the ukrainian alphabet as a political question in the russian empire before 1876

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Johannes REMY

THE UKRAINIAN ALPHABET

AS A POLITICAL QUESTION

IN THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE BEFORE 1876*

Literature in the modern Ukrainian vernacular began with the publica-tion of Ivan Kotliarevskyi’s Eneida in St. Petersburg in 1798. Its begin-nings were fairly modest, since only 31 editions appeared in the RussianEmpire during the first four decades of the nineteenth century. ThereafterUkrainian publishing gained momentum, and by 1876, when the Ems de-cree limited its scope in belles-lettres, 302 editions had been published inthe Russian Empire alone.1 One of the characteristic traits of a beginningliterary language not backed by a state is a lack of standardization, andUkrainian was no exception in this regard. In 1876, Ukrainian still lackedan authoritative grammar and dictionary. The Ukrainian alphabet, too, wasstill subject to discussion and differing opinions.

In standardizing a new literary language that previously existed only inthe vernacular, some areas leave a larger scope for deliberation than others.

* I am indebted to the Academy of Finland, which has made this article possible as partof my research project “Ukrainian Nationalism and Russia 1855-1876,” project number103289/2003.1 Ukrainomovna knyha 1798-1916. Vols. 1-3. Kyiv, 1996. Vol. 1. Pp. 1-97. By the year1876, 157 editions in modern Ukrainian had appeared outside the Russian Empire, almostall in Austrian Galicia.

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Grammar is to a great extent dictated by the spoken language, and evenconcerning vocabulary, reform is possible only up to a certain point, unlessthe people are called on to change their main language to another. Theabsence of a traditionally established script offers a somewhat wider scopefor deliberation and innovation in orthography, because the reforms do notviolate any traditional routines. In addition, a great variety of orthographicprinciples can be found in European languages. In the absence of criteria forjudgments that all the writers in a language might share, political and nation-al motivations easily influence the process in which orthography takes shape.

The questions related to linguistic standardization of the Ukrainian lan-guage in the nineteenth century were ripe with political connotations, themost prominent of which was the distance of the Ukrainian to the (Great)Russian language. While Mykhailo Drahomanov proposed accepting Rus-sian loanwords for concepts that did not have an equivalent term in Ukrai-nian,2 Mykhailo Starytskyi spent much effort in inventing suitable autoch-thonous neologisms.3 Their opinions reflected differing attitudes to the(Great) Russians and the Russian Empire, while linguistic considerationsplayed a secondary role. Like the vocabulary, the Ukrainian alphabet andorthography, too, were political questions, and were often understood assuch. However, apart from political motivations, the discussion of Ukraini-an orthography followed from the Ukrainian sound system, which indeeddoes differ from that of the Russian. In the two languages, similar wordsare pronounced in a somewhat different way. To mention just one example,where the Russians write ã and pronounce [g], the Ukrainians most oftenpronounce [h], but sometimes [g]. Either the actual Ukrainian pronuncia-tion or Russian orthography could be taken as the point of departure for theconstruction of Ukrainian orthography. The first choice made reading eas-ier to learn for those previously illiterate, while the latter made the textmore comprehensible for those literate in Russian and without prior knowl-edge of Ukrainian. In general, a phonetic orthography that followed theactual pronunciation was more convenient for Ukrainian national aims, whilethe use of Russian orthography as the model for the Ukrainian put the sta-tus of Ukrainian as a fully separate language into doubt. However, the ques-

2 M. P. Drahomanov. Literatura rosiis’ka, velykoruska, ukrainska i halytska // Idem.Literaturno-publitsistychni pratsi. Vol. 1. Kyiv, 1970. Pp. 179-180; First published inthe Galician journal Truth (Pravda) in the years 1873-1874.3 S. Yekelchyk. The Nation’s Clothes. Constructing a Ukrainian High Culture in theRussian Empire, 1860-1900 // Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas. 2001. No. 49. H.2. Pp. 233-234.

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tion was not as simple as that, for the differences in sound values of thesame letters were bound to exist, even if writers wanted to have a Ukrainianorthography as close to the Russian one as possible. For instance, if ã wereused in the “similar” way as in Russian, it would have one sound value [g]in Russian, but two [h, g] in Ukrainian. For a long time, intermediate vari-ants between the phonetic and etymologic orthographies were proposedand widely circulated, a fact that reflects both the complexity of the stan-dardization task and the precarious character of Ukrainian national identi-ty, especially in the first half of the nineteenth century.

The aim of this article is, first, to present an overview of the alphabeticdiscussion between Ukrainian cultural and national activists, with a focuson political aspects of the phenomenon. I shall then venture into a study ofgovernment attitudes on the Ukrainian alphabet. While it has not been pos-sible to cover all the orthographies and alphabets that were used in Ukraini-an publications, a wide scope of different usages and arguments that wereused in favor or against them is presented. I shall focus exclusively on thealphabets and orthographies that were used in legal publications within theRussian Empire. Thus illegal publications and those published in the Aus-trian Empire are excluded. This does not indicate a denial of their rele-vance, but rather an admission of the limits of the present study. The timelimit of the study is set at 1876. In that year, the Ems decree stipulated thatall Ukrainian publications had to use the “general Russianorthography.” 4 This indeed standardized Ukrainian orthography in legalpublications and, for a time, put an end to the alphabet discussion, althoughin a manner highly undesirable to Ukrainian national activists.

The Development of Ukrainian Orthography

The first author to pay conscious and outspoken attention to the questionof Ukrainian orthography was Aleksei Pavlovskii, the author of the firstgrammar (1818) of what he called the �Little Russian dialect.�5 Despitethe author�s origins in the Ukrainian linguistic area, the Putivl� district

4 A. I. Miller. “Ukrainskii vopros” v politike vlastei i russkom obshchestvennom mnenii(Vtoraia polovina XIX v.). St. Petersburg, 2000. Pp. 242-244. The book contains the fulltext of the Ems decree.5 A. Pavlovskii. Grammatika malorossiiskogo narechiia, ili grammaticheskoe pokazaniesushchestvenneishikh otlichij, otdalivshikh Malorossiiskoe narechie ot chistagoRossiiskogo jazyka, soprovozhdaemoe raznymi po semu predmetu zamechaniiami isochineniiami. St. Petersburg: Tipografiia V. Plavilshchikova, 1818.

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of Kursk Province, he did not consider himself a Little Russian and wasnot a native speaker. Pavlovskii noticed the differences of the Ukrainiansound system from that of the Great Russian and proposed a pair of ortho-graphic solutions to express them. Where the Ukrainian sounds differedfrom those of the Great Russians, Pavlovskii wrote them according tothe phonetic principle, that is, as he thought they were pronounced, ratherthan what was the correct equivalent in Great Russian. All of Pavlovskii�sinnovations marked the sounds that indeed do exist even in present-daystandard Ukrainian. He proposed to write the equivalent of the Russian ã asêã in those cases when it is pronounced as [g], today written as ́ . The etymologicequivalent of the Russian è he wrote as û, which was how he found itpronounced, whereas it is today written either as è or ³. The letter h heheard and wrote most often as ³, like in the word dilo (cause, case, thing).In this way, he ended up creating the first specifically Ukrainian orthography,without however adding any new letters.6 Pavlovskii�s orthographic inno-vations were based on the actual sound system rather than on any consciousattempt at linguistic nation-building. To be sure, he was fascinated by theUkrainian language and gave it the status of �almost a proper language.�7

Nevertheless, he considered the Little Russians a part of the Russiannation, found the crudeness of the Little Russian pronunciation its mostimportant difference from the Great Russian one, and predicted the ex-tinction of the Little Russian dialect.8

Prince Nikolai (Mykola) Tsertelev, the publisher of the first Ukrainianfolk-song collection, criticized Pavlovskii’s orthography in his review ofthe grammar.9 Tsertelev argued that Pavlovskii wrote many words “incor-rectly” because he had not been guided by the “best” of the dialects, the onespoken in Poltava province. According to Tsertelev, instead of writing êãand ³ the author should have placed as a diacritical mark two points over theusual signs in Russian orthography, ã and h. This first disagreement inUkrainian orthography entailed a contest between the different dialects,but it was hardly relevant to the perception of relationship between Ukrai-nian and the Great Russian language.

