The civilization image of the “West” in the historical works of Mikhail Maksimovych

The purpose of the article is to study the reception of the image of the West by Mykhailo Maksimovich in the context of his civilizational views and ideas. The methodological basis of the article is mental mapping as a strategy of cognitive reproduction of geographical objects in the imagination of scientists. The basic component of the used methodology is imagology as a method of studying one’s own/another person’s images. The scientific novelty of the article lies in the fact that it first clarified the attitude of this scientist to the West as an image of a civilized community; the role of this image in the civilizational self-identification of the historian is traced; an analysis of his ideas regarding the relationship between the historical images of Russia-Ukraine and the West in Maksymovich’s historical works is made. Conclusions. In Mykhailo Maksymovich’s civilizational identity the Slavic world was "his" civilizational community. The role of the main "foreign" and "enemy" civilizational community was performed by the West. The West was imagined by Maksymovich as a space populated by Germanic peoples, on which the Catholic faith prevails. The historian did not notice Romanic peoples or the Protestant faith in his historical texts. The Germanic West was interpreted by Maksymovich as an environment that has always carried out an aggressive expansion into the Slavic world with the aim of conquering and assimilating it. The scientist considered Catholicism, primarily the order of the Jesuits, to be the main characteristic of the West. For him, the ethnic representative of Western civilization was primarily the German people. Maksymovich interpreted the Germans as a people for whom the primordial, genetically determined "hostility" towards the Slavs is inherent. His historical image of Poland was also inscribed in Maksymovich’s reception of the West. This historian interpreted the Poles as the people who were the first to experience Western (German) expansion and were heavily influenced by it. As a result, the Poles were interpreted by scholars as bearers of "Western" traditions among the Slavs.