NATIONAL MUSEUMS IN UKRAINE AT THE BEGINNING OF THE 20TH CENTURY

Abstract

The article examines the development of Ukrainian national museums at the beginning of the 20th century. The “long” 19th century was an era of modernization, the formation of modern society, and the formation of modern nations. For the period of the late 19th – early 20th centuries the transformation of museums into a cultural norm of urban life was characteristic. A wide museum network operated in the Ukrainian lands that were part of the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires at that time. The museums worked in the Ukrainian lands of the empires under different conditions. In the Russian Empire, there were strict restrictions on the activities of Ukrainian institutions, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Ukrainian national movement had better conditions, in particular, in the development of Ukrainian cultural and scientific institutions. This period was characterized by the opening of such museum institutions as national museums in European countries. The National Museum is an institution representing the national historical and cultural heritage. The purpose of the proposed article is to study the history of museums that covered the history and culture of Ukraine in the context of characterizing them as national Ukrainian museums. The methodological basis of the article is the modernist approach to defining the nation, in particular the concept of “imagined communities” by Benedict Anderson and the “invention of traditions” by Eric Hobsbawm. The article examines the activity of Ukrainian national museums in the context of the formation of such museums in other countries at the same time, as well as the development of the museum in Ukrainian lands, the processes of nationbuilding, and the development of the Ukrainian national movement. Museums played a leading role in the formation of the Ukrainian nation; they were used by representatives of the national movement. Examples of Ukrainian national museums that operated at the beginning of the 20th century, as well as during the period of the Ukrainian Revolution of 1917–1921, in our opinion, were: the National Museum in Lviv, the Vasyl Tarnovsky Museum of Ukrainian Antiquities of the Chernihiv Provincial Zemstvo, the Kyiv Art-Industrial and Scientific Museum. On the basis of the latter, during the Ukrainian Revolution, it was planned to create the Ukrainian National Museum.