Beloved and Unloved Heroes In Krytyka, No. (18), 1999, pp. 18-21.

The purpose of Natalia Yakovenko's article is to question the ‘purity’ of Mykhailo Hrushevsky's positivist beliefs about the concept of ‘hero in history’. The author cites excerpts from the work of The History of Ukraine-Rus' to confirm the presence of three historiosophical models of evaluative interpretation of prominent figures, namely: 1) positivist and folklore; 2) from the standpoint of social psychology; 3) from the standpoint of the ‘philosophy of life’ / their modification by neo-romantics. Natalia Yakovenko concludes that the historian's text contains lexical clichés and the syndrome of the ‘initial text’.  The presentation of Mykhailo Hrushevsky's thoughts changes throughout the text. The concepts used by the historian — in particular, ‘people’, ‘state’, and ‘hero in history’ — were borrowed from various, sometimes contradictory philosophical systems, as Omelian Pritsak notes. Thus, as the author concludes, this is a paradox of the duality of the scholar's persona and the realization that every outstanding historian has his own unique style of historical writing.