[3] Polonska-Vasylenko studied history under Mitrofan Dovnar-Zapolsky at Kyiv University and from 1912 was a member of the Kyiv-based Historical Society of Nestor the Chronicler.

[6] During the 1920s, the most liberal years of Soviet rule, she was a professor at the Kyiv Institutes of Geography, Archeology, and Art, and a research associate at the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences (VUAN).

During the 1920s, she published extensively in the various periodicals of the Ukrainian Academy on the Zaporozhian Cossacks and the transformation and absorption of southern Ukraine into the Russian Empire during the reigns of Catherine the Great and her predecessors.

During the Cold War, deprived of the use of the archives of her native land, Polonska-Vasylenko collected and reprinted many of her earlier studies on Zaporozhia (1965–67), wrote several memoirs of intellectual life in revolutionary and Soviet Ukraine including a history of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences (2 vols.

She saw the strivings of this class for national unity and independence, or, at least, autonomy, as one of the main currents of Ukrainian history, and she characterized the nineteenth century as a time of Russian and Austrian occupation.