For the first time in the dissertation a comprehensive analysis of the image of the early modern Ukrainian state has been made. The Polish and Russian historians' basic theoretical approaches, terminology, conceptions and historiographical priorities were investigated. As it was researched like the Ukrainian historians the contemporary Polish and Russian historiographies have been remaining the leading scientific powers in the field of the investigation and interpretation of the early modern Ukrainian history. The dissertation argues that the end of the 1980th became the starting point of the fundamental changes in the Polish and Russian historiographies. They have been developing in the new intellectual and ideological circumstances which determine the specific features of the conceptualization of the early modern Ukrainian history by historians in the both scientific spaces. The most important consequence of this process became a disintegration of the former conceptual unity of the Russian historiography as well as the emergence of the traditionalistic and modernizing types of the approaches to the conceptuallization of the early modern Ukrainian state. The Russian traditionalistic model of the history of the Hetmanate substantiates the contemporary Russian claims to hold the Ukrainian territory. This model deny the existing of the separate Ukrainian historical narrative and proclaim the unity of the Russian and Ruthenian worlds as a fundamental point for the interpretation of the history of the Hetmanate and the early modern Ukrainian-Russian interrelations. The dominant intellectual trend in the traditionalistic interpretations lays in the adaptation of the old Russian vision of the early modern Ukrainian history to the new historiographical situation, took shape by Ukrainian and Polish historians as well as a modernizing part of the Russian historiography. Simultaneously the Polish historians closed the process of the overcoming of the traditional Polish conceptions "sword, cross, plow", "civil war", "united nobility of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth" as a starting point for the explanation of the early modern Ukrainian history. The main strategy of the imagination of the Hetmanate by Polish historians contains the concepts of the Ukraine as a separate part of the "Central-East Europe" and of the Ukrainian history as a self-sufficient narrative. The most influential Polish concept is to explain the Ukrainian uprising led by Bohdan Khmelnyts'kyi in the middle of the XVIIth century as a consequence of the global crisis of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in general. Also the Polish historians interpret that the elite of the Commonwealth provoked the Pereiaslav agreement of the 1654 between Hetmanate and Muscovite state, which radically changed the geopolitical balance in Eastern Europe, with major consequences for the future of the Russian imperial project and the fate of Ukraine, Poland, Lithuanian, Crimea, and neighboring European territories. Like the Polish vision and the contemporary interpretation of the Ukrainian historians the modernizing image of the Hetmanate explains the main trend of the process taking place in the 17th century Ukraine as a realization of the key Bohdan Khmelnyts'kyi's and new Ukrainian elite's goal to establish an independence state. The modernizing vision revises the most of the traditional Russian interpretations related to the history of the Hetmanate, particularly the concepts of the civil war in the Ukraine, Ukrainian-Russian interrelations, Ivan Mazepa age and idea of the independence of the Hetmanate. The key tendency for the formation of the contemporary image of the early modern Ukrainian State in the Polish and Russian historiography lays in the approximation of the basic approaches and most important interpretations of the Polish historians and the representatives of the modernizing trend of the Russian historiography. The contemporary Polish and Russian historians are doing leading useful research on the some factual aspects of the history of he Hetmanate. Certain insightful ideas that have been put forward may provide important intellectual stimuli to further study. Key words: Polish historiography, Russian historiography, Ukrainian early modern state, Hetmanate, Ukrainian elite, Cossacks, concept, image, interpretation, terminology.
