Cultural history: national identity and national organizations
After the beginnings of a revival in the late 1830s and 1840s, followed by a national “take-off stage” during the revolution of 1848, Ukrainian culture entered a period of fertile development between the 1860s and 1914 that in Galicia was unmatched before and has been unmatched since.
This half century witnessed a phenomenal growth in popular and scholarly cultural organizations, the press and other publications, schools, and literary activity. Moreover, all this was taking place at a time when, in the Russian-controlled Dnieper Ukrainian lands, Ukrainian cultural activity was severely curtailed (1863-1905). To be sure, Galician cultural life was not without difficulties, such as the internal controversies over national identity and an acceptable literary language, and the continued reluctance on the part of the provincial administration to allow more Ukrainian schools. Yet these factors may have stimulated as much as hampered the vibrant cultural activity that was the mark of the last half century of Austrian rule in Ukrainian Galicia. The literature on cultural developments between 1848 and 1918 consists of many works dealing with specific topics: the problem of national identity, cultural organizations, the press and publishing, the language question, education, literature, and the church.National identity became a factor in Galician life only after 1848, when political and social changes forced the leadership (and after the institution of
93 V. Levyns’kyi, Narys rozvytku ukrains’koho robitnychoho rukhu v Halychyni (Kiev 1914), 2nd rev. ed. (Kiev 1930); and his Pochatky ukrains’koho sotsiializmu v Halychyni (Toronto 1918). See also his programmatic statement on land reform: Selianstvo i sotsialdemokratiia (L’viv: Zemlia i volia 1910).
The early history of Galician socialism is also covered in S. Podolinskii, Sotsialisty ukraintsy v Avstrii (Geneva [1881]); M.
Hrushevs’kyi, Z pochyniv ukrains’koho sotsiialistychnoho rukhu: Mykhailo Drahomaniv i zhenevs'kyi sotsiialistychnyi hurtok (Vienna: Institut sociologique ukrainien 1922); M. lavors’kyi, Narysy z istorii revoliutsiinoi borot’by na Ukraini, vol. II, pt 1 (Kharkiv 1928).94 Jan Kozlowski, “I. Franko a polski ruch robotniczy w Galicji w latach 1870-tych i 1880- tych,” Kwartalnik Instytutu Polsko-Radzieckiego, I (Warsaw 1954), pp. 93-108; Volodymyr I. Kalynovych, Politychni protsesy Ivana Franka ta ioho tovaryshiv (L’viv: LU 1967); Ivan Karpynets’, “Do spravy areshtovan’ u L’vovi v chervni 1877 r.,” Zapysky NTSh, CLI (L’viv 1931), pp. 205-216. decennial censuses, the masses as well) to think in terms of self-identification. Basically, the intelligentsia became divided into three groups: the Old Ruthenians (starorusyny), who had a vague sense of belonging to East Slavdom, but whose national horizons did not really transcend the boundaries of Galicia; the populist Ukrainophiles (narodovtsi), who considered themselves part of a distinct nationality stretching from the Carpathians to the Caucasus Mountains; and the Russophiles, who rejected both the vagueness of the Old Ruthenians and the “separatism’ ’ of the Ukrainophiles and who considered the population of eastern Galicia (as well as the Dnieper Ukraine) to be part of one Russian nationality. Most writing on this subject is by partisans of the last two orientations and is usually polemical in nature.[425] More balanced descriptions of the national controversy up until the 1870s are found in contemporary essays by Ostap Terlets’kyi and Mykhailo Drahomanov.[426]The best works on the subject as a whole, however, are by Mykola Andrusiak, who is careful not to lump the Old Ruthenians and Russophiles together or to describe them with the pejorative term moskvofily, or to tarnish them as national renegades.[427]
Each of the national orientations had its own cultural organization. The Old Ruthenians controlled the Galician-Rus’ Matytsia (est. 1848), the Stauropegial Institute, the National Home (est. 1864), and the Kachkovs’kyi Society (est. 1874), all of which came into the hands of the Russophiles by the outset of the twentieth century. The Ukrainophiles founded the Rus’ka Besida (est. 1861), the Prosvita Society (est. 1868), and the prestigious Shevchenko Scientific Society (est. 1873). Oleksander Barvins’kyi has written a useful, if brief, history of these and other cultural, economic, and student societies;98 in addition, each organization has at least one, if not several, histories of its activity.99