Historian Hrushevsky wrote his first academic book,
Bar Starostvo: Historical Notes: XV-XVIII, on the history of
Bar, Ukraine. As a historian, he authored the first detailed scholarly synthesis of Ukrainian history, his ten-volume
History of Ukraine-Rus, which was published in the
Ukrainian language and covered the period from
prehistory to the 1660s. In the work, he balanced a commitment to the ordinary
Ukrainian people with an appreciation for native Ukrainian political entities, autonomous polities, which steadily increased in the final volumes of his master work. In general, his approach combined
rationalist enlightenment principles with a
romantic commitment to the cause of the nation and positivist methodology to produce a highly-authoritative history of his native land and people. Hrushevsky also wrote a multi-volume
History of Ukrainian Literature, an
Outline History of the Ukrainian People and a very popular
Illustrated History of Ukraine, which appeared in both Ukrainian and
Russian editions. In addition, he wrote numerous specialised studies in which he displayed a very acute critical acumen. His personal bibliography has over 2000 separate titles. In Hrushevsky's varied historical writings, certain basic ideas come to the fore. Firstly, he saw continuity in Ukrainian history from ancient times to his own. Thus, he claimed the ancient Ukrainian steppe cultures from
Scythia to
Kievan Rus' to the
Cossacks as part of Ukrainian heritage. He viewed the
Principality of Galicia–Volhynia as the sole legitimate heir of Kievan Rus, which opposed the official scheme of Russian history, which claimed Kievan Rus' for the
Vladimir-Suzdal Principality and Imperial Russia. Secondly, to give real depth to the continuity, Hrushevsky stressed the role of the common people, the "popular masses" as he called them, throughout the eras. Thus, popular revolts against the various foreign states that ruled Ukraine were also a major theme. Thirdly, Hrushevsky always emphasised native Ukrainian factors rather than international ones as the causes of various phenomena. Thus, he was an
anti-Normanist, who stressed the Slavic origins of Rus, internal discord as the primary reason for the fall of Kievan Rus' and the native Ukrainian ethnic makeup and origins of the
Ukrainian Cossacks. (He considered runaway serfs especially important in the last regard.) Also, he stressed the national aspect to the Ukrainian Renaissance of the 16th and 17th centuries and considered that the great revolt of
Bohdan Khmelnytsky and the Cossacks against the
Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth to be largely a national and social phenomenon, rather than simply a religious phenomenon. Thus, continuity nativism, and populism characterised his general histories. On the role of statehood in Hrushevsky's historical thought, contemporary scholars still do not agree. Some believe that Hrushevsky retained a
populist mistrust of the state throughout his career and that it was reflected by his deep
democratic convictions, but others believe that Hrushevsky gradually became more and more for Ukrainian statehood in his various writings and that to be is reflected in his political work on the construction of a Ukrainian national state, during the revolution in 1917 and 1918.
Other scholarly activities Eneida,
Lviv, 31 October 1898 As an organiser of scholarship, Hrushevsky oversaw the transformation of the Shevchenko Literary Society, based in the province of Halychyna (
Galicia),
Austria-Hungary, into a new Shevchenko Scientific Society, which published hundreds of volumes of scholarly literature before the
First World War and quickly grew to serve as an unofficial academy of sciences for Ukrainian on both sides of the border with Russia. After the
Russian Revolution of 1905, Hrushevsky organised the Ukrainian Scientific Society in
Kyiv in 1907 that served as a prototype to the future Academy of Sciences. After the
1917-1921 revolution, he founded the Ukrainian Sociological Institute in exile in
Vienna. After his return to Ukraine in the 1920s, he became a major figure of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences in Kyiv in 1923. ==Legacy==