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Where there is no law, but every man does what is right in his own eyes, there is the least of real liberty
Henry M. Robert

Sage at the Head of The State

8 December, 1998 - 00:00

Let historians and politicians decide whether Hrushevsky was actually
Ukraine's first President. What really matters is that in the annals he
will remain an encyclopedist: his ten-volume History of Ukraine-Rus'
and History of Ukrainian Literature are already significant works (though
his interpretations sometimes can be disputed, they are often appealed
to). However, the idea of serving his people did not obscure his allegiance
to the eternal ideals of scholarship. Someone may call this a sacrifice
for an intellectual, others honesty. "It is more important to make history
well, than to write it well," wrote Hrushevsky in his article, "The Culture
of Beauty and Culture of Life." "A good Constitution has more weight than
a brilliant poem, and a good land law will be placed in our library next
to Shevchenko's Kobzar. And although he was more successful in writing
than making history, Mykhailo Hrushevsky is nonetheless a grand experiment
of our political science, the almost a Platonic experiment of the philosopher
the head of the state, a Ukrainian Utopia, which we will always find more
attractive than the American Dream.

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