Hoshkevich family in the socio-cultural life of Ukraine (modern historiography of Ukraine, family history, "history of journalism", history of archaeology)

One of the leading trends in modern historiography has been the use of approaches and methods for comprehension of the subject field of the «new family history», which is part of the «new historical science», or anthropologically focused social history.

Due to their social status, the families of Orthodox priests along with the Cossack officers, nobles, intelligentsia families for centuries accumulated cultural and historical experience. In modern times, they gave the society a number of representatives of the political and intellectual elite. The Hoshkevychs played a significant role among such families.

The purpose of the research is to study the history of the Hoshkevych family as a social and cultural community and its interaction with the cultural and historical environment for several generations.

The chronological limits of the research cover the history of the Hoshkevych family from the end of the 17th century and at least until the middle of the 20th century. The lower limit of the paper deals with the origins of the Hoshkevych family, their first documented presence in Ukraine and the formation of the dynasty of priests. The upper limit deals with the end of the life and work of the priest Leonid Hoshkevych (Father Leonid) and archaeologist Iryna Fabricius, and the gradual extinction of the dynasty.

In the study of the history of the Hoshkevych family, theoretical and methodological principles of the «new family history» are supplemented by methods and terminology of genealogy, prosopography, intellectual history, biography, and given the breadth of professional activity of individual members of the family – by church history, archaeology, etc.

The academic novelty of the research lies in the attempt to reconstruct the Hoshkevych dynasty; the determination of the factors of the Hoshkevychs’ social status and professional activity transformation in the post-reformation period. The polarization of political orientations of the Hoshkevych family members due to the crisis of the Russian Empire and the establishment of Soviet power was analyzed on the basis of some examples; the Family Archive of Leonid Hoshkevych’s family, which is stored in the funds of the Kherson Regional Universal Scientific Library named after Oles Honchar, was analyzed for the first time. Most of the original documents are provided as annexes to the dissertation; intellectual biographies of Viktor Hoshkevych and Iryna Fabricius were reconstructed for the first time; a number of little-known archival sources on Hoshkevych’s network connections were updated, which allowed to inscribe the history of the family in the context of the social, cultural and public life of Ukraine in the 18th – first half of the 20th century.