History of the Ruthenians, or Little Russia, or more briefly History of the Ruthenians or History of the Rus, is an anonymous historico-political treatise, most likely written at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries. It had a great influence on the formation of the Ukrainian national identity in the 19th and 20th centuries, and was even named "the most prominent historical work in Ukraine".Istoriya Rusiv at the Handbook on History of Ukraine It was written and originally published in pre-reform Russian, and describes the history of the Ruthenians and their state, Little Russia (, in the book's terminology), from antiquity to 1769. It mostly focuses on the history of the Zaporizhian Sich and the Cossack Hetmanate.
Contents The History writes that the Ukrainian Cossacks ("Little Russian Cossacks") descended from the Rus' or Rusy (Русь), a people separate from the other Slavic peoples, especially from the Muscovites, or "Great Russians". The Rusy are said to have settled the lands between the Danube, the Daugava, the Donets, and the Black Sea, which were divided into Red Rus' / Ruthenia (modern Ukraine) and White Rus' / Ruthenia (modern Belarus). Not until Ivan the Terrible formed the Muscovite or Russian Tsardom in the 16th century, would Red and White Rus' supposedly adopt the name "Little Russia" to distinguish themselves from Muscovy or "Great Russia". Eventually the narrative shifts from Red and White Rus' to the Zaporizhian Host and the Cossack Hetmanate. Occasionally, the author takes an interest in Austrian Galicia and other Western Ukrainian territories, and treats them as part of Ukraine or Little Russia, while distinguishing the latter from Belarus and Muscovy.
The author prefers the term "Little Russia", and tries to avoid the term "Ukraine", as he believes it to be something Polish. However, starting from the 17th century and the Khmelnytsky Uprising, the History frequently employs the toponym "Ukraine", as this is how it ubiquitously appears in the sources he refers to, and bases his narrative on.
Composition The following sources have been identified as constituent parts of the History of the Ruthenians, or having heavily influenced its composition: Hryhorii Hrabianka, Hrabianka Chronicle ( 1710). anonymous, Brief Description of Little Russia (1730s). Vasyl Ruban and Oleksandr Bezborodko, Brief Chronicle of Little Russia from 1506 to 1776 (Saint Petersburg, 1777). Jean-Benoît Schérer, Annales de la petite Russie ou Histoire des Cosaques-Saporogues et des Cosaques de l’Ukraine (Paris, 1788). Daniel Ernst Wagner, Geschichte von Polen (1775). Various Russian literary narratives first published in the years 1804–1809.
Provenance Manuscript circulation The History circulated in manuscript form for a long time before it was finally published in print in 1846, by Osip Bodyansky at Moscow University. The first-known mention of the text as "the Konysky History" is in a letter, dated 21 October 1825 from the village of Ponurivka (Ponurovka, modern Bryansk Oblast), by to Kondraty Ryleyev (both of whom soon became leaders of the Decembrist Revolt, which on 14 December 1825 failed to overthrow the Russian autocratic government). Brigen wrote: "Having carried out your request, esteemed Kondratii Fedorovich [Ryleyev], I am sending you herewith an extract copied from the Konysky History." Ryleyev had been writing poetry about the Ukrainian Cossacks, but he needed additional sources on Ukrainian history; his friend Brigen had told him about a manuscript known as the "Konysky History" at his father-in-law's estate in Ponurivka, which he visited between June and October 1825, during which time he copied an excerpt from the manuscript for Ryleyev's writings. In 1828, another manuscript of the History was discovered on the former estate of Alexander Bezborodko's brother Ilia in Hryniv (Гринёво, in Pogarsky District near Starodub).
Between its first mention in the 1825 letter and its first publication in print in 1846, the History of the Ruthenians was copied and recopied numerous times by devotees of Ukrainian Cossack history. This was in part due to the popularity of Romantic poems such as Nalyvaiko's Confession and Voinarovsky, which Ryleyev published shortly before the ill-fated Decembrist Revolt, apparently based on the materials of the "Konysky History", in which the Nalyvaiko Uprising of the 1590s and Ivan Mazepa's revolt of 1708–1709 were romanticised, promoting an image of the Ukrainian Cossacks as righteous and brave freedom fighters against tyrannical oppression, be it from the Polish king or the Russian tsar.
Alexander Pushkin first became acquainted with the History in 1829, when critics panned his poem Poltava as inaccurate, but Mykhailo Maksymovych argued that Pushkin's description of an incident whereby tsar Peter I had grabbed Mazepa's moustache at a banquet was authentic, because the History of the Ruthenians also mentioned it. Two years later, Pushkin himself would retort in writing that "the Konysky Chronicle" vindicated his poem. Simultaneously, in response to the 1830–1831 Polish November Uprising, he was using the manuscript in preparing to write a state-sponsered anti-Polish and pro-Imperial Russian history of Cossack Ukraine (Little Russia), but the project was shelved once the revolt was crushed. In 1836, he became the first to uncritically accept the attribution of the text to Konysky, seeing in the Belarusian bishop his own predecessor, namely, a Russian patriot and anti-Catholic Orthodox zealot. Unlike Decembrists Ryleyev and Brigen, who used the History to promote constitutional republicanism and liberal values, Pushkin turned it into a tool for Russian autocracy and imperialism.
