НАЦІОНАЛЬНА СВОБОДА І «САМООПРЕДЕЛЕНИЕ»: ПУБЛІЦИСТИКА ОЛЕНИ ПЧІЛКИ

The view of modern researchers on the journalism of the writer and social activist Olena Pchilka (Olga Kosach, 1849-1930) is mostly fragmentary and haphazard, not properly appreciated. This is explained by the long-term bias, ideological labeling of her persona as a “bourgeois nationalist”. In the circle of Ukrainian and Russian social democrats, liberals of the beginning of the 20th century, Olena Pchilka was also perceived as a person of extreme (right-wing) views. Meanwhile, her worldview is clearly beyond the understanding of her contemporaries. She consistently, thoughtfully, and clearly sets out her views in various journalistic genres, she draws attention to the contempt of the Ukrainian nation, its lack of freedom. Lack of freedom to form a national identity (self-awareness) is the evil against which Olena Pchilka consistently fights. In particular, it is about the ideology of “self-determination”, with the help of which Russian liberals masked their chauvinistic attitude towards the Ukrainian nation. The concept was invented to create an illusion of democratization of the social processes in the Russian Empire when Ukrainians supposedly received the right to determine their social order. In fact, even dreams about the federation were marked quite negatively and persecuted