The worldview of the Ukrainian state in the Yevhen Onatsky’s opinion journalism (based on the Ukrainian small encyclopedia)

Abstract

Taking into consideration the Ukrainian Small Encyclopedia, the article recreates the worldview for the Ukrainian state in the interpretation of the encyclopedia’s author Yevhen Onatsky. The USE is a large-scale encyclopedic text by Yevhen Onatsky, which has no analogues. In this text the author concentrated his scientific and journalistic achievements over his life. A comparison of the USE with other encyclopedias gives the right to say that subjectivity in judgments is characteristic not of Onatsky’s work only, but of many other encyclopedias, in particular of the «Encyclopedia, or a Systematic Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts, and Crafts» by Diderot and d’Alembert, of Wikipedia and in general of any encyclopedia that claims to explain processes and phenomena. Owing to its subjective component, the USE is valuable not only as an encyclopedic work, but also as a journalistic one. From this point of view, the most noteworthy are encyclopedic articles of a worldview nature that are of immediate practical importance both in times of statelessness and at the stage of the Ukrainian state-building.

In his encyclopedia, Onatsky sharply condemns Marxism as an ideology, the USSR as an attempt to imitate its implementation in practice, Moscow imperialism as the essence of the Bolshevik state. The other author’s warnings, although less accentuated, are evoked by the vices of the free world: soulless egocentrism, hedonism, consumerism, as well as parliamentarism, capitalism and colonialism, if they are built on fraud and exploitation of man by man. Onatsky contrasts the named social phenomena with an ethos of struggle, supported by an unshakable hope of ultimate success; spiritual nationalism, the meaning of which is solidarity between members of society and service to higher ideals; thinking in the interests of the community (nation), and not in the interests of individuals, political parties or classes.