De par leur but et leur destination, les traductions, dans l'Union soviétique, sont étroitement unies à la politique promue par les autorités dans le domaine de la langue, en tant que “partie composante de la politique nationale”. Sous cet aspect, elles s'encadrent de manière naturelle dans la fameuse formule-triptique de l'historiographie de l'URSS: “épanouissement — rapprochement — fusion” des nations soviétiques, et, implicitement, de leurs langues et cultures.

The Soviet regime's contention that the nationalities problem has been solved can no longer be taken seriously. At his speech honoring the fiftieth anniversary of the formation of the Soviet Union on December 21, 1972, party chief Leonid Brezhnev claimed:

By now … solving the nationalities problem, overcoming the backwardness of previously oppressed nations, is … habitual for the Soviet people. We must remember the scope and complexity of the accomplishments, in order to appreciate the wisdom … of the party, which took upon itself such a task — and accomplished it.

After the military defeat of April 1941, the Axis powers divided Yugoslavia. The Independent State of Croatia (Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, NDH) received the lion's share of the defunct state. At least in theory — since the NDH could claim no sovereignity in several regions — the new state included Croatia, Slavonia, Dalmatia, parts of the Littoral, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Srem (Sirmium), and parts of Vojvodina. It sheltered most of the nationalities inhabiting the old Yugoslavia, while conferring the honor of the state-making nation on Croatians only. Minorities, albeit not recognized as nationalities, expanded the list of non-Croatian people living in the NDH. Without a regular census, which was never taken in the country, we do not possess exact data for the population; furthermore, the published statistics were twisted to support nationalistic ambitions.

Very few people outside Slovakia ever heard of Alexander Dubček prior to his elevation to the position of the First Secretary of the Communist party of Czechoslovakia in January 1968. A few years later, after a shortlived prominence, his name fell into oblivion, appearing only occasionally as a symbol of the “Prague Spring” and “socialism with a human face.”

The amount of writing relevant to the short career of Dubček and the developments in Czechoslovakia in 1968 is tremendous; yet it is not possible to write a “definitive” study on the “Prague Spring” and Dubček's role in it, for the story of those events is still unfolding. Also, interpretations of the Dubček phenomenon will continue to vary due to bias of authors and the lack of hard evidence. Finally, the archives of the Communist parties of the Soviet bloc countries and private papers of Communist party officials are not accessible. It is not possible, for political, personal, security or other reasons, to obtain the one particular piece of evidence — the one vital letter, memorandum of conversation, revealing diary, or a note of personal communication — which would explain conclusively why Dubček rose and fell.

The earliest extant dramatic texts written in Ukraine date from the sixteenth century. I shall discuss dramatic texts that were written in Ukraine and not “Ukrainian texts” because in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and even partly in the eighteenth, works were written for the stage in Ukraine in several languages: Church Slavonic (Western version), the colloquial Ukrainian language (various dialects), and Polish. But all the dramatic works which will be our subject were written chiefly for the Ukrainian Orthodox audience and thus without doubt belong to Ukrainian culture.