The years between 1772, when Austria first acquired Galicia, and 1848, the outbreak of revolution, were marked by a national awakening among Ukrainians in the Habsburg Empire. During these seventy-five-odd years, the Ukrainians essentially went through the first, heritage-gathering stage of an intelligentsia-inspired national movement. They also embarked upon some aspects of the second, organizational stage, in particular because of help and encouragement offered by the Austrian imperial government.
As a result of reports sent back by the very first Habsburg officials who entered the new province in 1772, it became clear to Vienna that the East Slavic population living in the eastern half of Galicia was distinct in religion and language from the Poles as well as from the Russians. The imperial government eventually was convinced of the distinctiveness of Galicia’s East Slavs, even though the East Slavs, like the Russians, used Church Slavonic publications in their religious and cultural affairs, and in their own language called themselves rusyny (Rusyns), or rus'kyi (Rusyn), which to outsiders sounded very much like Russian. The Austrian government therefore did not designate them as Russen, the German equivalent of Russian, but as Ruthenen (English: Ruthenian). In fact, Ruthenen was the only official designation given to Ukrainians living in the Habsburg Empire until its demise in 1918. (The Poles used the term Rusini, which derived from the Ukrainian term rusyny.) Determining who the Ruthenians were not did little, however, to answer who they were. It was the search for a positive identity and the need to express this identity through a literary language that would preoccupy the local intelligentsia during the national awakening before 1848.
The Austrian government and the Ukrainian national awakening
The Ukrainian movement in Galicia received its first stimulus largely as a result of the Theresian and Josephine reforms in religion and education. Since Ukrainians were almost all members of the Uniate, or Greek Catholic, church, any change in that organization’s status would directly affect the group as a whole. Joseph II, who was still co-regent when Galicia was acquired, felt that all the rites within the
Catholic church, which in Galicia meant the Latin, Greek, and Armenian rites, should be equal, or, as he said, be as ‘three daughters of one mother’ {drei Tochter einer Mutter). This attitude represented a marked improvement for the Uniate church. Although under the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth the Uniate church had been de jure equal to the Roman Catholic church, in practice it was regarded as a poor cousin offering limited financial and social possibilities. Under Habsburg rule, the economic disparity between the Uniates and Roman Catholics was somewhat reduced, since the government secularized much of the church’s property and made all religions equally dependent upon the state. In 1774, as a mark of its new status, the Eastern-rite hierarchy requested that the term Uniate be replaced, since they felt it was derogatory. From that year, the church in the Austrian Empire was officially designated as Greek Catholic.
The Greek Catholic eparchies that Austria acquired between 1772 and 1795 (L'viv, Przemysl, and part of Chelm) were under the authority of the Uniate metropolitan of Kiev. The Uniate metropolitan had not resided in his titular city, however, since it had become part of Muscovy in the late seventeenth century. This meant that his jurisdiction was effectively limited to territories within the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. After 1793-1795, when the Rnssian Empire acquired from Poland-Lithuania all Greek Catholic eparchies not in Habsburg territory, relations between the two ‘halves’ of the church, now split between Austria and Russia, became difficult. While struggling for his own survival (the Russian government abolished the Uniate church between 1796 and 1806), the metropolitan of Kiev viewed as a threat to his authority Austria’s plans to restore an independent Greek Catholic metropolitanate of Galicia, the Metropolitanate of Halych and Rns', which had ceased to exist in the early fifteenth century. In the end, the Vatican approved Austria’s request, and in 1808 the Greek Catholics of Galicia received their own metropolitan province, with a seat in L'viv and division into two eparchies, based in L'viv and Przemysl.
Austrian policy was particularly important for education. The several educational reforms not only improved the status of the Greek Catholic clergy, but also had a effect on the peasant masses. Maria Theresa’s decree of 1777 provided for the establishment of three types of schools at the elementary level. In Galicia these included (l) a normal school in L'viv for teachers’ training; (2) district schools in larger cities; and (3) triviums, or basic elementary schools, in towns and villages. Then, in 1781, Joseph II supplemented the reform by making elementary education compulsory. While German was used in the district schools, Ruthenian, or, more precisely, Slaveno-Rusyn, was used in the more widespread village schools. At this time, the first elementary textbooks were published in Slaveno-Rusyn, which in essence was the liturgical language Church Slavonic mixed with the local Ukrainian vernacular.