6 A. Pavlovskii. Grammatika. Pp. 1-4. This is not an exhaustive list of Pavlovskii’sorthographic innovations, but it is enough for the present study, dealing as it does withnation-building and political history rather than linguistics.7 A. Pavlovskii. Grammatika. VI. “Pochti nastojashchii jazyk.”8 A. Pavlovskii. Grammatika. II. Pp. 3-4.9 N. Tsertelev. “Grammatika…” [a book review] // Syn Otechestva. Istoricheskii,politicheskii i literaturnii zhurnal. 1818. Vol. 46. Pp. 147-151.

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The development of Ukrainian orthography reached a new level withMykhailo Maksymovych’s collection of folk songs, published in 1827.10

In its foreword, Maksymovych was the first to call “Little Russian” a lan-guage, finding for it a place at the center of the Slavic language group.Maksymovych proposed his own orthography, through which he tried bothto express the specific Ukrainian sounds and to retain the traditional lettersof the Great Russian and the Old Slavonic. In order to reach both his ends,Maksymovych often placed the diacritical mark ˆ above vowels. In thisway, where the Russians spoke kon’ (horse) and Ukrainians kin’, he wroteêôíü. His explicit motivation was the wish not to put too great a distancebetween the Ukrainian and Great Russian languages:

I do this, first, since I write not only to the Little Russians, but alsoto the Russians, to whom much will be incomprehensible if I writeaccording to pronunciation and do not attempt to bring the Little Rus-sian orthography but a bit closer to the Russian one. Besides, there isnot any language in which the pronunciation of the letters would nothave specific variations and special signs, and I introduce rather few.One cannot read exactly like we write in the Russian, but it would beincorrect also to write as we speak.11

Maksymovych presented the further argument that the Ukrainian mid-dle vowels changed in different cases so that, for instance, the nominativecase kin’ switched to konia in the genitive case. Because this variation oc-curred within a single word, Maksymovych found it incorrect to change themiddle vowel in writing according to the case, as it is done in modern liter-ary Ukrainian. In addition, in some dialects somewhat different sounds werepronounced, like kuin for “horse” in the Pereiaslav district. Maksymovychfound that his orthography retained a balance between all the different Ukrai-nian dialects: everyone could pronounce the vowels according to his owndialect, and the pronunciation of a single dialect was not forced upon theothers. Maksymovych may have been the first to claim that the Ukrainianetymological equivalent of the Great Russian è [i] was pronounced some-what differently as a middle form between the Russian sounds è [i] and û[]. Because of this sound [I], modern standard Ukrainian orthography hasaltogether abandoned the letter û. Maksymovych, however, found it fullypermissible that a single sound was marked through two different letters,advising his readers to pronounce both è and û in a similar manner, as the

10 M. Maksimovich. Malorossiiskiia pesni. Moscow, 1827.11 M. Maksimovich. Malorossiiskia pesni. P. XXVI.

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middle sound between their Russian equivalents. As there indeed were dif-ferences in the pronunciation of this sound between the dialects, the claimof standard pronunciation was an act of deliberation rather than an objec-tive linguistic fact. However, what is most important is that Maksymovychseparated his orthography from the phonetic principle in his attempt to bringthe Ukrainian closer to the Great Russian language.

Maksymovych’s orthography reflected his national and political posi-tion, the claim of the existence of a separate Little Russian/South Russianethno-linguistic nation that nevertheless retained a close and specific rela-tion to the Great Russian nation. In his Beginnings of Russian Philology(1848) Maksymovych claimed that the language expressed the individualityof a nation (narod). He emphasized that in the Slavic languages the wordiazyk meant both language and the nation that spoke the language. Thus theexistence of two separate nations, what he called the North Russian (sever-norusskii) and the South Russian (iuzhnorusskii), followed from the exist-ence of the corresponding languages.12 On the other hand, according toMaksymovych, North Russian and South Russian were held in specific re-lation to one another: they were the closest of linguistic relatives and to-gether, of all the Slavic languages, they had retained the most ancient ofproto-Slavic traits in their respective sound systems. Moreover, Maksy-movych credited the North Russian language with a specific role in thewhole Slavic world as ‘superior’ to all the other Slavic languages.13

Following Maksymovych, some other Ukrainian writers in the 1830sand 1840s, like Mykola Kostomarov (Ieremyi Halka), used the diacriticalmark ̂ in their works.14 However, in general Kostomarov followed the pho-netic rather than the etymological principle proposed by Maksymovych,even introducing in his collection Branch (Vitka, 1841) a letter that did notexist in Russian orthography, the Latin g to express those relatively fewcases when the etymological equivalent of the Russian ã was pronouncedas [g] and where today ´ is written. Taras Shevchenko’s Kobzar, too, had anorthography that was based on the phonetic principle, without howevercontaining any new letters or diacritical marks.15Shevchenko used the û tomark the vowel [I] that is today written as è, while he used è for what is

12 M. Maksimovich. Nachatki ruskoi filologii. Kniga pervaia. Ob otnoshenii ruskoi rechik zapadnozlavianskoi. Kiev: Tipografiia Feofila Gliksberga, 1848. Pp. 36-37, 42-43.13 Ibid. Vol. 1. Especially Pp. 25-28, 31-32, 47, 52-54, 105-106.14 [Mykola Kostomarov] Ieremii Halka (pseud.). Vitka. Kharkiv: Universitetskaiatipografiia, 1840.15 T. Shevchenko. Kobzar. St. Petersburg: Tipografiia E. Fishera, 1840.

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today the ³ [i], occasionally even writing ³. Shevchenko’s orthography wasfully based on the letters that existed in literary Russian, and he used themroughly to mark the same sounds as they did in Russian. The prominentprose writer Hryhoryi Kvitka-Osnov’ianenko, too, preferred the phoneticprinciple. Kvitka altogether abandoned the letter h, thus distancing the Ukrai-nian from the Russian; on the other hand, he used both è and û to mark thesame sounds as they did in Russian orthography.16The almanac Sheaf (Snip)edited by Aleksandr Korsun, which appeared in 1841 and contained worksfrom all the most prominent Ukrainian writers, used two specific lettersthat did not exist in Russian orthography: the Latin j, which marked [i],roughly the phonetic equivalent of the Russian è, and the Latin g, used in away similar to that in Kostomarov’s system.17Thus the title of the almanacwas actually written Snjp.

In 1839, Amvrosyi Metlynskyi, at the time a postgraduate student atKharkiv University, but later a professor of Russian literature, at first inKharkiv and then at St. Vladimir’s University of Kyiv, proposed a compro-mise between the phonetic and etymological principles, slightly modifyingMaksymovych’s orthography closer to the Ukrainian sound system. WhereMaksymovych wrote ô and ê and the Ukrainians pronounced [³], Metlyns’kyiwrote û. His solution was not very consistent, for he ended up definingthree different sound values for the letter è, while what he perceived as oneand the same sound [i] could be written through three different letters: è, û,or h.18 In his South Russian Collection published in 1848, Metlynskyi os-tensibly retained his previous principal compromise between phonetic andetymological orthography. Indeed, he came much closer to the phonetic prin-ciple through dropping the letters û and h altogether and ú everywhere,except where the latter marked the absence of palatalization of consonantsin middle syllables, leaving for it the same role that it has had in Russianorthography since 1917. Instead of û, Metlynskyi wrote è to express theUkrainian [I]. To express the diphthong [jå], he introduced a new letter, º,which was absent in Russian orthography, although it was used in the OldSlavonic alphabet.19

16 H. Osnov’ianenko. Kozyr-Divka. St. Petersburg: Tipografiia 3 departamentaGosudarstv. Imushchestv, 1838.17 Snjp, ukrains’kii novorochnyk. Zkrutyv Aleksandr Korsun. Kharkiv, 1841.18 [Amvrosyi Metlynsk’yi] Amvrosii Mohyla (pseud.). Dumki i pisni ta shche de-shcho.Har’kov: Universitetskaiia tipografia, 1839. Pp. 13-15.19 Iuzhnyi russkii sbornik, izdanie Amvrosiia Metlinskogo. Khar’kov: Universitetskaiatipografiia, 1848. Pp. 9-18.

