VASYL HNYLOSYROV (1836-1900) — FOLKLORIST:BIOGRAPHY AS CREATION OF UKRAINIAN SPACE (BASED ON ARCHIVAL SOURCES)

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to analyze, based on archival manuscript materials, the principles of V. Hnylosyrov’s scientific work as a folklorist, to identify the connection between the collected folklore collection and the biography of the recorder, and to substantiate the possibility of using these manuscripts not only to characterize him as a scientist, but also to reconstruct individual periods of his biography. The research methodology involves the use of textual analysis and source research methods based on the principles of historicism and objectivity, which allow analyzing folklore records as scientific documents and revealing their significance for folklore studies. The scientific novelty of the work lies in the attempt to comprehend the activities of V. Hnylosyrov as a folklorist through his manuscript heritage — recorded examples of oral folk art, a program for collecting ethnographic and folklore material. Passport-style versions of songs and folklore prose make it possible to link records with the settlements where the folklorist worked, and with his biographical data. Conclusions. The manuscript collection of folklore recorded by V. Hnylosyrov, as well as his letters and diaries, is a scientific document that reveals not only the scientific interests of the folklorist. The records make it possible to highlight the scientific principles that became the basis of his work: the desire for accuracy of fixation at the syntactic, lexical and phonemic levels, the reproduction of accents, the fixation of variants, the initial systematization of the collected material, the sporadic certification of samples, commenting on individual variants, recording narrators’ explanations, creating short dictionaries of dialect vocabulary. The program of recording ethnographic and folklore primary source material he organized is evidence of V. Hnylosyrov’s high professional level, a generalization of his scientific knowledge, and a kind of reflection of the researcher’s biography.