At the more advanced level, special provisions were made to train prospective Greek Catholic clergy. In 1775, the Austrian government opened a Greek Catholic seminary in Vienna attached to the parish church of St Barbara and hence known by its Latin name, the Barbareum. Forty-six places were made available for Greek Catholic seminarians from both Galicia and Hungary. The Barbareum was Important not only for the theological training it provided, but also because it exposed young Ukrainians to the secular intellectual world of Vienna and to other more culturally advanced Slavic peoples like the Czechs, Slovenes, and Serbs, who came to the imperial capital to study and teach. Although the Bar-bareum was closed nine years later, in 1784, to be replaced by a general seminary in L'viv, it had a great impact in promoting an awareness of Slavic culture among its students, many of whom were subsequently to become leading members of the Greek Catholic hierarchy in Galicia and in Hungary. In 1803, some years after the Barbareum was closed, a konvikt, or student dormitory, was opened in its place to house Greek Catholic seminarians studying in Vienna. For the next ninety years, until 1893, the kanvikt served the same sociocultural function as the Barbareum - namely, that of a meeting place for Greek Catholic intellectuals from Galicia and Hungary and for other Slavs throughout the empire.
Another innovation instituted by the Austrians was the Studium Ruthenum, opened in 1787 in L'viv and attached to the newly founded university there. The Studium Ruthenum was intended to train Greek Catholic seminarians who did not know Latin. In a sense, the Studium Ruthenum became the first Ukrainian school at the university level. All courses were taught in Slaveno-Rusyn, and several texts were translated into that language. Nevertheless, after two decades, the Studium Ruthenum was gradually phased out, and in 1809 it was closed. As with the Barbareum, its functions were taken over by the Greek Catholic branch of the general seminary in L'viv.
The closing of the Barbareum in Vienna and the Studium Ruthenum in L'viv also reflected a change in Austrian policy. The fervor of the Josephine reform era had really ended with his death in 1790. His successors, Leopold II (reigned 1790-1792) and, especially, Franz I (reigned 1793-1835), were less inclined to train from scratch a new stratum of imperial functionaries than to cooperate with the existing elite in Galicia, which continued to be the Polish magnates and gentry and the Polish-controlled Roman Catholic church. As an expression of the new attitude on the part of the Austrian government, compulsory elementary education was abolished in 1812. Those schools that remained came under the control of the Roman Catholic church, which by 1817 had succeeded in having Polish taught in all village elementary schools (triviums) throughout Galicia. This measure gave rise to protests on the part of the Greek Catholic hierarchy, which prompted the imperial government to issue a decree in 1818 that made Ruthe-nian (Slaveno-Rusyn) the language of instruction in Greek Catholic schools. By 1843, there were 2,132 lower-level schools in eastern Galicia, 938 of which used Ruthenian, Polish, and German - 921 solely Ruthenian, 190 Polish, and 81 German. In the five secondary schools {gymnasia), German and Latin, and later German and Polish, were used; at L'viv University, only German.
The point to remember about the educational system in Galicia during the first half of the nineteenth century is that Ukrainian, or the antiquated book language called Slaveno-Rusyn, was taught at the elementary level in schools under Greek Catholic supervision, while at the secondary level the only language used besides the official and thereby somewhat neutral German was Polish. Moreover, in the absence of the Stndium Ruthenum and in the context of the actual social superiority of the Polish nobility and Roman Catholic church, the Polish language continued to have greater prestige. The practical result was that many young Greek Catholic seminarians, the only potential Ukrainian leaders, fell increasingly under the sway of Polish culture.