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In his literary activities, Metlynskyi was motivated by Ukrainian na-tional ideas. He knew from Kostomarov about the existence of the SlavicSociety of St. Cyril and St. Methodius, the first Ukrainian undergroundpolitical society that aimed at a Pan-Slav republican federation, with Ukraineas one of the constituent federal states.20Metlynskyi expressed a positiveopinion about the Society’s plans to publish books for the common people.However, he would have preferred an informal group in order to avoidcriminal responsibility for establishing an illegal society. He also recom-mended that the group should practice some official-sounding rhetoric insupport of Orthodoxy and autocracy, writing to Kostomarov:

…then something about the nationality which is indissolubly boundwith Orthodoxy and autocracy, following the example of the GeographicSociety and the like (you understand that it is necessary to leave some-thing for the reader to comprehend and to follow not only the national,but also the official forms).21

Metlynskyi did not share the radical social egalitarianism of the mem-bers of the Slavic Society of St. Cyril and St. Methodius, for he disap-proved of the idea of the struggle against the nobility.22In the South Rus-sian Collection he called Ukrainian “a language or a dialect.”23However,the contents of Metlynskyi’s letter indicate that support for the so-called“official nationality” was for him a practical matter and not a primary ques-tion. He was somewhat closer to full-fledged Ukrainian nationalism thanMaksymovych, for whom official all-Russian patriotism entailed a genuineemotional appeal. However, Metlynskyi was not ready to get involved inunderground revolutionary activities either, which differentiated him fromKostomarov and other members of the Slavic Society of St. Cyril and St.Methodius. As to the orthographic disputes, Metlynskyi attributed to thema national relevance: “I do not think, as you wrote and write, that the or-thography war is useless, since the script and pronunciation is a characteris-tic emblem (znamia kharakterna) also of the essence of nationality.”24Despite

20 For the Society in general, see P. A. Zaionchkovskii. Kirillo-Mefodievskoe obshchestvo(1846-1847). Moscow, 1959. I use the name of the society as it appears in the documentsof the investigation.21 I. I. Hil’z et al (Eds.). Kyrylo-mefodiivs’ke tovarystvo. Kyiv, 1990. Vol. 1. P. 289.Metlynskyi to Kostomarov March 28, 1847.22 Kyrylo-mefodiivs’ke tovarystvo. Vol. 1. P. 288.23 Iuzhnyi russkii sbornik. P. 9.24 Kyrylo-mefodiivs’ke tovarystvo. Vol. 1. P. 288.

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his cautious and loyalist outlook, Metlynskyi indeed perceived his ortho-graphic proposals as national activism.

However, the impact of Maksymovych’s and Metlynskyi’s proposalswas limited. Between the years 1849 and 1855, Father Vasyl Hrechulevychwas the only Ukrainian author who attempted to write for the commonpeople. In his phonetic orthography, he used neither diacritical marks norany letters that did not already exist in the Russian alphabet. In his religiousbooks, Hrechulevych indicated the [I] with û and the [i] with è.25At theend of the reign of Nicholas I, any wide agreement on Ukrainian orthogra-phy did not exist.

Apart from the discussion of Ukrainian Cyrillic orthography under Nicho-las I, a Latin alphabet, too, appeared in a bilingual Polish-Ukrainian bookthat was permitted by the censors: Tymko Padurra’s Ukrainian Songs withNotes (Ukrainky z nutoju), published in Warsaw in 1844.26In his romanticpoetry, Padurra glorified Ukraine’s Cossack past and downplayed the con-flicts between the Cossacks and Poles, depicting their joint campaigns againstthe Turks and Crimean Tatars. Although the author emphasized Slavic soli-darity, he mentioned Russians only once, and then as enemies.27Padurrawas a private teacher, the Polish son of a steward from the province ofKyiv, and a veteran of the underground Patriotic Society in the 1820s. Hemay have participated in the Society’s negotiations with the Decembrists.He had participated in the 1830-1831 insurrection.28

Padurra’s book is a good indication that by the 1840s, Polish nationalismwas as yet not fully shaped into an ethnic mold, and the ideas of a multieth-nic Polish nation were perfectly permissible within the national movement.As long as Ukrainian identity remained non-exclusive, it did not necessar-ily present a problem for Polish nationalism. Across the border in AustrianGalicia, the minority Polonophile part of the Rusin intelligentsia used theLatin script in Ukrainian during the revolutionary events of 1848.29 The use

25 V. Grechulevich. Propovedi, na malorossiiskom iazyke. Sankt-Petersburg: TipografiiaK. Kraiia, 1849; Idem. Besedy katikhizicheskiia, na deviat’ blazhenstv Evangel’skyh idesiat’ zapovedei Bozhiikh. St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Vtorogo Otd. ImperatorskoiKantseliarii, 1952; Idem. Besedy katikhizicheskiia, pri ob”iasnenii molitvy Gospodnei,na Malorossiiskom iazyke. St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Ia. Ionsona, 1855.26 T. Padurra. Ukrainky z nutoju. Warsaw, 1844.27 T. Padurra. Ukrainky z nutoju. Pp. 39, 65, 117, 188.28 Polski S³ownik Biograficzny. Wroc³aw, 1998. Vol. XXV. Pp. 13-14.29 P. Brock. Ivan Vahylevych (1811-1866) and the Ukrainian National Identity // CanadianSlavonic Papers. 1972. Vol. 14. No. 2. Pp. 172-185.

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of the Latin alphabet may have had some support among the members ofthe Slavic Society of St. Cyril and St. Methodius. Among Mykola Kos-tomarov’s confiscated papers, there was a handwritten copy of TarasShevchenko’s Kobzar in Latin letters. However, at least the published partof the investigation documents does not bring any additional light to thisenigmatic fact.30

The orthography proposed by Panteleimon Kulish in his Essays on South-ern Rus in 1856 was to have a great future, in any case, for it became thebasis for the development of modern standard Ukrainian orthography. Fol-lowing Metlinskyi, Kulish altogether abandoned û, sharing with Maksy-movych the opinion that the corresponding sound did not exist in the Ukrai-nian:

Until now the letter û, through which the authors have expressedthe soft Southern è, has unpleasantly disturbed the eyes of the unac-customed reader… However, it is so inappropriate to South Russianspeech that an inhabitant of Poltava or Chikhirin even in a Great Rus-sian book cannot pronounce the sounds vy, my (âû, ìû) etc. He willpronounce something like the words vi, mi (âè, ìè), but never will hesay vy, or mi [sic?] in such a hard way (tverdo) as a northern inhabitantpronounces it. The sound û does not at all exist in the Little Russianlanguage, which is embodied for me in the dialect most common to theLittle Russians, namely that of Poltava and Chikhirin; that is why Ihave excluded it from my orthography.31

Kulish solved the postulated orthographic problem by writing è insteadof û and ³ instead of è. Both these letters existed in Russian, although ³ waslater abandoned. However, as Kulish used these letters in a way differentfrom the Russian, his reform made the Ukrainian texts look different fromthe Russian ones. Without presenting any explicit arguments in favor of hisdecision, Kulish also abandoned the letter h, writing most often ³ in accor-dance with the actual pronunciation. Kulish also followed Metlynskyi inusing the letter º [jå], which the latter had introduced. This letter was argu-ably needed because of the perceived difference between the Russian andthe Ukrainian pronunciations: while the Russian å occurs more often in ayotized form as [jå], the Ukrainian å is often a simple [å]. However, Kulish

30 Kyrylo-Mefodiivs’ke Tovarystvo. Vol. 1. P. 249. List of Kostomarov’s confiscatedpapers.31 P. Kulish. Zapiski o iuzhnoi Rusi. Vols. 1-2. St. Petersburg, 1856-1857. Vol. 1. Pp.VII-VIII.

