The purpose of my personal blog is to acquaint my foreign friends with the history, culture and current political situation in Ukraine. Such diversity seems very checkered, even for such ambitious girl like me, who has an honors law degree and is currently obtainig creative education at university.
Yes it is too much, but that's exactly what Ukraine is. All about Ukraine.
I want to show the difficult, thorny, but very bright and heroic path of Ukraine to independence. And very often it was cultural processes and cultural figures who took up the banner of the struggle for the Ukrainian state, as Ukrainian political figures were often simply physically destroyed. In such conditions, cultural figures used their publicity for the benefit of the Ukrainian state.
In my presentations and subsequent articles, I spoke and will speak, and now I will provide a general analysis of the historical and cultural process of the formation of the Ukrainian state.
The idea of Ukraine as a state was formed precisely in culture, thanks to culture it developed and was embodied in life. The Ukrainian people, stateless for centuries, preserved themselves and proved their right to independence at the expense of culture.
Cultural differences grow out of folk art, customs, and traditions. However, ethnic culture does not yet form the basis of statehood. This makes an intellectual and cultural environment of creators, scientists, social workers, those who create meanings, analyze, have a vision.
Under the rule of Warsaw, Moscow, and Vienna, in the divided territories, the phenomenon of Ukrainian culture was formed, which made sense of the common history, territory, and destiny. Cossack Dumas, Mazepyn Baroque, Kobzar chants, the philosophy of Hryhoriy Skovoroda, the folk painting "Cossack Mamai", the persistence of legends from ancient Kyiv times, the preservation of the language - all this nourished the stability of the self-awareness of unity and the right to free will of the people living on the territory of Ukraine.
(Cossack Mamai is a symbol of the eternal fighter for the Independence of Ukraine. A Cossack plays the bandura and sings songs - duma.)
The culture of feudal society did not have the concept of a nation, therefore, in the competition for independence of Bohdan Khmelnytskyi (from Poland 17 century) or Ivan Mazepa (from Moscov 18 century), we can talk about their ambitions to acquire the right to a domain, to found a separate state with its aristocracy under the suzerainty of one or another influential monarch, who would provide opportunities for the widest self-government. However, even in this situation, the bet was placed on cultural features and traditions as the basis of broad rights.
It is important to remember that at the same time a Jewish cultural community was formed on the territory of Eastern Europe, and Crimea had its own Crimean Tatar state. Under Catherine II, with the partition of Poland, part of the Ukrainian lands passed to the Habsburg - Austrian Empire, Crimea was annexed by Russia, the Jews were given a zone of settlement, and the Ukrainian hetmanship was destroyed. In these conditions, the mutual influence of different ethnic cultures took place on the Ukrainian territory.
The political idea of Ukraine as a land with power and the right to freedom and statehood exploded in the 19th century precisely in the cultural strata. Taras Shevchenko - Ukrainian poet of 19 century, who defended the idea of Ukrainian independence in his poems (for which he was punished by Moscow). His poems have been heard for centuries in peasant houses from Bukovyna, Halychyna and Transcarpathia to the Kuban, and the first monument to him on Ukrainian territory was erected in Kharkiv in 1899. The Ukrainian idea unfolded in literature, ethnography, historical studies, theater, which encouraged representatives of the Ukrainian nobility, overcoming Russification and Polonization, to turn to their Ukrainian roots.
(The first Ukrainian professional theater - CORIFEI THEATER TROUP, 1886. A mobile theater that played Ukrainian plays during the time when the Ukrainian language was completely banned by Moscow. Corypheus - leading singer in Antient Greek theatre. Singers of Ukrainian statehood.)
Thus, the aunt of the future last hetman of Ukraine, Pavel Skoropadskyi, Countess Elizaveta Myloradovych, takes the Taras Shevchenko Scientific Society under her financial patronage. The count, leader of the UGCC, Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytskyi acts as a patron of the "Enlightenment" society and a number of artists, founds an art museum, libraries, gymnasiums, nature reserves in Lviv. It is significant that, at one time, the richest Ukrainian in the world, this prince of the church did not build a single temple with his own money, instead financing cultural, scientific and social projects.
