Nataliia Polonska-Vasylenko
Encyclopedia
Nataliia Polonska-Vasylenko (1884 in Kharkiv
Kharkiv
Kharkiv or Kharkov is the second-largest city in Ukraine.The city was founded in 1654 and was a major centre of Ukrainian culture in the Russian Empire. Kharkiv became the first city in Ukraine where the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic was proclaimed in December 1917 and Soviet government was...
– 1973 in Dornstadt
Dornstadt
Dornstadt is a town in the district of Alb-Donau in Baden-Württemberg in Germany....
, near Ulm
Ulm
Ulm is a city in the federal German state of Baden-Württemberg, situated on the River Danube. The city, whose population is estimated at 120,000 , forms an urban district of its own and is the administrative seat of the Alb-Donau district. Ulm, founded around 850, is rich in history and...
, West Germany
West Germany
West Germany is the common English, but not official, name for the Federal Republic of Germany or FRG in the period between its creation in May 1949 to German reunification on 3 October 1990....
) was one of the foremost Ukrainian historians
History of Ukraine
The territory of Ukraine was a key center of East Slavic culture in the Middle Ages, before being divided between a variety of powers. However, the history of Ukraine dates back many thousands of years. The territory has been settled continuously since at least 5000 BC, and is also a candidate site...
of the 20th century. She was a wife of the Ukrainian academician of history and statesman Mykola Vasylenko.
Life and career
Polonska-Vasylenko studied history under Mitrofan Dovnar-Zapol'skiyMitrofan Dovnar-Zapol'skiy
Mitrofan Viktorovich Dovnar-Zapol'skiy was a historian, ethnographer, and diplomat of Belarusian origin. He hailed from the family of land-less smaller nobility and was the son of Collegiate Secretary....
at Kiev University
Kiev University
Taras Shevchenko University or officially the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv , colloquially known in Ukrainian as KNU is located in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine. It is the third oldest university in Ukraine after the University of Lviv and Kharkiv University. Currently, its structure...
and from 1912 was a member of the Kiev
Kiev
Kiev or Kyiv is the capital and the largest city of Ukraine, located in the north central part of the country on the Dnieper River. The population as of the 2001 census was 2,611,300. However, higher numbers have been cited in the press....
-based Historical Society of Nestor the Chronicler
Nestor the Chronicler
Saint Nestor the Chronicler was the reputed author of the Primary Chronicle, , Life of the Venerable Theodosius of the Kiev Caves, Life of the Holy Passion Bearers, Boris and Gleb, and of the so-called Reading.Nestor was a monk of the Monastery of the Caves in Kiev from 1073...
. From 1916, she was a lecturer at Kiev University and Director of its archeological museum. During the 1920s, the most liberal years of Soviet rule, she was a professor at the Kiev Institutes of Geography, Archeology, and Art, and a Research Associate at the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences (VUAN). She witnessed, but survived the Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...
purges of the 1930s and was a member of the reorganized and Sovietized academy from 1937 to 1941. In 1940, she received her doctorate and became a professor at Kiev University. During the German occupation, she directed the Kiev Central Archive of Old Documents and worked in Kiev City Administration, was responsible for renaming of streets and consulted Kiev Archive Museum of Transitional Period
Kiev Archive Museum of Transitional Period
Kiev Archive Museum of Transitional Period was a propaganda museum whose establishment was sanctioned by German occupants in 1942. The museum existed in April - October 1942. Its expositions demonstrated "achievements" of the German occupation and crimes of Stalin's regime...
(dedicated to achievements of German occupation and crimes of Communists). As the tide of the war turned against the Germans, she fled west, first to Lviv
Lviv
Lviv is a city in western Ukraine. The city is regarded as one of the main cultural centres of today's Ukraine and historically has also been a major Polish and Jewish cultural center, as Poles and Jews were the two main ethnicities of the city until the outbreak of World War II and the following...
, then to Prague
Prague
Prague is the capital and largest city of the Czech Republic. Situated in the north-west of the country on the Vltava river, the city is home to about 1.3 million people, while its metropolitan area is estimated to have a population of over 2.3 million...
, and finally to Bavaria
Bavaria
Bavaria, formally the Free State of Bavaria is a state of Germany, located in the southeast of Germany. With an area of , it is the largest state by area, forming almost 20% of the total land area of Germany...
. She was a Professor at the Ukrainian Free University
Ukrainian Free University
The Ukrainian Free University is a private graduate university located in Munich, Germany.-History:The Ukrainian Free University was established in Vienna, January 17, 1921. The idea to organize a Ukrainian university-in-exile came from Ukrainian academics, some of whom had held chairs at...
in Prague (1944–45), and moved together with this institution to Munich where she continued to teach until her death in 1973. In the 1960s, she took an active part in the establishment of the American-Based Ukrainian Historical Association and was its Vice-president from 1965.
Writings
Polonska-Vasylenko was a specialist in Ukrainian archeology, the history of Kievan Rus'Kievan Rus'
Kievan Rus was a medieval polity in Eastern Europe, from the late 9th to the mid 13th century, when it disintegrated under the pressure of the Mongol invasion of 1237–1240....
, the later history of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, and the history of her own times. She also wrote extensively on modern Ukrainian historiography.
Before the First World War, she participated in the compilation and writing of a large Russian cultural history atlas which was published in three volumes between 1913 and 1914. During the 1920s, she published extensively in the various periodicals of the Ukrainian Academy on the Zaporozhian Cossacks and the transformation and absorption of southern Ukraine into the Russian Empire during the reigns of Catherine the Great and her predecessors.
During the Cold War, deprived of the use of the archives of her native land, Polonska-Vasylenko collected and reprinted many of her earlier studies on Zaporozhia (1965–67), wrote several memoirs of intellectual life in revolutionary and Soviet Ukraine
Ukraine
Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It has an area of 603,628 km², making it the second largest contiguous country on the European continent, after Russia...
including a history of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences (2 vols. 1955-58), published a book on the Stalin repressions of Ukrainian historians (1962), and turned increacingly toward synthesis, at the end of her career, publishing a volume on Ukrainian historiography (1971) and a two volume general history of Ukraine (1973–1976).
In her general approach to Ukrainian history, Polonska-Vasylenko followed the lead of her distinguished emigre predecessor, Dmytro Doroshenko
Dmytro Doroshenko
Dmytro Doroshenko was a prominent Ukrainian political figure during the revolution of 1917-1918 and a leading Ukrainian emigre historian during the inter-war period.-Political career:...
, and wrote in a conservative vain, stressing the importance of the Cossack
Cossack
Cossacks are a group of predominantly East Slavic people who originally were members of democratic, semi-military communities in what is today Ukraine and Southern Russia inhabiting sparsely populated areas and islands in the lower Dnieper and Don basins and who played an important role in the...
officer class and the Ukrainian gentry into which they were later transformed. She saw the strivings of this class for national unity and independence, or, at least autonomy, as one of the main currents of Ukrainian history, and she characterized the nineteenth century as a time of Russian and Austrian occupation. She ended her general history with the advent of Soviet rule.