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adopted the º [jå] to express the pronunciation that is rather similar with theRussian one and that occurs especially at the beginning of words and aftervowels. While this innovation could be grounded in the consistent applica-tion of the phonetic principle, it, too, made Ukrainian orthography differentfrom that of Russian. Moreover, Russian has the letter ý to express a soundfairly close to the Ukrainian [å], but Kulish dropped the first without pre-senting any arguments. Further, he abandoned most of the diacritical marksused by Metlynskyi and Maksymovych, but he adopted new ones in orderto express the stress where it deviated from that of the Russian.32 In hisprimer Hramatka, published in the same year, Kulish adopted even the Lating in a similar manner as the Sheaf and Kostomarov had done in 1841.33

However, later he abandoned this last reform.34

Kulish’s orthographic innovations were based on both political consid-erations and the actual Ukrainian sound system. In a private letter, he ex-plicitly stated his aim to safeguard the Ukrainian language from Russianinfluence.35 In a private letter written in 1858, Kulish was the first to ex-press the idea of complete independence as the final aim of the nationalmovement,36 although he qualified this statement with the opinion that itwould take place only in the distant future after his own lifetime.37 What-ever its motivations, the radicalism of Kulish’s orthography should not beexaggerated, for all its innovations had been previously proposed by otherUkrainian writers. In the field of orthography, Kulish was a compiler ratherthan an innovator.

Kulish’s orthography, the so-called kulishivka, was in the following yearswidely adopted, and it became the first system to reach a dominant posi-tion. The only two lawful organs of the Ukrainian movement in the Empire,Foundation (Osnova, 1861-1862) and Chernigov Leaflet (ChernigovskiiListok, 1861-1863), both used Kulish’s orthography. Kulishivka even influ-enced a brochure that the Kharkiv provincial authorities published in 1862in order to explain the terms of emancipation to the peasants: although the

32 P. Kulish. Zapiski. Vol. 1. Pp. VII-IX.33 P. Kulish. Hramatka. St. Petersburg: Tipografiia P. Kulisha, 1857. P. 7.34 For instance: P. Kulish. Khmel’nyshchyna, istorychne opovidannia. St. Petersburg:Koshtom F. Y. Chornenka, 1861.35 A. Miller. “Ukrainskii vopros” v politike vlastej i russkom obshchestvennom mnenii.Pp. 71-72.36 Ibid. Pp. 73-74; Although Kulish did not use the exact word “independence,” I agreewith Miller in reading the text in this sense.37 GARF. F. 109. Sekretnyi arkhiv. Op. 1. Ed. khr. 1762. L. 2.

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º was not used, the û was excluded, and the use of è and i followed Kulish’sguidelines.38The reasons for this success were clarity and consistency inapplication of the phonetic principle, but also Kulish’s own activities: ofthe 123 Ukrainian or bilingual editions published in the Russian Empire inthe years 1856-1863, at least 47 were printed on Kulish’s printing press inaccordance with the rules of his own orthography.39

Despite its success, the kulishivka was not universally accepted. Thesecond edition of Taras Shevchenko’s Kobzar was printed by Kulish in thekulishivka.40 However, in the primer that he wrote and published shortlybefore his death in 1861, Shevchenko himself used the letter û and includ-ed it in the Ukrainian alphabet. Indeed, the alphabet of the primer was iden-tical to the Russian alphabet of the time, including also the h, but no lettersthat were absent in Russian.41Vasyl Hrechulevych, the most productivewriter for the common audience in the 1850s and 1860s, returned to hisprevious orthography, which had closely resembled the Russian one, afterusing kulishivka in one of his collections of sermons.42The semi-under-ground Hromada group of Kyiv, the most active and forward-looking partof the national movement, at least outside the imperial capital, acceptedkulishivka only partially: its own publications directed at the reading publicmissed the º, although the Latin g was used.43Maksymovych, too, continuedto write and publish using his own orthography.44Another officially inspiredbrochure that the authorities published in order to explain the emancipationand land reform to the peasants kept close to Russian orthography.45Of theother challenges to kulishivka, perhaps the most interesting ones were pre-

38 Pravdyve slovo do selian ta khutorian (Iz “Pribavlenii k Khar’kov. Gubernsk.Vedomostiam. No. 88. Khar’kov, 1862.)39 Ukrainomovna knyha. Pp. 20-48.40 T. Shevchenko. Kobzar. St. Petersburg: Koshtom Platona Semerenka, 1860.41 T. Shevchenko. Bukvar’ iuzhnorusskii. St. Petersburg: V pechatni Gogenfel’dena iKo, 1861. P. 3.42 V. Grechulevich. Propovedi na malorossiiskom iazyke. Izdanie vtoroe, ispravlennoe.St. Petersburg: Tipografia A. Iakobsona, 1857; Idem. Besedy katikhizicheskiia na deviat’zapovedei Bozhiikh, govorennye na malorossiiskom iazyke. Izdanie vtoroe. St.Petersburg: tipografiia Eduarda Pratsa, 1859.43 [L. V. Il’nyts’kyi]. Deshcho pro svit Bozhyi. Kyiv: koshtom K. Hurta, v drukarniMyniatova i Fedorova, 1862.44 M. Maksimovich. Ukrainets, knizhka pervaia. Moscow: Tipografiia Katkova i Ko., 1859.45 Korotkyi vyklad prav i oboviazannostei pomishchch’ikh khrestian i dvorovykh liudei,vyshedshykh z kripattstva. Perelozhyv z rus’koho pys’ma na malorossians’ku, prostu inarodnu rich’ i movu Kostiantin Bozhovskii. Katerinoslav: v drukarni Ia. Chausskaho, 1861.

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sented by Mykola Hattsuk and Kalynyk Sheykovskyi. In a primer pub-lished in 1861, Hattsuk rejected the modern Cyrillic script as a Petrine in-novation not suitable for Ukrainian, preferring the Old Slavonic alphabetwith some modifications, like the additional letter i´ to express the diph-thong [ji] that is nowadays written as ¿.46Hattsuk adhered to extreme lin-guistic purism, managing to teach readers to count money without men-tioning the word “ruble.” He defended his choice of alphabet by its au-tochthonous character, ancient use, and religious benefit:

I did not follow the Petrine alphabet, which is not suitable to ourlanguage, but preferred the one used in the Church, …orthographythat we really had and that is rooted in our ancient texts…47Everyonewho will learn well this alphabet and become literate in it will moreeasily proceed to the Psalter and read the Holy Scripture, which ismost necessary for everyone in the world.48

It is rather likely that Hattsuk had adopted an adherence to the Old Slavon-ic alphabet from Austrian Galicia, present-day Western Ukraine, where itwas widely used in publications in Ukrainian.