The idea of Ukrainian statehood was nurtured, substantiated for decades, and finally brought to life in 1918 by the same historian Hrushevskyi, writer Volodymyr Vynnychenko, journalist, art critic and publicist Simon Petliura. A powerful wave of writers and artists of the Shot Renaissance, with their own creativity and at the cost of their lives, prevented the RSFSR from absorbing the Ukraine conquered by the Bolsheviks.
The power of Ukrainian culture forced both Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler to consider Ukraine as a separate entity, to form their projects of its quasi-statehood.
(The First General Secretariat of the Ukrainian Central Rada. 1917 - Goverment. Standing (from left to right): Hrystiuk P., Stasyuk M., Martos B. Sitting (from left to right): Steshenko I., Baranovskyi H., Vynnychenko V., Efremov S., Petlyura S. - majority - culture workers)
At the beginning of the 20th century, Ukrainian culture was nourished by representatives of various nationalities, as it is now. The Crimean Tatar Agatangel Krymsky becomes one of the founders of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, the German Heinrich Neuhaus teaches music in Yelysavetgrad (now Kropyvnytskyi), then at the Kyiv Conservatory, the Jew Hryts Kerner (Kernerenko) writes insightful poems in Ukrainian. And the UNR pursues a policy of granting national and personal autonomy to minorities.
During the times of the USSR, it was the representatives of culture, preserving it, bypassing the official framework, in camps and prisons, in the diaspora, who continued to remind the world of the existence of Ukraine, its desire for freedom. In 1965, the Armenian Serhiy Paradzhanov, with the film "Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors", with the Russian Larisa Kadochnikova in the lead role, forced the whole world to immerse themselves in Ukrainian culture, to discover Mykhailo Kotsiubynskyi. Poets Vasyl Stus, Ivan Svitlichnyi, artist Alla Gorska, cultural expert Ivan Dzyuba - many people of culture laid down their fates, and sometimes their lives, for the sake of the existence of Ukraine through culture.
Historian and founder of Ukrainian Studies at Harvard Omelyan Prytsak, literary critics Yurii Sherekh, Hryhoriy Grabovych, poet and artist Emma Andievska and many other cultural figures of the Ukrainian diaspora also demonstrated to the world the presence of Ukraine on the map of civilization. The artist Borys Mykhaylov in Berlin, the director Roman Viktyuk in Moscow, the leader of the New York punk band Gogol Bordello Yevhen Hudz, the American film actress Mila Jovovich sings "Oh in the grove by the Danube..." at elite parties, reminding us that they do not forget their Ukrainian roots. what culture is she from?
Halychyna (Galiciya? Western Ukraine) was once known as the "Ukrainian Piedmont" - at the time of the creation of the сultural institutions - "Prosvity" it became the undisputed cultural center of the Ukrainian idea. And in Soviet times, there was a tradition of confrontation there - from the Catholic church in the catacombs to the wave of Ukrainian punk during Gorbachev's time. Independence was revealed culturally by the Forum of Publishers in Lviv, the cultural journal "Yi", the Ukrainian Catholic University, and a galaxy of bright publishing houses.
Ukrainian culture proved its salutary power, its ability to survive under the tsar, the soviets, the impoverishment of the collapse of the USSR, and the cynicism of the wild formation of primitive capital in 90 s.
It will survive even after the war.
Of course, at considerable losses. The situation of the 90s may repeat itself, when the smartest and most energetic humanities students abandoned their professions and went into business or emigrated for creative realization to places where there were conditions for this. Of course, there will be a serious setback, which will affect the country's international image. Because relevant culture is something that the state can be interested in for the world community, a language, the mastery of which allows you to perceive the country as an equal. Societies are united through values.
It may be interesting for my British friends that during the division of the spheres of influence after the Second World War, the British government agreed to the annexation of Western Ukraine to the Ukrainian SSR, Member of Parliament Eden stated that these territories have a Ukrainian character. We thank the English parliamentarian for the unification of Ukraine after many centuries of division. (I found an extremelyinteresting and deep article about Ukrainian-British relations since the Middle Ages in the library encyclopedia - Should I translate it?)
There can be no limits of gratitude to Ukrainian culture in the formation, support and recovery of Ukrainian statehood.
Map of Ukraine with the names of creators on it.
To write the post, the article "Ukraine is a culture. Why you can't destroy what has been formed for centuries" by K. Doroshenko, the article Great Britain from the Ukrainian Encyclopedia was uprooted