Contemporary Ukraine on the Cultural Map of Europe

Larissa M. L. Zaleska Onyshkevych, Maria G. Rewakowicz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317473770
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The concept of a 'return to Europe' has been integral to the movement for Ukrainian national rebirth since the nineteenth century. While the goal of a more fully reformed politics remains elusive, numerous expressions of Ukrainian culture continue to develop in the European spirit. This wide-ranging book explores Ukraine's European cultural connection, especially as it has been reestablished since the country achieved independence in 1991. The contributors discusses many aspects of Ukraine's contemporary culture - history, politics, and religion in Part I; literary culture in Part II; and language, popular culture, and the arts in Part III. What emerges is a fascinating picture of a young country grappling with its divided past and its colonial heritage, yet asserting its voice and preferences amid the diverse and at times conflicting realities of the contemporary political scene. Europe becomes a powerful point of reference, a measure against which the situation in post-independence Ukraine is gouged and debated. This framework allows for a better understanding of the complexities deeply ingrained in the social fabric of Ukrainian society.

III

Manifesting Culture

Language, Media, and the Arts

19

The European Dimension Within the Current Controversy over the Ukrainian Language Standard

Serhii Vakulenko

Some fifty years ago, when writing about the formation of Modern Standard Ukrainian in the nineteenth century and its impact on the political and intellectual history of the Ukrainian people, George Y. Shevelov (1980, 155) summarized his analysis as follows:

Contrary to the opinion that languages, to assert themselves, require cultural centers created by economic and political development, modern literary Ukrainian has been the work of a group of men of letters (primarily Ševčenko and Kuliš) as a manifestation of the poetic spirit… the Ukrainian literary language offers the “miracle” of a linguistic development that has given birth to a political movement. The linguistic work of Ševčenko and Kuliš prepared the way for the rise of political parties, states, armies, for wars, struggles and conflicts. Lovers of paradoxes may say that a poet created a language and that the language created a nation.¹

An analogous “miracle” repeated itself recently: if the decisive blow to the Soviet Union was delivered by the Ukrainian referendum for independence on December 1, 1991, it should not be forgotten that the scene had been set by a widespread democratic movement triggered in the late 1980s by the Shevchenko Society for the Ukrainian Language. The language question again paved the way to political demands. In the following years, language continued to be a momentous factor on the political scene, influencing the voters’ electoral preferences (see Wakoulenko 5). Even if the importance attached to this subject in society has been diminishing recently (although at a slow pace), it still plays a significant role in politics; moreover, some politicians periodically try to revive it (playing on the Russian/Ukrainian polarity) in order to stimulate otherwise vanishing support from their followers. Alongside the inescapable issue of the relative official status of the country’s two most widely spoken languages, the controversy focuses on what exactly Standard Ukrainian should look like, which occasionally becomes a matter of public debate that goes far beyond academic circles.

This situation is rooted in the history of the Ukrainian people and the Ukrainian language. Drawing upon Einar Haugen’s (16–26) already classic fourfold distinction between selection of norm, codification of form, implementation, and elaboration of function in language planning, Halyna Iavorska (156) dates the first two phases for Ukrainian between the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, when Ukrainian ethnic territory was divided between the Russian and the Austrian (Austro-Hungarian after 1868) empires. Accordingly, not one, but two (quasi-) standards emerged during that time, which differed, apart from dialectal basis, in their functional scope. Whereas the Ukrainian language in the Russia-ruled territory repeatedly suffered from governmental restrictions and could develop only by fits and starts in the domain of literature (where, in fact, it made considerable progress), the situation was quite different for the Ukrainian language under Austria, where authorities were inclined to accept and even promote its use in education, administration, law, public life, and the periodical press. Moreover, the Westerners could profit from contact with other Slavs of the Austrian Empire, whereby their national renascence was integrated into the Central European course of events (cf. Moser 2004, 108–112 et passim). Thus Western Ukraine, although unable to boast of many masterpieces of the literary style commensurate with those coming from the other part of the country, managed to develop a diversified standard apt to fulfill the entirety of modern language’s social functions. Larysa Masenko (2004, 13) is therefore quite right when she notes: “It was in Lviv and Chernivtsi that the formation of modern business, scientific and journalistic Ukrainian commenced.”

Thus, if any serious attempt to understand current linguistic problems in Ukraine requires retrospection as far back as the first half of the nineteenth century (cf. Iavorska 154), the analysis of this period must take into consideration the coexistence at that time of two varieties of the standard language. For all its importance, the issue is rather insufficiently studied, having belonged to the category of “prohibited” topics during the Soviet era (cf. Masenko 2004, 13). In the 1950s, a politically motivated dogma about the so-called dialect of Poltava and Kyïv as the basis of the Ukrainian national language was established (cf. Bulakhovsky 1954), aiming, first of all to downplay the West Ukrainian contribution to its formation. Although the patent absurdity of its main thesis (one would look in vain for a dialect with such a name in any handbook on Ukrainian dialectology) made most scholars switch over to the less irritating term “dialects of the Central Dnipro area” by the beginning of the 1960s (cf. Iermolenko 2005, 6),² the underlying intention remained unchanged for a long time. Of course, the situation has evolved by now, and the issue of regional varieties of Ukrainian may be openly discussed: in a study by Ivan Matviias (1998), one finds not only both of the main varieties, but no less than nine subvarieties of Standard Ukrainian. Nevertheless, trustworthy data available on this subject continue to be very restricted, especially with respect to the processes that took place in the twentieth century.