There were some attempts to reverse this polonophile trend, but they no longer came from the Austrian government. Instead, the initiative came from a small number of intellectual leaders, mostly clergy. It is with their activities that the heritage-gathering stage of the intelligentsia-inspired variety of nationalism was to begin among Ukrainians in eastern Galicia.
The heritage-gathering stage in Galicia
The first center of the heritage-gathering stage of the Ukrainian national movement was PrzemyM (in Ukrainian, Peremyshl'), in particular among members of the consistory of the local Greek Catholic eparchy led by Bishops Mykhailo Levyts'kyi (reigned 1816-1858) and Ivan Snihurs'kyi (reigned 1817-1847) and including the priests Ivan Mohyl'nyts'kyi, losyf Levyts'kyi, losyf Lozyns'kyi, and Antin Dobrians'kyi. As early as 1816, this group of clerics attempted to establish in Przemysl a society for organizing and promoting Ukrainian schools, but the effort never got off the ground. That same year, however, the Greek Catholic consistory did establish an institute for the publication of elementary textbooks, and a series of these were published in Slaveno-Rusyn.
Works devoted to local history also began to appear. It is interesting to note that the earliest of these came from the pen not of a Galician Ukrainian, but of an Austrian official, Johann Christian von Engel, who at the end of the eighteenth century published in German a two-volume history of the Galician-Volhynian Kingdom (1792-93). It was later republished (1796) as part of a multivolume history of the world undertaken in the spirit of the Enlightenment and universalism as propounded in Germany at the time. Engel presented Galicia as a part of the Hungarian patrimony, which, he argued, had been occupied for several centuries by Poland before being rightfully returned to Hungary (this, of course, was the official Habsburg imperial view). Despite its ideological bent, Engel’s history had a positive effect in raising pride on the part of the Ukrainians in Galicia with respect to their own past.
The first serious studies by a Galician-Ukrainian historian were by Denys Zubryts'kyi, one of a few non-clerical intellectual leaders. He published several works on local history, including a general survey of the Rus' people (1836) and a history of the city of L'viv (1844). All his works appeared in either Polish or German, with some later ones in Russian as well. This was because Zubryts'kyi looked down on the speech of Galicia’s Ukrainians, which he considered the ‘language of cowherds.’ Such views were partly the result of his correspondence with Russian scholars, especially Mikhail D. Pogodin, who was a proponent of the idea that there existed one Russian people with three branches - the Great Russian, the Belorussian, and the Little Russian. Zubryts'kyi's pro-Russian, or russophile, views Were also encouraged by his contact with Dnieper-Ukrainian scholars. It was in a letter to Zubryts'kyi that in 1840 the renowned Dnieper-Ukrainian ethnographer and first rector of Kiev’s University of St Vladimir, Mykhailo Maksymovych, made the statement that while there could be individual Little Russian dialectal writers, a Little Russian literature would never really come into being (see chapter 28).
Interaction with other Slavic leaders, whether in the Russian Empire or in the Austrian Empire, was an important feature of the Galician-Ukrainian national revival. For instance, it was Polish scholars like Waclaw Zaleski (Waclaw z Oleska) and Zegota Pauli who published some of the first collections of Galician-Ukrainian folk songs. The impact of Czech and Slovak authors - Josef Bobrovsky, Karel Zap, Jan Kollar, Pavel Safarik - as well as the Slovenian Jernej Kopitar was no less important. The Czechs in general provided an inspiring model for a Slavic cultural revival, and it was their leading linguist and the spiritual father of PanSlavism, Josef Bobrovsky, together with the Slovenian Kopitar (both of whom taught and worked in Vienna), who had a particularly strong impact on how Galician Ukrainians viewed the problem of language.
