History of the rule of prince Volodymyr the Great in the works of Polish historians of the end of the 19th – first third of the 20th century

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to study the specifics of the research approaches of Polish scholars of the late 19th – first third of the 20th century. to the depiction of the history of the reign of Volodymyr the Great and assessments of his figure and historical period. The research methodology is based on the principles of objectivity, historicism, problem-solving and methods of analysis and synthesis, scientific historiographic analysis, criticism of historical sources, comparative historical methods and others. The scientific novelty of the research lies in the fact that for the first time in domestic historiographic studies, the specifics of the image of Prince Volodymyr the Great and the period of his reign in the works of Polish historians of the late 19th and the first third of the 20th century are specially studied. Conclusions. The works under consideration show the considerable interest of Polish scholars in the history of the reign of Prince Volodymyr the Great. For researchers, the reign of the Rus' ruler and his person served as both an object of comparison with the times and personalities of the Polish princes - the creators of the Piast State, and as an example of the first enemy of Poland in history. The focus of interest was the problem of Volodymyr's conquest of the Chervensk towns and the beginnings of the Polish-Russian confrontation for possession of the lands of modern Western Ukraine and southeastern Poland, the competition for which lasted for the next thousand years. Historians saw Volodymyr the Great as a person who provided a vector for the civilizational development of all East Slavic peoples, which assessed as opposite and hostile to Western European civilization. Thus, scholars often found one of the deep causes of the Russo-Polish conflict in the adoption of Christianity in its Greek church tradition by Rus. Scholars saw Vladimir the Great himself as the organizer of both solid state institutions and the creator of ethnocultural unity in the lands of Rus', which he achieved through the introduction of Christianity and the borrowing of Byzantine state traditions.