The Pokorshchyna Estate of the Darahans and Galagans in the Research of Tetiana Mishkivska: A text publication

Abstract

The purpose of this publication is to introduce the research of Tetiana Mishkivska into scholarly circulation, an art historian of the 1920s and 1930s, concerning the estate holdings of the Ukrainian elite of Cossack-officer origin — the Darahans and Galagans — in the vicinity of Kozelets. Mishkivska’s academic career began successfully with studies in art ethnology, particularly in folk decorative painting. During her postgraduate studies at the All-Ukrainian T. Shevchenko Historical Museum, she expanded her scholarly pursuits to include the development of Ukrainian architecture. Her study of the Pokorshchyna estate as a historically evolving ensemble, integrating its architectural and decorative-artistic components, was a natural progression of her research interests. The publication of Mіshkivska’s lecture on the Pokorshchyna estate, delivered at public sessions of the Historical Museum, serves multiple scholarly objectives. It expands the documentary base for the history of Ukrainian art history in the 1920s and demonstrates the high level of expertise among young researchers whose mentors included prominent scholars of the older generation, such as Fedir Ernst, Oleksii Novytskyi, and Danylo Shcherbakivskyi. The necessity of introducing this text into academic discourse lies in the fact that, despite sustained scholarly interest in the topic from the latter half of the twentieth century to the early twenty-first century, Mishkivska’s work remains the only comprehensive study of Pokorshchyna. Her research successfully combines a meticulous analysis of historical and art-historical literature with an examination of primary sources, alongside her own fieldwork, including architectural measurements of structures preserved until the late 1920s. By integrating historical, architectural-historical, and art-historical perspectives, Mishkivska provides a synthesis of Pokorshchyna’s history from the expansion of the estate in the mid-1750s to its destruction amidst the profound historical transformations of the 1920s.