It was language more than history, ethnography, or literature that preoccupied activists in the Galician-Ukrainian national movement before 1848. In a sense, the language question had been with the Galician Ukrainians from the very outset, having arisen as one of the practical implications of the Theresian and Josephine reforms. These reforms called for compulsory education at the elementary level in the vernacular, and they described the Galician-Ukrainian vernacular as ruthenisch, or Ruthenian. The problem immediately arose as to what Ruthenian was. According to the local intelligentsia, Ruthenian was the Galician-Ukrainian variant of Church Slavonic, known at the time as Slaveno-Rusyn. Because it was the language used in the Greek Catholic church and in old books and manuscripts, it had dignity and was therefore acceptable. Accordingly, it was used as the language of instruction in the Barbareum, in the Studium Ruthenum, and in elementary schools.
Then came Romanticism, with its interest in national cultures and local languages. With the publication of Galician-Ukrainian folk songs, the writings of Bobrovsky and Kopitar, and the example of other Slavic peoples, it became clear (if it had not been so before) that the Slaveno-Rusyn book language was far from any spoken Galician-Ukrainian vernacular. Moreover, Slaveno-Rusyn proved ill suited to and in most cases incapable of expressing modern concepts and secular ideas. These seemingly innocuous linguistic concerns gave rise to questions of national identity, with the result that before long the language question developed important political ramifications.
One part of the debate centered on whether the Galician-Ukrainian vernacular was at all suitable for publications. Some leaders felt that the vernacular lacked the necessary dignity and prestige, qualities that were the strengths of Slaveno-Rusyn. And if this antiquated Church Slavonic-based language proved insufficient, then perhaps some other book language, Russian or even Polish, should be adopted instead. Another matter for debate arose among those who otherwise supported the idea of the vernacular. The vernacularists were displeased with Slaveno-Rusyn not only because it was essentially Church Slavonic, a non-living liturgical language, but also because it was written in the Church Slavonic alphabet {kyrylytsia). More appropriate would be a modern Cyrillic civil script, the so-called grazhdanka. Some vernacularists proposed abandoning the Cyrillic alphabet altogether and instead adopting the Roman, or Latin, alphabet based on Polish orthography. Not surprisingly, proponents of the latter option were accused of favoring national assimilation to the Poles, although such accusations were not entirely fair. Each of the linguistic camps, whether proponents of Slaveno-Rusyn, vernacular in the Latin alphabet, or vernacular in the Cyrillic civil script, composed their own grammars.
It was during the course of the alphabet controversy that the best-known Galician-Ukrainian leader from this period, Markiian Shashkevych, first came to public attention. In a polemical tract published in 1836 {Azbuka i abecadh), Shashkevych rejected the use of the Latin alphabet, arguing that it was unsuited to the language of Galician Ukrainians. Efforts continued to be undertaken to introduce Latin letters, but all were ultimately unsuccessful.
Shashkevych was a student in the 1830s at the Greek Gatholic seminary in L'viv, and he and two of his colleagues, lakiv Holovats'kyi and Ivan Vahylevych, formed a circle which came to be known as the Ruthenian Triad {Rus’ka triitsia). Imbued with a romantic love of their people and inspired by the example of other Slavs in the Habsburg Empire, the Triad collected folk songs and composed poetry in the Galician-Ukrainian vernacular.
The activity of the Ruthenian Triad was looked upon with suspicion, however, by both the local Greek Catholic hierarchy and the Austrian government, which was reacting to new conditions on the European continent. During the late eighteenth century, Vienna had given support to its various nationalities, including the Ukrainians, but by the second decade of the nineteenth century its policies had begun to change. Europe’s dominant powers - Russia, Prussia, and Austria - in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars had become greatly concerned with containing France and with maintaining the political status quo established by the Congress of Vienna in 1815. These three autocratic states, known as the Holy Alliance, were intent on controlling and eradicating wherever possible all revolutionary ideas, most of which were associated with democratic liberalism from France and romantic nationalism from Germany.
The leading representative of this conservative, even reactionary, trend was Austria’s influential foreign minister. Prince Clemens von Metternich. At his urging, censorship was made stricter, and the police were allowed to establish a widely spread spy network. The ruling elite in Vienna became suspicious of anything new, and it was especially anxious about Galicia, where Polish revolutionary activity, which had supported the abortive uprising against Russia in 1830-1831, was still being engaged in clandestinely. Accordingly, by proposing linguistic change, in itself relatively harmless, the Ruthenian Triad found themselves doing the wrong thing in the wrong place at the wrong time.
