Hipolit (religious name, Vladimir) Terlecki1 (1808-88) merits the historian’s attention because of his contribution to the development of nineteenth-century Ukrainian political thought, and because of the biographical interest of his long and extraordinary life.
Nevertheless, he is virtually a forgotten figure, and no monographic study has ever been written about him.
This neglect is to be explained by the fact that Terlecki falls into a marginal area between Polish, Ukrainian, and Russian national histories.
By birth he belonged to the Polish nobility of Right-Bank Ukraine; in his mature years he identified himself with the Ukrainian nationality; in his old age, finally, he went over to the Russian side. These changes in national-political orientation were paralleled by religious changes. Terlecki was in turn a Roman Catholic of the Latin rite, an Eastern-rite Catholic (Uniate), and an Orthodox. It is not surprising that scholars of all three Slavic nationalities have been reluctant to claim as their own a figure who did not seem to fit well into any of their respective national histories.An evaluation of Terlecki,s personality, and of his disturbing spiritual odyssey, will be offered in the concluding part of this paper. It will be based on the preceding discussion of his life, writings, and ideas. At this point, I wish only to propose that Terlecki, in spite of his metamorphoses, ought to be considered as belonging essentially to Ukrainian history, not only because during the prime of his life he professed to be Ukrainian,2 but also because his very vacillations are characteristic of the difficulties and pitfalls to be found on the road which nineteenth-century Ukrainian intellectuals had to travel.