Sheykovskyi, an activist of the Kievan Hromada, proposed his phoneticorthography in a two-volume primer published in the years 1860-1861.49

The author’s aim was to find a distinct letter for all the nuances of Ukraini-an pronunciation. Because of this, he added many new letters that werenever accepted by anyone else, like the � [dΖ], nowadays written äæ, aswell as a multitude of diacritical marks. Following Kulish, Sheykovskyused the º to express the [jå], but he retained the ý to express a non-yotized[å], as well as the û against which Kulish had so eagerly protested. Sheyk-ovskyi’s orthography was too complicated to be widely accepted. In 1870,he dropped all the diacritical marks, and retained only the use of û as thesole difference from the kulishivka.50

In 1863, a circular of the Minister of the Interior, Petr Valuev, banned allliterature in Ukrainian that was directed to the common people.51 As a re-sult, Ukrainian publishing activities almost ceased, and only seven editionswere published in the years 1865-1868. Thereafter a slight recovery began;

46 M. Hatstsuk. Ukrains’ka abetka. Moscow. U drukarni universitetskoi, 1861.47 Ibid. P. IV.48 Ibid. P. VI.49 K. Sheykovs’kyi. Domashnia nauka. Vols. I-II. Kyiv, 1860-1861.50 K. Sheykovskyi. Sho take Ibn-Dastova “Rus’”? Kyiv, 1870.51 A. Miller. “Ukrainskii vopros”. Pp. 240-241. It contains the full text of the circular.

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27 publications appeared in the years 1869-1873. The three years 1874-1876 marked a new peak of Ukrainian publishing activities, when 71 edi-tions were published.52During this short period, publishing was concen-trated mainly in Kyiv, and it was connected with the activities of the KievanHromada. Most of the publications followed a further modified kulishivka,which also abandoned the hard sign ú in word endings after consonants andintroduced the letter ¿ to express the diphthong [ji].53 By 1876, this orthog-raphy came to have a more dominant position than any other had held pre-viously, and was widely considered to be the Ukrainian orthography.54

However, there were still dissenting voices. Of the prominent Hromadaactivists, Mykhailo Drahomanov wanted to bring orthography closer to theRussian. He wrote in the Galician journal Truth:

Not abandoning the phonetic principle in orthography, Ukrainianwriters should, however, also avoid attempts at graphic originality,which is now often mistaken for the phonetic principle. This is be-cause by inventing new combinations without a real need we onlyhinder our common people from reading our publications, for theystudy with Russian books at school; we make more difficult the accessof our books to the elementary schools…

If we, against all probability, were to gain for our textbooks theexclusive position in the schools (which would demand a rapid andbroad expansion of Ukrainian literature and such a great and instantgrowth of Ukrainian national ideas among the local public, which ishard to imagine without a miracle), then a very different orthographywould hinder the access of our people to Russian literature, whichindeed has the chance to be richer than the Ukrainian one.55

52 Ukrainomovna knyha. Pp. 52-97.53 For instance, I. Levits’kyi. Pershi Kyivs’ki kniazi Oleh, Yhor’, Sviatoslav i sviatyiVolodymyr i eho potomky. Kiev: Tipografiia M. P. Fritsa, 1876; N. Gorbunov. Shchorobyts’ia u vozdusi i shcho z toho treba znaty zemlerobu. Pereklad na ukrains’kuiumovu I.M.R. Kiev: Tipografii gazety “Kievskii Telegraf”, 1875; A. Yvanov. Rozmovapro nebo ta zemliu. Z de-iakymy odminamy j dodatkamy. Pereklav na ukrains’ku movuM. Komarov. Kiev: Tipografiia M. P. Fritsa, 1874.54 Apart from Sheykovskyi’s work mentioned above, I have managed to find only onebook from the 1870s before the Ems decree that did not use the further modifiedkulishivka: [A. K. pseudonym]. Svoim zemliakam khliborobam daruiu dvi kazochky.Kharkiv, drukarnia A. I. Nemovets’koho, 1876. This book has both the û and the ú inconsonant endings. However, there may well be more such books.55 M. P. Drahomanov. Literatura rosiis’ka, velykoruska, ukrainska i halytska // Idem.Literaturno-publitsistychni pratsi. Kyiv, 1970. Vol. 1. Pp. 178-179; First published inthe Galician journal Truth (Pravda) in the years 1873-1874.

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This proposal, too, reflected a political position, namely, Drahomanov’swish to see a transformed and democratic Russia as the core of a greaterSlavic federation.56Drahomanov found it possible that Russian would gainthe position of a common international language of high culture for allSlavs, but who would nevertheless also continue to use their own languages,including Ukrainian.57The enactment of the Ems decree in 1876 shatteredhis hopes for a specific Ukrainian contribution to the policy of a democraticRussia.

The Imperial Government and Ukrainian Orthography

Orthography as a political question was discussed in government cir-cles, but the discussions concerned mainly the Latin script in Polish, and,after 1863, also in Lithuanian. Under Nicholas I, the introduction of Cyril-lic into Polish was seriously discussed in 1844 and again in 1852, but theplans were not executed, perhaps because they evoked opposition evenwithin the imperial elite. To be sure, the government inspired the publica-tion of a selection of Polish literature in Cyrillic in 1852. The idea of intro-ducing the Cyrillic script into Polish was revived after the defeat of thePolish January insurrection of 1863-1864, and a few additional Polish booksin Cyrillic script were published. This policy was based on the perceptionof the Cyrillic script as a Pan-Slav, imperial and Orthodox script, opposedto separatist tendencies and Roman Catholicism. However, no normativerules were decreed that would have established Cyrillic as the only permit-ted script in Polish publications. On the other hand, the Latin script wasindeed prohibited in 1864 for publications in Lithuanian.58

The tendency to distance Ukrainian from Russian orthography ran counterto the unifying tendencies of the government. However, at first governmentcircles perceived as dangerous only the Latin script or its influence. Beforethe uncovering of the Slavic Society of St. Cyril and St. Methodius in 1847,the authorities did not pay much attention to Ukrainian orthography. Hav-ing read Kostomarov’s Branch after the arrests, the Governor-General of

56 M. Drahomanov, Literatura rosiis’ka. Pp. 205-219.57 Ibid. P. 133.58 B. Uspenskii. Nikolai I i polskii iazyk. (Iazikovaia politika Rossiiskoi imperii votnoshenii Tsarstva Polskogo. Voprosy grafiki i orfografii) // Die Welt der Slawen. 2004.Bd. XLIX. S. 1-38; for ban on Latin script in Lithuanian publications, W. Rodkiewicz.Russian Nationality Policy in the Western Provinces of the Empire (1863-1905). Lublin,1998. Pp. 172-176.

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Kyiv, Dmitrii Bibikov, wrote to the Chief of Gendarmes Aleksei Orlov thatit contained words borrowed from the Polish, and even the Polish letter q[sic, should be g] occurred.59Bibikov’s remarks did not lead to any officialregulations concerning orthography. Censorship belonged to the domain ofthe Ministry of Public Enlightenment, and the Minister, Sergei Uvarov, hada fairly positive opinion of Ukrainian cultural activities.60That is why inthe field of censorship the results of the case of the Slavic Society of St.Cyril and St. Methodius were not very serious. Uvarov’s circular called onthe censors merely to pay attention to expressions of excessive patriotismof either a “general” or provincial character. He did not at all mention eitherUkrainians or the Ukrainian language.61In the actual practice of censor-ship, the number of publications in Ukrainian did not diminish: while in theyears 1841-1847, 11 editions were published, in the years 1848-1854 thereappeared 15.62 To be sure, it was a heavy blow to Ukrainian literature thatthe members of the Society were forbidden or lost the opportunity to pub-lish their works.63

The next time that the authorities perceived an orthographic danger wasin April 1853. A civil servant named Skrêdzewski, presumably a Pole, sub-mitted an article to the censors in St. Petersburg titled: An Inquiry, is itPossible to Write in Russian using Polish letters?64As a result, the Ministerof Public Enlightenment, Platon Shirinskii Shikhmatov, banned the use ofthe “Latin-Polish alphabet” in articles in Russian.65The ban was applicablealso for Ukrainian, since it was officially considered a dialect of Russian.In the Ukrainian context, the ban was applied for the first time in 1859. Therecently appointed Curator of the Kievan School District, the surgeon andliberal educational reformer Nikolai Pirogov, wrote to the Minister of Pub-lic Enlightenment, Evgraf Kovalevskii, and expressed his concern over the

