi, the prominent historian and journalist of the Basilian Order of St. Josaphat and the Mukachevo Eparchy in the second part of the XIX century. Scientific novelty. For the first time in historiography, Volodymyr Moroz compares the works of Kostomarov and Kralytskyi with insights into the Basilian intellectual activity to describe his learning ideas of the outstanding historian. The author defines Kralytskyi’s appreciation of Kostomarov’s heritage and his work to transmit some Conclusions. The author found that Anatolii Kralytskyi could read works and learn the ideas of Mykola Kostomarov concerning Ukrainian history and the national question. Firstly, the monk published his texts in the periodical literature of Galicia already in the early 1860s, where Kostomarov’s texts were simultaneously published. For the second, in 1875, Kralytskyi received a set of Kostomarov’s books from Mykhailo Drahomanov. Kostomarov’s arguments had become so attractive to Basilian that he publicly declared Kostomarov was the most significant historian of his time. The article ascertains that Kralytskyi used Kostomarov’s ideas to strengthen his arguments. He did so while being included in transmitting the Ukrainian population from the archaic “Old-Ruthenian” identity to the new one. At the same time, the author explains, these significant changes included a Russophillian stage in the Galicia and Zakarpattia.