Archeography and Family Honour: The Circumstances Surrounding the Publication of the Autobiographical Notes of the Pryluku Сolonel Hryhorii Galagan by Oleksandr Lazarevskyi

Abstract

The article is about the publication by Oleksandr Lazarevskyi, a prominent historian and archeographer, of the autobiographical notes of the Pryluky Colonel Hryhorii Hnatovych Galagan, written around 1771, which he found in the Galagan family archive in Sokyryntsy and printed in 1883. Comparison of the published text with the original, which is now kept in the Manuscript Institute of the National Library of Ukraine named after Volodymyr Vernadskyi, showed that this document was not printed in its entirety. Lazarevskyi’s publication lacks places where the author talks about his “dishonour”. Using the diary notes of Hryhoriy Pavlovich Galagan, who owned the archive, where the manuscript was stored, made it possible to find out the reasons for the incompleteness of the publication. Lazarevskyi was forced to remove all references to “dishonour” at the request of Hryhorii Galagan. This was caused by concern for the impeccable reputation of his ancestors, conditioned by the ideas about noble honour and dignity, which played an important role in the system of socio-cultural coordinates of the stratum of society to which the owner of the document belonged. Impeccable family honour was an important part of the symbolic capital, on the basis of which the Ukrainian local nobility tried to maintain authority in local public life in the conditions of the gradual disintegration of traditional society and the onset of the era of modernity, in which class and national structures replaced the pre-modern hierarchy. The case study of the publication of Hryhorii Galagan’s autobiographical notes shows what subjective motives influenced the publication of materials from the private archives of the Ukrainian local nobility at the end of the 19th century and helps to better understand the socio-cultural context in which the Ukrainian archeography developed.