Ukraine, the land and its people

by Stepan Rudnytskyi

The Ukrainian language is distinguished by advantages which insure it a high place among Slavic languages. The great wealth of vowels, the full tone, the softness and flexibility, the transition of many vowels to the i-sound, the absence of the massing of several consonants in one syllable, make Ukrainian the most melodious Slavic language. After the Italian language the Ukrainian is best adapted for singing. Most important, however, is the great richness of the Ukrainian language. This richness is all the more remarkable in that it did not come about thru centuries of development of the language in literature and science. [[173]]The common people have collected and preserved the treasures of the Ukrainian language. While the vocabulary of an English farmer, according to Ratzel, does not include more than three hundred words, the Ukrainian peasant uses as many thousands. And, incidentally, the purity of the language is remarkable. Barely a few borrowed words have been introduced into the language of the people thru the centuries of contact with neighboring peoples. They disappear entirely amid the wealth of pure Ukrainian words. What interests us geographers and natural scientists most of all is the wonderful wealth of the colloquial language in very striking names for surface forms, natural phenomena, plants and animals. The construction and codification of the Ukrainian terminology of natural sciences and geography was, therefore, very easy. The infant science of the Ukraine possesses a terminology which, for example, far surpasses the Russian.

The most important proofs of the independence of the Ukrainian language are Ukrainian literature and Ukrainian science. The Ukrainian language has given proof, thru its development of a thousand years, that it is capable of giving expression to the loftiest products of human feeling and human intellect.

Ukrainian national literature cannot possibly be compared with the literature of a Provençal or Low German dialect, which represents the daily life of a small group of people. Ukrainian Literature is the versatile literature of a great nation; a literature which looks back upon a history of a thousand years and continues to develop in spite of all obstacles. A strong foundation is furnished it in the remarkably rich, popular poetry, which has not a counterpart in the entire civilized world.

Ukrainian Literature holds a high place among Slavic literatures. Only Russian and Polish Literature surpass it in the number and greatness of their works. [[174]]

The history of almost a thousand years of Ukrainian Literature begins at the time of the fullest development of the Kiev Empire, when the so-called Chronicle of Nestor originated, the Galician-Volhynian Chronicle, the powerful Epic of Igor and other important monuments of Ukrainian Literature (the works of Ilarion, Serapion, Kirilo Turivsky, etc.). Their language is built up upon the Church-Slavonic dialect, but presents great linguistic departures, as early as the 11th Century, from the literary works simultaneously produced in the Russian territory to the north.

This promising beginning of the old Ukrainian Literature was almost completely crushed by five centuries of Tatar barbarism. The continuous state of war, the loss of their independent political organization, the crushing foreign yoke, permitted only a weak vegetating of Ukrainian Literature for five centuries. Legal, theological, philosophical and polemic literary monuments and the beginnings of the drama, written in a Macaronic language made up of a mixture of Ukrainian and Church-Slavonic, can at the most be considered proof that the educated Ukrainians of that time had too little leisure and opportunity to devote themselves to artistic literature.

But these times of decline of the written literature are at once the times of the greatest flourishing of the unwritten literature of the people. The old pre-christian religious and secular songs and tales were not forgotten, and the active, warlike life of the nation created an immense mass of epic folk-lore dumy, which was sung by by wandering minstrels (kobzar, bandurist). Toward the end of the 18th Century, when the political and national destruction of the Ukrainian nation seemed inevitable, the Ukrainian popular literature reached such a high stage of development that it awoke the educated classes of the nation to new literary life.

Through the introduction of the pure popular speech [[175]]into Ukrainian Literature (by Kotlarevsky, in 1798), and thru the great influence of the popular literature, the foundation was laid for an unanticipated rise of Ukrainian Literature. In the course of the 19th Century the history of Ukrainian Literature has a number of great poets and prose writers to show, who would be a credit even to the greatest literatures of the world (Shevchenko, Vovchok, Kulish, Fedkovich, Franko, Mirni, Kotsiubinsky, Vinnichenko and others), as well as a considerable number of lesser poets. Great versatility characterizes the works of Ukrainian Literature in the 19th Century, and in the 20th Century its development in all directions is making giant strides.

The second half of the 19th Century was also marked by a very active study of the sciences, leading to the founding of two learned bodies very much along the plan of the so-called “Academies” (in Lemberg and Kiev). In every branch of human knowledge the Ukrainians can already point to publications, books and dissertations in their own language.

The versatility and richness of Ukrainian Literature assure it a prominent place among Slavonic literatures, thus furnishing proof, if any is needed, that the Ukrainian language is not a mere dialect, but a civilized language in every sense of the word; and the testimony of Ukrainian scholarship strengthens the case beyond a doubt. For surely nobody could discuss problems of higher mathematics, biology or geomorphology in a dialect analogous to the Provençal or Low German.