Meanwhile, Nikolai Gogol's novel Taras Bulba was published in 1835 amidst much acclaim for its fictional but sympathetic depiction of Cossack officers, executed by Polish authorities in Warsaw, a non-historical narrative taken directly from the History of the Ruthenians. Controversially, Gogol's second edition in 1842 was much more laden with Russian nationalism, anachronistically portraying all 17th-century Ukrainian Cossacks as "Russians", which many readers of the novel mistook for historical fact.
By the late 1830s, when German traveller J.G. Kohl visited Dnieper Ukraine, he reported that the "Kanevsky [Konysky] history" was remarably popular amongst the local nobility, with a copy of the text on every estate in some regions. Taras Shevchenko likely first encountered the text of the manuscript around 1840; his poem A Dream (written in Saint Petersburg in July 1844) was significantly influenced by the History of the Ruthenians portrayal of hetman Pavlo Polubotok's fate. Shevchenko interpreted the History as "a call to arms in defense of the Ukrainian nation against its oppressors, the Russian tsars and nobles." In turn, Shevchenko thus employed the manuscript for building up poetry and literature full of Ukrainian nationalism. Mykola Kostomarov, his close friend and leader of the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius, had written the Books of the Genesis of the Ukrainian People in the mid-1840s, which also heavily relied on the History of the Ruthenians for its information. Panteleimon Kulish in 1843 published a History-based Ukrainian-language historical treatise named Ukraine: From the Origin of Ukraine to Father Khmelnytsky, as well as a Russian-language novel Mykhailo Charnyshenko, or Little Russia Eighty Years Ago based on the History.
Printed editions Brigen told Ryleyev in his October 1825 letter that he was considering "a critical edition of Konysky, which contains a great deal that is fine and unknown to Karamzin himself"; but these plans never materialised, as the Decembrist Revolt was crushed, Ryleyev was executed, and Brigen exiled to Siberia for 30 years. It was not until 1834 when the Kharkiv Romantics were the first to publish some excerpts of the History in print in the journal Zaporozhkaia starina ("Zaporizhian Antiquities"). In 1836, Puhskin published long excerpts from a manuscript of History of the Ruthenians in his journal Sovremennik ("The Contemporary"), saying that "Many passages in the History of Little Russia are pictures drawn by the brush of a great painter", and hoping the fulltext would be printed soon. But because of the freethinking aspects of the History (according to J.G. Kohl), state censorship long held back a complete publication.
The History was finally published in print in 1846 by the Ukrainian-born academic Osip Bodyansky at the Imperial Society of Russian History and Antiquities at Moscow University, which was exempt from regular censorship. In the critical edition's introduction, Bodyansky explained he had collected a number of manuscript copies of the History, and "I selected the best of them, added readings form other copies, and then proposed that the Imperial Society (...) publish it, which is now accomplished."
Starting with the 1972–1973 Ukrainian purge, Brezhnev-era Soviet Communism repressed Cossack studies as "bourgeois nationalism". No critical edition of the History of the Rus could therefore be published in the Ukrainian SSR until 1983, when restrictions on Cossack studies were somewhat relaxed again. In a volume on 18th-century Ukrainian literature, the cautiously published excerpts of the History that would likely be acceptable to the prevailing ideologies of the day, namely anti-Polish Cossack uprisings, Cossack resistance to the Union of Brest, and the impression that the Ukrainian and Russian past were intertwined.
In early 1991, during the 1989–1991 Ukrainian revolution, a reprint of Bodyansky's 1846 editio princeps was published in Kyiv in 100,000 copies. In May 1991, a Ukrainian translation by Ivan Drach (a leading figure of the People's Movement of Ukraine, or Rukh) was published in 200,000 copies, remarkable given the troubled economic situation in the Soviet Union at the time, but understandable given the renewed interest in Ukrainian Cossack history as the Ukrainian independence movement gained strength. Drach stated in the introduction: "This is a book to bring us to our senses. It always comes to Ukrainians at times of decision. Needless to say, this is just such a time." In 2001, this Ukrainian edition was reprinted with better quality, although only in 5,000 copies. By the late 1990s, some Ukrainian scholars began reviewing the History more critically as any other work of Ukrainian historiography, and did not accept it as simply a prophecy of an independent Ukraine, as it was widely treated in the early 1990s.
Studies Authorship The book was written as a political essay by an unknown author at the end of the 18th or early 19th century.
The title page ascribed the work to "Georgy Konissky, Belarusian Archbishop" (1717–1795). Subsequently, his authorship was seriously questioned. In 1857, Panteleimon Kulish was amongst the first skeptics to challenge the authenticity of the History and Konysky's credibility, while Taras Shevchenko maintained it (and his own interpretation of it) until his death in 1861. Throughout the 1860s, debate about the text's authorship raged in full force; by 1870, Mykhailo Drahomanov wrote that "Maksymovych's view, now universally accepted, [is] that the History of the Rus was not written by Konysky." The true author has not been established.