As a result, the Triad’s most famous publication, Rusalka dnistrovaia (Nymph of the Dniester, 1837), could not be published in Galicia but rather in the ‘other half’ of the Austrian Empire, in Hungary’s capital of Buda, where the censorship Laws were more relaxed. Since the book was banned in Galicia, only a few copies reached Ukrainian readers there. To the present-day reader, there is certainly nothing startling in Rusalka, from either a literary or a political point of view. It contained local Ukrainian folk songs, some original literary works, and a few translations of Serbian and Czech songs. It was ‘revolutionary,’ however, in that it was the first publication to use vernacular Galician Ukrainian written in tbe modern civil script. Tbis became tbe orthographic model subsequently adopted for the Ukrainian national movement in Galicia.
The products of Galician-Ukrainian cultural life in the decade following the appearance of Rusalka dnistrovaia were limited to individual publications. They included historical works by Denys Zubryts'kyi; several grammars, each proposing a different linguistic and orthographic orientation (Ivan Vahylevych, 1845; losyf Lozyns'kyi, 1846); and a two-volume anthology of new literature in the vernacular {Vinok rusynam, 1846-47), the first to appear in Galicia. Also during the 1840s, the Ukrainian problem, both in its historical context and from a contemporary perspective, for the first time was brought to the attention of other Slavic peoples, by Vahylevych, Holovats'kyi, Zubryts'kyi, and Levyts'kyi, whose writings appeared in St Petersburg, Moscow, Warsaw, Prague, and Leipzig.
Bukovina and Transcarpathia before 1848
Ukrainians living in what was the southernmost part of Galicia, the formerly Ottoman-ruled area of Moldavia known as Bukovina, did not experience the first, or, for that matter, any, stage of the national awakening in the decades before 1848. Elementary education was under the supervision of the Roman Catholic diocese of L'viv, and the few dozen lower-level schools used German and/or Romanian as the language of instruction. The three upper-level schools - a gymnasium, a teachers’ college (normal school), and a theological institute in the administrative center of Chernivtsi - provided instruction in German or Latin. Even after 1818, when as a result of pressure from the Greek Catholic bishop of L'viv some vernacular was to be used in elementary schools, the only texts acceptable for Austria’s Orthodox Slavic population were written in Serbian.
The only unusual activity among Bukovina’s Ukrainians was a peasant revolt led by the Hutsul mountaineer Lukiian Kobylytsia. The revolt of 1843, directed largely against Romanian landowners, spread to such a degree that Austrian troops were called in the following year to put down the disturbances.
Transcarpathia, the region south of Galicia on the other side of the Carpathian Mountains, unlike Bukovina saw the beginnings of a national awakening. The East Slavic inhabitants of Transcarpathia and what is today far northeastern Slovakia for centuries maintained a subsistence-level existence as shepherds and peasant-serfs in the mountain valleys of northeastern Hungary. Like the Ukrainians in neighboring Galicia and Bukovina, they called themselves Rusyns or used the local name, Rusnaks. By 1843, Transcarpathia’s Rusyns numbered 470,000 and were distinct from other inhabitants of Hungary in their use of East Slavic dialects and their membership in the Greek Catholic church.
It was a series of problems associated with the Greek Catholic church that prompted the national awakening in Transcarpathia. Although the Greek Catholic church had been established in the region in 1646, its bishops remained jurisdictionally subordinate to the Hungarian Roman Catholic bishop of Eger. In the mid-eighteenth century, an active struggle for jurisdictional independence from the bishop of Eger was led by Transcarpathian hierarchs, especially Bishop Mykhailo Ol'shavs'kyi (reigned 1743-1767). The hierarchs were aided in their efforts by amateur historians, mostly priests, who sought in old chronicles and charters legal justification for the reestablishment of an independent eparchy based in Mukachevo. Their search resulted in the first published histories of Transcarpathia, all written in Latin, including a three-volume work (1799-1805) by loanykii Bazylovych.