59 Kyrylo-Mefodiivs’ke. Vol. 1. P. 303. Bibikov to Orlov May 20, 1847.60 C. Whittaker. The Origins of Modern Russian Education. An Intellectual Biographyof Count Sergei Uvarov, 1786-1855. DeKalb, Illinois, 1984. Pp. 214-220.61 Sbornik postanovlenii i rasporiazhenii po tsenzure s 1720 po 1862 god. St. Petersburg,1862. P. 240.62 Ukrainomovna Knyha. Pp. 8-18.63 Kyrylo-Mefodiivske. Vol. 1. Pp. 69-70. Orlov’s submission to Nicholas I on May 26,1847, endorsed by the latter. Although only Shevchenko was explicitly forbidden towrite and publish his texts, in practice publishing was impossible to Kostomarov andKulish as well.64 RGIA. F. 772. Op. 1. D. 4840. Ll. 2-3. An excerpt from the records of the MainAdministration of Censorship April 25, 1859, where the earlier decision is referred to.65 Sbornik postanovlenii. P. 288.

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Ukrainian publications in Latin letters that were entering the region fromAustrian Galicia. Pirogov found that “by the Latin alphabet, the Poles aimat the suppression of the Ruthenian (russinskoi) nationality and its alien-ation from Russian influence.”66Indeed, at the same time as Pirogov wrote,an attempt was made in Galicia to introduce the Latin script in Ruthenianpublications,67 and the Curator may well have been aware of it. Moreover,he pointed out that in Kyiv itself a work entitled New Ukrainian Alphabethad recently been submitted to the censors “with the aim of introducing tothe common people the Polish alphabet instead of the Russian one.”68 Al-though the Curator did not specify who had submitted the manuscript, it ismost likely that the authors were Ukrainian-minded Polish students fromSt. Vladimir’s University of Kyiv, who were then becoming active. In 1859,they all as yet found the Ukrainian and Polish identities mutuallycompatible.69Pirogov proposed to forbid the publication and import of allthe books in Little Russian that were meant to circulate among the commonpeople and used “any other except the Russian alphabet.”70Referring to theprevious decision from 1853, the Main Administration of Censorship nowexplicitly banned all such Little Russian publications, and a circular to thiseffect was sent to the local censorship committees.71Despite its ambiguouswording, the decision was directed only against the use of the Latin alpha-bet, for the Ukrainian specifics in the Cyrillic script were not discussed inthis context. Already after the decision, the Director of the School Depart-ment of the Holy Synod, Sergei Urusov, not knowing about the decision,wrote to Nikolai Mukhanov in the Ministry of Public Enlightenment, ask-ing him to prevent the publication of the primer mentioned above. Perhapsnot being fully aware of the development of a separate Cyrillic Ukrainianorthography, Urusov stated his opinion:

Little Russians from ancient times share with North Russia a com-mon church and civil alphabets. With no doubt, this kind of separation

66 RGIA. F. 772. Op. 1. D. 4840. Pirogov to Kovalevskii, April 5, 1859. L. 1.67 O. Sereda. “Whom Shall We Be?” Public Debates over the National Identity of GalicianRuthenians in the 1860s // Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas. 2001. Bd. 49. H. 2. S.202; A. Wendland. Die Rückkehr der Russophilen in die ukrainische Geschichte. NeueAspekte der ukrainischen Nationsbildung in Galizien, 1848-1914 // Jahrbücher fürGeschichte Osteuropas. 2001. Bd. 49. H. 2. S. 182-183.68 RGIA. F. 772. Op. 1. D. 4840. L. 1.69 J. Remy. Higher Education and National Identity. Polish Student Activism in Russia1832-1863. Helsinki, 2000. Pp. 252-262.70 RGIA. F. 772. Op. 1. D. 4840. L. 1.71 RGIA. F. 772. Op. 1. D. 4840. L. 2-3.

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of the South Russian alphabet from the North Russian or Muscoviteone is based on evil intentions: by the Latin alphabet there cameabout the apostasy of the Western Serbs to Catholicism, and in Galiciaunder Catholic influence there has already emerged a controversy be-tween the two parties, Ruthenian (Russinskoi) and Polish, the latter ofwhich demands the introduction of the Polish, or Latin, alphabet, in-stead of the Old Slavonic and Russian ones.72

Urusov expected “results harmful for Orthodoxy” from the circulationof the Little Russian books with the Latin alphabet. Although his interven-tion did not have immediate effects, as the case had already been decided, itillustrates well the fairly broad international and religious connotations at-tributed to alphabets in some circles of the imperial administration. Kulishwas not the only one to find the alphabet question crucial. The ban on theLatin alphabet in Russian publications was endorsed in temporary rules forthe press in 1862.73

Despite their strong disapproval of the use of the Latin alphabet, theauthorities had not noticed that a certain Kirill Kadinskii, a little-knownRussian author, had in 1842 already legally published a book in St. Peters-burg in which he proposed the introduction of the Latin alphabet into theRussian language.74 Kadinskii repeated the proposal in 1857 in a brochurethat again passed the censorship.75 His orthography was to a great extentbased on modern French. For instance, Kadinskii found the Latin g thedesirable equivalent to the Russian æ and the Latin x the equivalent of theø. The word æèð should have been written gir, the verb øèòü should

72 RGIA. F. 772. Op. 1. D. 4840. L. 8.73 Sbornik postanovlenii. P. 478. The ban was mentioned in the appendix that containedthose of the previous rules that retained their force.74 K. Kadinskii. Uproshchenie russkoi grammatiki. St. Petersburg: Tipografiia ShtabaVoenno-uchebnykh zavedenii, 1842. This book has not been available to me, and I amindebted to Mikhail Dolbilov who informed me about its existence; Ia. K. Grot. Ocherkistorii russkogo pravopisania. 4-e, dopolnennoe izdanie. St. Petersburg, 1899. Pp. 665-666. Pages 673-674 mention Kadinskii’s proposals as worthless, hinting at his Polishbackground, which is probably a mistake; apart from the brochures that advocated hislinguistic reform, Kadinskii published textbooks in history and geology. He also wrotetwo titles on weights and measures: Sistema vseobshchikh mer. St. Petersburg: TipografiiaAkademii Nauk, 1856; Idem. O merakh i vesakh. St. Petersburg, 1861. Since thesebooks have not been available to me either, I do not know whether he also proposed toreform the Russian weights and measures.75 K. Kadinskii. Preobrazovanie i uproshchenie ruskago pravopisaniia. St. Petersburg:Tipografiia Imperatorskoi Akademii Nauk, 1857.

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have been xith. Kadinskii claimed that the introduction of the Latin alpha-bet would shorten and simplify the text and even make it more beautiful.Moreover, the Latin script would at once put an end to all the orthographicambiguities and controversies in Russian that Kadinskii claimed were dueto the fact that the Cyrillic script did not have letters for all the Russiansounds, whereas the Latin script did. He enthusiastically denied the con-nection made between the Latin alphabet and the Poles, and also claimedthat the latter would benefit from adopting his orthography, since they wouldno longer need cumbersome diacritical marks. Russians, Poles, and Czechsshould all abandon their “barbarous” scripts and adopt the alphabet of “en-lightened nations.”76 Indeed, Kadinskii argued that the introduction of hisorthography would be politically beneficial, for it would unite the two na-tions, Russians and Poles, who lived under one government and who dif-fered mainly in their orthographies. He found the difference between theRussian and Polish orthographies more fundamental than the linguistic orreligious differences. Although the authorities were inclined to perceivePolish subversion in the attempt to introduce the Latin alphabet, Kadinskiiindeed aimed at greater linguistic unity in the Empire.

