Summary

The contemporary Ukrainian historiography is based on two philosophies of the history of Ukraine: that of Mychaylo Hrushevski, who was under the influence of the narodniks ideology, and Viatcheslav Lypynski, who began his scholarly and political activity in a period when the Ukrainian national question was transformed from cultural and social issues only into political issues as well. These conceptions are entirely different; they express other social preferences - folk and nobility - and indicate different mechanisms of history - rebellion of the folk and statebuilding tendencies. However, they both had to deal with the same problem: the sources and ways of overcoming foreign domination. The former showed a historical and cultural difference of the nation; the latter declared the necessity of creation an independent state. The complexities of the history of Ukraine caused that after World War II both postulates remained equally topical, and hence these completely different historiosophic conceptions are still vivid.