Viktor Moisiyenko. The Ukrainian Written Tradition of the 11th–14th Centuries: Debunking Russian Myths

The author addresses the issue of studying the earliest Ukrainian manuscripts and highlights the need for further publishing Ukrainian written monuments, accompanied with thorough codicological, palaeographic, and linguistic (especially orthographic) research. A special emphasis is placed on the necessity of exposing the ideologically driven and, in fact, unscientific views promoted by Russian scholars regarding the cultural and linguistic heritage of Kyivan Rus. These views, widely circulated in international scholarship, propagate a distorted myth claiming that until the 14th century, the Ukrainians, the Russians, and the Belarusians allegedly shared a common Old East Slavic culture, language, and literary tradition – a heritage supposedly inherited solely by Muscovy­Russia. Disproving this pseudoscientific narrative remains one of the most urgent tasks facing Ukrainian humanities scholars today.

Viktor Moisiyenko — Corresponding Member of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Professor at the Department of Ukrainian Language, the Ivan Franko State University of Zhytomyr. From February 24, 2022 to the present, he has been in the Armed Forces of Ukraine.