The Role of Cossack Colonel Illya Lyzohub (1720-1781) in State-Building Processes in Ukraine

Abstract

The Lyzohubs were Cossack chiefmen and at the same time a noble family, whose representatives have played a prominent and sometimes paramount role at different stages of state formation during the XVII-XX centuries within the territories that are now part of the modern Ukrainian state. Illya Lyzohub’s personality (about 1720–1781), despite his high social status, has not been the subject of research by the academic community of historians. Indirectly, his biography was covered by genealogists G. A. Miloradovich, V. L. Modzalevskyi and V. V. Kryvosheya. O. M. Lazarevskyi, who studied the Lyzohubs family in general, managed to bring most of the facts about his life path into the scientific circulation. However, there were no more attempts made to summarize the data concerning Illya Lyzohub’s life and activities in the national historiography. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to attempt to fill in the above mentioned lacuna, based on a wide range of written sources. Thus, on the basis of the methods of the so-called “new family history”, socio-cultural transmissions and Illya Lyzohub’s social ambitions as a representative of a chief Cossack family have been analysed. In the course of the study, interpersonal interactions between I. Lyzohub and Hetman K. G. Razumovsky, as well as Major General I. I. Golovin, have been studied. The latter are extremely important in the view of the analyzed genealogical relationship between Lyzohub and Golovin. Therefore, there is a reasonable opportunity to claim that Lizohubs are relatives of such writers with a worldwide name as A. S. Pushkin and L. M. Tolstoy. On the basis of memoirs and archival sources, it was possible to find information about most of Illya Lyzohub’s places of residence, thus extending the geography of the study beyond the Hetmanate. Thus, the proposed article is, in its essence, the first biographical research of the life and activities of Illya Lyzohub.