The turning point for the Ukrainian language came with World War I and the subsequent years of struggle for national independence (until 1920). On the one hand, these events led to an unprecedented intensification of contacts between the Easterners and the Westerners; on the other hand, it made possible the formal establishment of Ukrainian as the official language of state (cf. Smal-Stotsky 34–37). While none of the successive Ukrainian governments of that period managed to last for long, and the general atmosphere of wartime and political turmoil was not propitious for language planning, the positive attainments in the actual introduction of Ukrainian in a number of new fields were to have lasting effects. The essence of these changes was well expressed by Shevelov:

… in the years of the struggle for independence, it was the development of the Ukrainian language in the former Russian Ukraine that proved to be crucial for not only that part of the country, but for the entire Ukraine. There actual independence lasted for longest, the status of the Ukrainian language changed most radically, and the dynamics of its expansion were the most striking. None of the language changes was completed at the time the independent Ukraine fell…. Nevertheless, they could not be immediately extinguished, and to a great extent they determined the zig-zags in the ensuing language policy within the Ukrainian S.S.R., as well as the vicissitudes of the Ukrainian language in the parts of Ukraine occupied by Poland, Romania, and Czecho-Slovakia. (1986, 142–143)

Although the achievements in corpus planning were much more modest than those gained in status planning, it should be noted that the first ever official spelling rules for Ukrainian (compiled under Ivan Ohiienko’s guidance) were adopted in 1919, which may be seen as the beginning of the process of Haugen’s implementation (cf. Iavorska 156). These rules, with slight changes, continued to be valid in Soviet Ukraine until the end of the 1920s. Besides orthography, many other aspects of the Ukrainian standard were developing a new dimension, including lexicography, terminology, and stylistics. The common aspiration was to settle on a standard that would be acceptable for all Ukrainians, both within and outside the Soviet Union. A remark by Oleksa Syniavsky (1923, 41), on the occasion of the publication of his Poradnyk ukraïns’koï movy [Guide to Ukrainian] in Germany, reveals the general spirit of those efforts: “The whole of my Guide, as a reference book on Standard Ukrainian, was based on the idea that it is necessary to attain, as far as possible, a uniformity in the literary language.” In other words, it was well recognized, according to Mykola Hladki (158), that “a resultant for All-Ukrainian standard language” had to be found.

The prescriptive rules set at the time did have a tangible effect. In his study devoted to the language of contemporary Ukrainian fiction, Hladki wrote:

Our observations… prove that substantial progress can be seen even in the language of literary works between 1925 and 1926, and then 1927, and so on, especially if we consider the language of the literary production of 1929 as the criterion. (158)

The year 1929 was singled out because at that point the new Ukrainian spelling rules came into force, which Hladki regarded as the main factor allowing the claim that the language of Ukrainian literature had set out on “the path of its normal development” (ibid.). The rules in question were the result of three years’ work by a commission appointed by the government of Soviet Ukraine, which counted among its members not only leading scholars (including Syniavsky, who practically had the last word) but also prominent Communist functionaries. Before the adoption of the rules, an Orthographic Conference was convened in Kharkiv in 1927, with the participation of representatives from Western Ukraine. According to Shevelov (1987, 138), the most difficult problem it faced was the necessity of combining two different spelling traditions, the Eastern and the Western. The points that remained unsettled during its sessions were the uses of h vs. g and l vs. l’ in the rendition of words of foreign origin (the Eastern tradition preferred the first variant in each case, the Western the second one). In Shevelov’s (1987, 139) opinion, Syniavsky was wrong in treating this discrepancy “as being chiefly a West European tradition vs. a Byzantine one,” for the choice was rather “dictated by Russian or Polish mediation.” With all due respect to Shevelov, one cannot but observe that these two mediations are not quite homologous, as the first one implies a transition from Latin to Cyrillic script in the mediating language (Russian), with its subsequent reinterpretation in Ukrainian, while the second one left the task of transliteration as such to the latter.

Members of the commission found themselves facing a particular instance of a broader choice that the Ukrainian elite had to make. One of the most popular writers of the period, Mykola Khvylovy (390, 463–476), formulated it as the opposition of two “psychological categories”: “Europe” and “Prosvita” (a Ukrainian word originally meaning “education of the people,” which was also used in a derogatory sense as “primitive pedagogism”). Whereas Europe’s symbol, for Khvylovy (468), was Goethe’s Dr. Faust, “Prosvita” was identified with “cultural epigonism” (469–476), that is, a complete lack of intellectual independence. Khvylovy’s (426) own choice was definitely for Europe, whence, in particular, his famous urge to move “away from Moscow” (571–575). In the linguistic field, this meant rejecting Russian mediacy in the adaptation of foreign words (with all of its historically conditioned inconsistencies) and directly addressing the source languages.³ Of course, this approach was more familiar to West Ukrainians, who had a long experience of direct contact with other European languages within the Austrian Empire, so that many people in Eastern and Central Ukraine thought they had to do with a “Galician” practice. In reality, this was not quite true, as the new rules departed from the West Ukrainian tradition in the treatment of words of Greek origin: the Greek γ was transcribed as h, and not as g, according to the older West Ukrainian usage, patterned on the Polish, German, and—speaking generically—Latin way of its rendition. Seen from this angle, the new rules appear not to be a compromise (unsatisfactory for both parties concerned) (cf. Shevelov 1987, 139), but rather a consistent application of one underlying principle, consonant—accidentally or not—with another literary catchword of the time: Mykola Zerov’s (262) answer to Kh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction The Mapping of Ukraine
• Ukraine on Historical Maps of Europe
• I. Mapping the Nation: History, Politics, and Religion
• II. Reflecting Identities: The Literary Paradigm
• III. Manifesting Culture: Language, Media, and the Arts
• Index
• About the Editors, Authors, Translator