Three universals issued by hetman Ivan Mazepa from the Baturyn archive

The article presents the first publication of three universals issued by Hetman Ivan Mazepa from the Baturyn archive, which expand the corpus of sources on Ukrainian hetmandom of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The history of the archive’s removal from Baturyn in 1708 and the reasons for its long-lasting limited accessibility to Ukrainian scholars are outlined. It is demonstrated that the documents published here were not included in the modern two-volume Ukrainian edition of Mazepa’s universals, although they had previously entered scholarly circulation through a Russian publication.

The article analyzes the principles used in preparing the earlier texts according to the Soviet “Rules for Editing Historical Documents”, which prescribed the modernization of orthography. It is emphasized that such editorial interventions resulted in the loss of characteristic graphic and linguistic features of the early modern Ukrainian written tradition. Special attention is paid to the consequences of replacing the letters «і» and «ѣ», which distorted the phonetic and morphological features of the Old Ukrainian language. The study stresses the importance of publishing the universals in a maximally authentic form as a prerequisite for accurate historical and linguistic research.

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