Kadinskii’s eccentric proposals did not gain popularity. The authoritiesnoticed his activities as a would-be orthographic reformer only after theappearance of two additional brochures in 1862 that were actually writtenin the Latin alphabet.77 This time Kadinskii presented the further argumentthat the Latin script would make simple Russian texts, like announcements,comprehensible to foreigners. In May, the Acting Minister of Public En-lightenment, Aleksandr Golovnin, informed the St. Petersburg CensorshipCommittee that Alexander II had noticed Kadinskii’s brochures and ob-served that they should not have been permitted.78 Kadinskii tried to appealto Golovnin, in vain, claiming that the ban on the “Latin-Polish alphabet”could not be applied to his “Latin-Russian” one. Kadinskii’s letters to Golov-nin, written in the Latin alphabet, reveal a curious Westernizing orienta-tion: for instance, he claimed that the ugly letter ä, different from its hand-written variant, was retained in the press only “out of hypocrisy in order tobe but somehow different from the educated people (chtob xoth cem-nibudh

76 K. Kadinskii. Preobrazovanie. P. 19.77 [Kadinskii]. Predlogenie vseem Ruschim gramotnhim lüdeam. St. Petersburg:Tipografiia Imperatorskoi Akademii Nauk, 1862; Idem. Obrazetz ruscoho pravopisania.St. Petersburg: Tipografia Imperatorskoi Akademii Nauk, 1862.78 RGIA. F. 773. Op. 1. D. 120. Golovnin to the Chairman of the St. Petersburg CensorshipCommittee. May 19, 1862. L. 9.

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otlichitsea ot lüdei obrazovannhix)” 79; he also claimed that the rejection ofhis orthographic reform would mean that “the Russian nation has to remainforever an illiterate nation (Ruschy narod dollgen na vsegda ostavathseabezgramotnhim narodom).”80

The initial permission of Kadinskii’s brochures nine years after the banon the Latin alphabet in Russian texts reflects the general ineffectiveness ofthe imperial bureaucracy in executing the decisions of the central govern-ment. The same phenomenon is evident in the case of a collection of songs,Little Russian Songs, Jokes, and Epic Poems, that a Kievan bookseller,Anton Kocipiñski, a Pole, published in Leipzig in both Cyrillic and Latintext.81 In November 1861, the censor Orest Novitskii in Kyiv permitted thebook for circulation in Russia. For three years, the book was lawfully onsale. Meanwhile the censorship passed from the jurisdiction of the Ministryof Public Enlightenment to that of the Ministry of the Interior in 1863, andNovitskii advanced to the position of the chairman of the Censorship Com-mittee in Kyiv. In this capacity, he wrote a denunciatory letter againstUkrainian literature to the Minister of the Interior, Petr Valuev, in 1863 thatstarted the official process leading to the above-mentioned circular con-taining the restrictions against Ukrainian publications.82In December 1864,Valuev was informed about the song collection in Latin script from Ko-cipiñski’s announcement in a newspaper. The Minister inquired at the localCensorship Committee how such a transgression of the rules had been pos-sible and which of the censors was guilty. Now Novitskii, who had partic-ipated in the enactment of the restrictions against the Ukrainian publica-tions, was suddenly charged of his previous excessive permissiveness con-cerning the Latin script in 1861. The Censorship Committee sided with himand found no transgression:

Kocipiñski�s publication Little Russian Songs, Jokes and Epic Po-ems is printed in two alphabets, not one: on the one hand, in the Russianscript for Russians, and on the other hand in the Latin-Polish script forPoles, and not only for those of the latter who inhabit this South-West-ern region, but also to those in the Kingdom of Poland, the Poznañ

79 RGIA. F. 773. Op. 1. D. 120. Kadinskii to Golovnin June 28, 1862. L. 14. Kadinskiipointed out that the form of this letter that was used in handwriting looked differentfrom the one that was used in print.80 RGIA. F. 773. Op. 1. D. 120. Kadinskii to Golovnin September 13, 1862. L. 15.81 The exact bibliographic information is not available in the archival holding that containsdocuments related to the case. RGIA. F. 774. Op. 1. D. 15.82 A. Miller. “Ukrainskii vopros”. Pp. 109-110.

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region, and Galicia, and even for the other Slavs as well who use theLatin alphabet�

In this form, the publication does not in the least violate the circu-lar of the Minister of Public Enlightenment of April 7, 1853, since bythat circular it is forbidden to print Russian articles in Latin-Polishletters, of course, for distribution among Russians with the aim topolonize them. However, the Committee does not accept the opinionthat this decree is applicable to a musical publication that has beenprinted in Leipzig with the aim to distribute it not only in Russia, butalso among foreign nations. Since all the songs� are printed in theRussian script, no Russian will read the other, Latin-Polish text.83

Unconsciously echoing Kadinskii’s argument, the Censorship Commit-tee pointed out that the Latin script made the text comprehensible to Polesand other Slavs abroad who did not know the Russian script.

...thus harm does not follow which the government wanted to pre-vent by the ban on Polish script in the Russian articles for the Russiansbut, quite the opposite, only a benefit may follow in which case Poleswho belong to other powers, and even some of the other Slavs, willlearn the melodies and contents of the Little Russian songs and epicpoems, in which the Russian spirit is rather strongly expressed.84

These arguments may have been presented out of opportunistic con-siderations, but they still contain a somewhat more sober and less nervousattitude to the Latin script than the incidents described above indicate wasthe dominant mood in the imperial administration. The position of the KyivCensorship Committee is one more reminder that the imperial administra-tion should usually not be considered a monolith. Nevertheless, the Com-mittee’s arguments did not impress Valuev. Under Valuev’s chairmanshipthe Council for Book Printing Affairs, the highest collegial body of thecensorship administration, found that Novitskii had acted incorrectly byarbitrarily interpreting the censorship regulations, and obliged him to bedirected by them in the future.85

After Kocipiñski’s song collection, the alphabet question in Ukrainianand Russian publications did not concern the government for eleven years,until the Ems decree in May 1876 stipulated the use of “Russian orthogra-phy” in Ukrainian publications, explicitly banning printing in the “so-called

83 RGIA. F. 773. Op. 1. D. Novitskii to Valuev, January 12, 1865. L. 2-3.84 RGIA. F. 773. Op. 1. L. 3.85 RGIA. F. 773. Op. 1, 4. Valuev to the Censorship Committee of Kiev, February 9, 1865.

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kulishovka.”86 This clause of the decree was the first government act againstCyrillic deviations from Russian orthography in Ukrainian publications.Previously, the government struggled only against the Latin script. The rea-sons for this change in government policy must be sought out in the inter-national aspect of the Ukrainian question: the situation in Austrian Galicia.

The division of the Ruthenian national movement into the Russophileand Ukrainophile orientations emerged from the year 1862. At first boththese groups adhered to an identity distinct from either the Poles or theRussians. However, orthography became one of the first questions contest-ed between the two orientations: the Ukrainophiles supported kulishivka,while the Russophiles preferred an etymological orthography that was closerto Russian.87 Later more fundamental differences in political orientationand national identity were added to the orthographic ones, when the Ukraino-philes began to emphasize more their differences from Russia, and the Rus-sophiles their closeness to it. After participating in the Slavic Congress inMoscow in the year 1867, the Galician Russophiles started to receive sub-sidies from the Slavic Welfare Committees for their publications.88 For itspart, in 1873 the Austrian-Hungarian government asked Russia to permitthe circulation of Ukrainophile popular books in its territory, but this re-quest was rejected in the Censorship Committee for Foreign Publications.89

The perception of the orthographic differences within the Cyrillic script asa difference between two national identities was most likely adopted inRussian government circles from Galicia, where the orthographic contestwas the most intensive. That the government was becoming more interest-ed in the Galician Ruthenian question is evident from the Ems decree, whichalso stipulated a Russian government subsidy to the Galician Russophilesfor the first time.90 As the crisis in the Balkans was becoming more acute in1876, a conflict of interest between Russia and Austria-Hungary seemedpossible in the not-too-distant future. The ban on kulishivka was most likelybrought about by these international considerations, while it served simul-taneously as a domestic act that would not provoke Austrian protest.

