Introduction

Summary

In the third decade of the twentieth century the Soviet Ukrainian writer and literary critic Borys Antonenko-Davydovych (1899–1974) succinctly expressed the Ukrainian dilemma:

One could live one's entire life in a Ukrainian city and not know Ukrainian. You could ask the conductor in a Kiev streetcar a question in Ukrainian and he would not understand or would pretend that he did not understand you. A Ukrainian writer, appearing before a provincial audience, might discover that ninety percent of the audience had never read any of his works or heard anything about him at all.

But it should be axiomatic that it is best and most “natural” to learn Ukrainian in a Ukrainian city, for the most part to hear Ukrainian on Kiev's streets, and for eighty percent of the readers to borrow Ukrainian books from urban libraries. 2×2 = 4, right? But this equation has yet to be demonstrated under our conditions in the Ukraine. For us, this is still a theorem.

Antonenko-Davydovych's frustrations echoed those of all nationally conscious Central and East Europeans in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For them, the city was more than just an economic, cultural, military, political, transportation, and communications center. Cities, especially such historic capitals as Prague, Budapest, Vilnius, and Riga, were the flagships of emergent national movements. Because the overwhelming majority of nationally conscious Central and East Europeans defined their identity by primary language usage, they believed that the language of the cities would have to reflect the language of the surrounding countryside for their national movements to triumph.