The formation of Polish historiography regarding the origin of the Slavs in the 19th – early 20th centuries: between ideology and science
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Abstract. The purpose of the article is to conduct a historiographical analysis of the formation of Polish historiography in regard to the origin of the Slavs in the 19th and early 20th centuries and establishing the reasons and ways of its nationalization, ideologization and politicization, against the background of the intensification of what would seem, at first glance, purely scientific disputes between Polish and German researchers in this segment of knowledge of the past that is largely common to them. Scientific novelty. Polish historical science began its formation in a pan-European context, which was conditioned by the Age of Enlightenment from the middle of the 18th century. In the 19th century, its specificity was influenced by the loss of Polish statehood and the fact that the Polish nation was divided between three European empires (Austria, Prussia, Russia) until the end of the First World War. Therefore, the issues of the origin of the Polish ethnos and nation, their ethnic history, acquired paramount importance for Polish scientists of that time. The problem of the origin of the Slavs became a determining factor in the construction of the modern national identity of the Poles. Therefore, from its beginning, this purely scientific problem turned into the creation of a new myth of origin in Polish historiography, which immediately turned into a political myth. Conclusions. Polish historiography has gone through a difficult path of its scientific affirmation, but its development was typical for the European schools of that time in this field. The greatest specificity was distinguished Polish historiography of the 19th and early 20th centuries. The Polish autochthonous concept of the Slavs’ origin encountered immediately with the opposite vision of the problem from the side of German historiography. The latter demonstrated no less powerful nationalist fervor and chauvinistic disposition, declaring all the Slavs (and above all Poles) in the historical context to be uncultured barbarians and declaring the Germans to be the only worthy European cultural carriers. Opposing this trend, Polish historiography in the context of the problem of the Slavs’ origin also became more a propaganda tool than a center for the search for scientific objectivity in resolving this issue. The confrontation between these two approaches to the ancient Slavic history became particularly acute at the beginning of the 20th century, on the eve of the First World War.
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