Archbishop Varlaam Shishatsky against the backdrop of the era and in the context of Ukrainian historiography

Abstract

The article explores the life and career of Archbishop Varlaam Shyshatsky against the background of transformations in Ukraine at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries. The study aims to identify key trends in the interpretation of his figure in Ukrainian historiography. The study is grounded in the principles of historicism, objectivity, and systematic analysis, combining critical, comparative, and prosopographical approaches. Scientific novelty. The article attempts to analyze the state of Ukrainian historiography concerning the study of Varlaam Shyshatsky’s activities in the context of social and political changes in the Ukrainian lands at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries. Attention is drawn to the variety of interpretations offered by researchers regarding the archbishop’s actions and views. Conclusions. The figure of Varlaam Shyshatsky represents a logical reflection of the historical, political, and cultural processes that unfolded in Ukraine at the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th centuries. His activity as an archimandrite has been of particular interest to historians studying the Orthodox Church, religious education, and the intellectual elite of that period. As a lecturer and rector of the Pereiaslav Collegium, the Novhorod-Siversky Theological Seminary, and the Volhynian Theological Seminary, Shyshatsky is presented in academic studies as a key figure in the founding, administration, and intellectual influence of these institutions. Historians have variously portrayed him as a defender of Orthodoxy in Right-Bank Ukraine, an opponent of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and of the Union, and as a proponent of an independent Ukrainian Church.This multiplicity of interpretations highlights the complex identities of the Ukrainian elite within the political and religious space of the Russian Empire. As a descendant of  Cossacks and an Orthodox clergyman, Varlaam Shyshatsky was a representative of the Ukrainian elite of the late 18th and early 19th centuries who operated within the realities of the Russian Empire. His life, therefore, like that of many Ukrainian intellectuals of that time, calls for reinterpretation through the prism of multidimensional identity, which could manifest itself both in loyalty to the empire and in adherence to the ideas of autonomy, as an expression of social and/or religious interests.