86 A. Miller. “Ukrainskii vopros”. P. 242.87 A. Wendland. Die Rückkehr der Russophilen. Pp. 183-184; O. Sereda. Public Debates.Pp. 204-205.88 A. Miller. “Ukrainskii vopros”. Pp. 198-199; O. Sereda. Public Debates. Pp. 207-208.89 RGIA. F. 776. Op. 11. 1872. D. 70. The Minister of Foreign Affairs of Austria-Hungary,Julius Andrássy, to the Russian ambassador in Vienna April 14, 1872. Ll. 2, 4-5. Excerptsfrom the records of the Censorship Committee for Foreign Publications.90 A. Miller. “Ukrainskii vopros”. P. 243.

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Conclusions

The seemingly innocuous question of Ukrainian orthography had a reallinguistic basis in the Ukrainian sound system. However, from the 1820sonward, the orthographic discussion was dictated and motivated mainly bythe political orientations of the participants. Mykhailo Maksymovych’s ety-mological orthography was the first attempt to bring the Ukrainian scriptcloser to that of the Russian, despite the phonetic differences between thetwo languages. And despite Maksymovych’s attempt, the orthographic dis-cussion was, in time, all the more influenced by Ukrainian nationalist ideas,whose adherents wanted to draw a clear demarcation line between the twonations. As a result, both Ukrainian and Russian languages today have rathersimilar sounds [i, I, , å, jå] that are nevertheless written using differentletters. The dominant position of the modified kulishivka in the Kievanpublications of the 1870s marked the success of the Ukrainian nationalmovement, but even within the Kievan Hromada no general agreementupon orthography existed at that time.

While the Russian government did not always pay much attention to theorthographic question, it was concerned with possible attempts to polonizenot only Ukrainians but even Russians through the Latin script, which wasperceived to convey much greater force than it actually did. Because of thetendency of the authorities to see the Ukrainian question only as a by-product of the Polish question, for a long time attention was directed onlyagainst the introduction of the Latin script. The government reacted stronglyto the rather unimportant incidents when the Latin script was used in eitherUkrainian or Russian, but the attempts to separate the Ukrainian orthogra-phy from the Russian one were paid scant attention. Beginning from the1840s, the Ukrainian national movement managed indeed to create its ownorthography. Although the government began oppressing Ukrainian pub-lishing in the Empire in the Valuev circular of 1863, it did not contain anyrules about orthography, which allowed the kulishivka (associated with thenational cause) to gain dominance in the first half of the 1870s. When thegovernment finally reacted against the kulishivka in 1876, the Ukrainian move-ment was already attributed not only to the Polish, but was also associatedwith a perceived possible Austrian threat. On the Ukrainian side, the ban onthe kulishivka was rightly considered an act of arbitrary oppression. However,this should not delude scholars of the Ukrainian national movement intoforgetting that Taras Shevchenko accepted the letter û in 1861, the year ofhis death. The letters may remain the same, but their perception evolves andchanges over time, both receiving new connotations and dropping old ones.

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SUMMARY

Ïðåäìåòîì èññëåäîâàíèÿ â ñòàòüå Éîõàííåñà Ðåìè ÿâëÿþòñÿ óêðà-èíñêèå àëôàâèò è îðôîãðàôèÿ êàê ïîëèòè÷åñêàÿ ïðîáëåìà. Àâòîð àíà-ëèçèðóåò âçãëÿäû êàê àêòèâèñòîâ íàöèîíàëüíîãî äâèæåíèÿ, òàê è ïðåä-ñòàâèòåëåé ïðàâèòåëüñòâà. Íà÷èíàÿ ñ 1820-õ ãã. ìíîãèå óêðàèíñêèåèíòåëëåêòóàëû âîñïðèíèìàëè âîïðîñ îá óêðàèíñêîé ãðàôèêå êàê ïîëè-òè÷åñêèé, èáî îí çàòðàãèâàë âçàèìîîòíîøåíèÿ ìåæäó óêðàèíñêèì èðóññêèì ÿçûêàìè, à òàêæå ìåæäó ñàìèìè èõ íîñèòåëÿìè. Åñëè Ì. Ìàê-ñèìîâè÷ îòêðûòî ñòðåìèëñÿ ñîõðàíèòü áëèçîñòü óêðàèíñêîé îðôîãðà-ôèè ðóññêîé, òî Ï. Êóëèø ïûòàëñÿ êàê ìîæíî ÷åò÷å îòäåëèòü ïåðâóþîò âòîðîé. Ïðåäëîæåííàÿ Êóëèøîì îðôîãðàôèÿ (�êóëèøîâêà�) íå ñðàçóáûëà ïðèíÿòà äåÿòåëÿìè óêðàèíñêîãî äâèæåíèÿ: ê ïðèìåðó, Ê. Øåé-êîâñêèé âûñòóïèë ñ ñîáñòâåííîé ñèñòåìîé, Ì. Ãàòöóê âûñêàçûâàëñÿçà èñïîëüçîâàíèå öåðêîâíîñëàâÿíñêîé àçáóêè, à Ì. Äðàãîìàíîâ æåëàëñáëèçèòü óêðàèíñêîå ïðàâîïèñàíèå ñ ðóññêèì. Ò. Ïàäóððà äàæå ñóìåëëåãàëüíî èçäàòü äâóÿçû÷íóþ êíèãó � íà ïîëüñêîì è óêðàèíñêîì, íàïå-÷àòàííóþ ëàòèíèöåé.

Ðåìè ðàññìàòðèâàåò è òðàêòîâêó ýòîé ïðîáëåìû ïðåäñòàâèòåëÿìèïðàâèòåëüñòâåííûõ êðóãîâ, êîòîðûå âèäåëè â ëàòèíñêîì àëôàâèòå ïî-òåíöèàëüíóþ óãðîçó îïîëÿ÷èâàíèÿ. Óïîòðåáëåíèå â óêðàèíñêîé ïèñü-ìåííîñòè êèðèëëè÷åñêîãî àëôàâèòà, îòëè÷íîãî îò ðóññêîãî, íà ïåð-âûõ ïîðàõ ïî÷òè íå ïðèâëåêàëî èõ âíèìàíèÿ. Â ñâÿçè ñ ïðåäëîæåíèåìïðèìåíèòü ëàòèíèöó ê ðóññêîìó ÿçûêó â 1853 ã. áûë óñòàíîâëåí çàï-ðåò íà ðóññêîÿçû÷íûå ïóáëèêàöèè ëàòèíñêèìè áóêâàìè. Îòäåëüíàÿ æåóêðàèíñêàÿ êèðèëëè÷åñêàÿ îðôîãðàôèÿ áûëà â êîíöå êîíöîâ çàïðåùå-íà ïå÷àëüíî èçâåñòíûì Ýìñêèì óêàçîì 1876 ã., êîòîðûé åùå è âîçáðà-íÿë ïóáëèêàöèþ íà óêðàèíñêîì ÿçûêå ëþáîé ëèòåðàòóðû, êðîìå õóäî-æåñòâåííîé.

Ðåìè îãðàíè÷èâàåòñÿ àíàëèçîì òåêñòîâ, ëåãàëüíî íàïå÷àòàííûõ âÐîññèéñêîé èìïåðèè.

the ukrainian alphabet as a political question in the russian empire before 1876

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