Modern Ukrainian historical science faces many challenges that require a scientific solution. Exploring the life and work of famous people and the history of individual regions of Ukraine are among them. The end of 19th - the beginning of 20th centuries in the history of Ukraine is characterized by a general revolutionary exaltation that was caused by sharp contradictions, national oppression, political disenfranchisement of the population. It is a time when new creators of history enter the political scene.
Nowadays, the critical task is to rethink the role of the individual in history, to explore creative people, to
fill the historical process with energetic, working people, to make this process anthropocentric. It is necessary not only to revive the forgotten names but to determine a place for each personality in the history of Ukraine. The article aims to show the features of the pre-revolutionary past of Kherson city from the perspective of Leonid Solovyov, indigenous inhabitant, engineer, the qualified worker of Kherson seaport and brilliant memoirist.
In his memoirs, he described the city in pre-revolutionary times and showed the changes of Kherson during Soviet power.
Memoirs (memories) are a special kind of written historical sources that reflect the author’s understanding of past reality and historical consciousness of the personality of their creator. They are about the past based mostly on a personal the memory of the author and his own impressions of those events in which he participated or which he watched by himself.
In his memoirs, we see the dualistic nature of historical sources, because, on the one hand, they record information about the past and, therefore, it is its reflection. On the other hand, memoirs are part of the period in which they came on. Today Mr Solovyov’s memoirs are unexplored, and this article is the first attempt to show the role of this personality.
Pre-revolutionary Kherson had a number of its features. It was a small, quiet, calm, provincial town. Mr Solovyov remembers the city since 1914. He was always interested in the history of his native city. The comparison of
pre-revolutionary and Soviet Kherson from the perspective of an ordinary citizen of Kherson is particularly useful.
Most of Kherson citizens worked as merchants, officials, entrepreneurs and small haggler. The workers were a minority, lived mainly in the suburbs and had their property, farm. It was a typical and traditional demonstration
of the usual Ukrainian way of life. The result of long and hard work of Mr. Solovyov as an ethnographer is a significant number of photo albums, including “Kherson seaport”, “Flood in Kherson”, extracts from books, magazines, newspapers about ports of Kherson, Skadovsk, Khorly, and, of course, memoirs about his native city and the port which contains unvalued layer of interesting information about the history of our city.
It is shown the role of the individual in history and the impact of circumstances and the environment in the formation of his worldview and future activities from Mr Solovyov example. It is the first time when the researcher is depicted as a citizen whose life was dedicated to the service of society. The results of his work played a significant role in today’s economic and cultural potential of our city.
Mr Solovyov’s great experience in the organization of productive work in the port, the realization of his interests in studying historical characteristics of the land has not lost its practical value and is useful today.
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