Mykhailo Hrushevsky and the student community of Lviv University: cooperation, conflict, reception

The aim of the article is to study of M. Hrushevsky’s communication with students of Lviv University. The methodological basis of the work is an interdisciplinary approach with particular emphasis on the structural-functional systematic analysis of historiographical facts and the comparative-historical method, based on the principles of objectivity and historicism. The scientific novelty of the article lies in the attempt to comprehensively reconstruct M. Hrushevsky’s communicative strategies in relation to representatives of the student community of Lviv University. In conclusion, the innovative nature of the activities of Hrushevsky as a teacher at the Lviv University forum is emphasized. The scientist rejected patriarchal practices of elevating the professorship over the student community and their nurturing of democratic traditions of communication with youth. The basis of such a strategy was the idea of the University as a harmonious community of authoritative teachers and adepts thirsting for new knowledge, formulated during the Enlightenment. Thanks to this communicative model, M. Hrushevsky established a productive equal dialogue with his students. This made possible the emergence of the first school of Ukrainian socio-humanitarian studies, whose representatives influenced the leading directions of Ukrainian studies throughout the twentieth century. An important effect was also the unification of students divided into party groups by the idea of founding a Ukrainian university. This cultural demand became a long-term reference point in the fight against Polish discrimination in Eastern Galicia. M. Hrushevsky’s ideological leadership in these projects turned him into an authoritative figure for Ukrainian youth. However, because of this, Polish students, imitating the anti-Ukrainian rhetoric of their senior colleagues, treated the professor with a distinct distance, and sometimes openly hostile. But in general, it was M. Hrushevsky’s students who determined the nature of the course of the difficult Polish-Ukrainian dialogue during the First World War and during the following twenty years. The study of the influence of the ideas of the author of the "History of Ukraine-Rus" on the peculiarities of its course is an important subject of the intellectual history of Central and Eastern Europe.