How Ukrainian Peasants Were Taught to Read: Khrystyna Alchevs’ka’s, Borys Hrinchenko’s, and Semen An-ski’s Reading Experiments

• In Event: National-Liberational Projects in the Habsburg and Russian Empires: Socialism, Education, Language

Abstract

This paper studies how a reading audience was created in the eastern Ukrainian gubernias of the Russian Empire at the turn of the twentieth century. Unlike the other Ukrainian territories within the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires, eastern Ukraine was predominantly monoethnic . The enlightenment of former peasants in Ukraine’s industrial east was crucial during 1880s-1900s when the region underwent the fastest socioeconomic, and consequently the most intensive denationalization of its indigenous Ukrainian population. Ukrainian educators had two ideological goals in working with a large-scale reading audience: the creation of a unitary Ukrainian nation and simultaneously its modernization. During those two decades alone nearly 145 teaching tools (primers, grammars, readers) were published. The very approach to selecting reading materials reflected significant variations in the understanding of peasant “enlightenment.” Some educators argued for educating Ukrainian masses in the Russian and European cultural traditions, others defended the need for elementary education the Ukrainian mother tongue. The three most prominent enlighteners, Khrystyna Alchevs’ka, Borys Hrinchenko, and S. An-ski, all of whom had quite different views, formulated the reading culture of eastern Ukraine, which this paper aims to put in conversation.

Author

• Yuliya Ilchuk, Stanford U