As with the Galician awakening, Vienna had a decisive impact on Transcarpathian national developments. At the initiative of Empress Maria Theresa, a Greek Catholic eparchy was established in Mukachevo in 1771 (its seat was transferred to Uzhhorod in 1780), and elementary schools as well as a seminary were opened where instruction was given in Slaveno-Rusyn, that is, in more or less the same variety of Church Slavonic as the one used in Galicia at the time. Particularly instrumental in raising the cultural standards of the Transcarpathian clergy was Bishop Andrei Bachyns'kyi (reigned 1773-1809). Young seminarians were sent to the Barbareum in Vienna, and several other Transcarpathians (Mykhailo Shchavnyts'kyi, Petro Lodii) taught at the Studium Ruthenum in L'viv. In 1807, Bishop Bachyns'kyi tried to make his Transcarpathian eparchy part of Galicia’s Greek Catholic Metropolitanate of Halych and Rus', which was restored the following year. His efforts were blocked, however, by the Hungarian government.
The Transcarpathian awakening was limited to the achievements of its Greek Catholic church in the areas of jurisdictional independence and the educadon of some priests. In general, northeastern Hungary was a backward provincial area. For instance, Transcarpathia’s largest ‘city,’ Uzhhorod, at the beginning of the nineteenth century had a mere 3,000 inhabitants. The limitations of an underdeveloped social and cultural environment, therefore, and not any pressure from the Hungarian government in the form of national assimilation (a policy known as magyarization, which was not to become a serious concern until the second half of the nineteenth century), prompted whatever local intellectual talent there was to seek careers abroad. Their primary goal was the Russian Empire, where in Dnieper Ukraine and Russia proper new universities and lycees were being established in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Before long, some of the leading positions in the Russian Empire’s new educational institutions were held by Transcarpathians. Ivan S. Orlai headed the gymnasium in Nizhyn and, later, the Richelieu lycee in Odessa; Petro Lodii was a dean of L'viv University and, later, of St Petersburg University’s faculty of law; and, perhaps the most distinguished of all Transcarpathian ex-patriots, Mykhailo Baludians'kyi was appointed first rector of St Petersburg University and a leading adviser on legal reform to the tsarist government. In terms of the national movement, all these Transcarpathians accepted the concept of the hierarchy of multiple loyalties; in other words, they Considered themselves Russians from Little Russia. Some, like Orlai, expressed their russophile views in publications. These subsequently had an impact on their Transcarpathian homeland, where the idea that the local East Slavic population ostensibly belonged to a ‘common-Russian’ nationality was implanted in the first half of the nineteenth century.
Leaving aside the intellectual emigration, in Transcarpathia itself a few writers, among them the historian and grammarian Mykhailo I. Luchkai and the philosopher and poet Vasyl' Dovhovych, continued to maintain an awareness of the region’s East Slavic cultural inheritance through their writings (only some of which were published in their lifetimes) and through contact with Slavic leaders abroad. Transcarpathia had no cultural organizations before 1848, however, and its leaders had not yet developed a clear sense of their national identity.
While the Galician-Ukrainian and, to a certain extent, Transcarpathian national movements got off to a promising start after 1772 with help from the Austrian government in the areas of education and church organization, by the first decades of the nineteenth century these achievements had largely been undermined. In Galicia, the new conservative political and social environment allowed the Polish nobility to regain its former dominant position and encouraged a trend toward assimilation to Polish culture and language among all educated individuals, regardless of their national background. In Hungary, the provincial environment of Transcarpathia hampered all kinds of cultural activity, whether or not they were East Slavic in orientation, and prompted the region’s intellectual elite to emigrate abroad. In the absence of any real organizational framework, it was left to the heritage-gathering intelligentsia to carry out its activity in the areas of historical writing, ethnography, and language. In order for the national movement firmly to get under way, however, it was necessary to await some more profound change in the political and social environment. That change did come, with the revolution of 1848.
World History
