The Reading Revolution in the Ukrainian Countryside: Mshanets, 1870–1914

Frank E. SYSYN The Reading Revolution in the Ukrainian Countryside: Mshanets, 1870–1914 n his recent posthumously published memoir about meeting Ivan Franko, the poet Andrii Voloshchak recounts how he had learned to read. 1 He phrases this Iprocess poetically, describing the way “I mastered that great and wondrous sec- ret of capturing human thoughts from a written-on leaf of paper”. Born in 1890, Voloshchak relates that when it came time for him to attend school, the newly built school building in Mshanets stood empty. He attributes this situation to the resistance of the village to a Polish teacher who had tried to force pupils to learn incompre- hensible Polish patriotic songs. Although Voloshchak maintains that this resistance resulted in the closing of the school, he declares that those “commanding power” (vlast’ imuchchi) were wrong in maintaining that the simple folk did not want to learn. He asserts that the village defended itself from darkness (temriava) and in its own way promoted learning. Here and there, children in the village gathered in the houses of those older villagers who were somewhat literate. According to Volosh- chak, it was in these homes by assiduous exercise of an out-of-date and barely effec- tive method of learning, repeating the names of the letters of the Slavonic alphabet, that the youth learned to read. He had learned to read in this manner at the house of his father, who, though a poor peasant, had been among the fi rst nine literates of the village. The literates of his father’s generation had learned to read from an eccentric vagabond who had travelled through distant lands and who in the winter came to the village. 2 There the eccentric was occupied with threshing the grain. He would, after completing some work, run out of the barn, knock a few times with a fl ail, and enter a house. There he would show those who assembled a certain letter and teach how to read it and write it before returning to his task. At this point in Voloshchak’s account he confl ates his own and his father’s experience by saying that the eccentric vagabond recounted “to us” his experiences in Pochaiv and the Caves Monastery in Kyiv and other places where he had been. Voloshchak says that his older brother, who had attended school, had shown him his fi rst written signs, tracing them on a stove plate. He adds that his house was the second in the village of chimneyless houses to have a stove plate and chimney. He avows that books had interested him, and with the help of his brother he had learned to read and write one winter. He 1 “Try momenty z spohadiv pro Ivana Franka”, in Andrii Voloshchak, Moia tuha. Poeziia, proza, lysty, spohady, svitlyny (Lviv, 2012), pp. 164–168. 2 The text says “pobuvav z dalekykh kraiiakh”, a likely misprint for “v” (p. 165). 139 read a primer written in etymological script as well as some old church books of his father’s. At that point Voloshchak recounts how he had come to read Ivan Franko’s famous children’s tale Lys Mykyta (“Mykyta the Fox,” fi rst published in 1890) and then had met Ivan Franko in the village. The account that Voloshchak left contains some quandaries aside from his shifting from his father to himself in describing experiences. Who was this stranger who had travelled from distant lands all the way to Kyiv? Did the older semi-literate householders teach him to read or did his brother, who had somehow attended school? Had the brother attended the new school that stood empty after the Polish school teacher had so offended the villagers or some other school? How did it come about that his father, a poor peasant, had put in the second chimney and stove in the village? How did the church books and primer come into his father’s hands and where were they from? Even the account of Franko, whom Voloshchak describes as frequenting the village, may be problematic. We need to verify Franko’s visits, the best known of which was on the Boiko expedition in late 1904 when Voloshchak was 14, with an earlier attested visit in 1900 or 1901.3 Chief among our quandaries is whether Voloshchak recounts his own experience, accounts of elders and fellow villagers, or even written sources. In relating his experience of meeting Ivan Franko, he introduces the central role of the village pas- tor, Father Mykhailo Zubrytsky, who he says had published a history of the village of Mshanets in Zapysky Naukovoho Tovarystva im. Shevchenka.4 Though that history did not discuss literacy in Mshanets, Zubrytsky’s unpublished autobiography (written in 1896) did, as did several newspaper articles, all of which will be discussed later. It seems unlikely that any of these writings infl uenced Voloshchak’s account. We can- not be sure when it was written, although this would seem to have taken place some time after the events recounted. What is clear is that Voloshchak’s political credo on the Left, both pro-Communist and anti-clerical, affected his account. He had, after all, written this text before his death in 1971 and surely intended to publish it in a Soviet publication. Whatever its political coloration, Voloshchak’s memoir gives us an entrée into the world of how literacy came to the inhabitants of the Ukrainian Carpathians and how some of those who came into contact with the written word responded to it. Throughout the rural world of Galicia, the spread of literacy among villagers in the nineteenth and early twentieth century marked a revolutionary transformation of 3 Between 18 August and 24 September 1904, Franko spent 10 days in Mshanets. He reported on the expeditions in “Eine etnologische Expedition in das Bojkenland,” Zeitschrift für österre- ichische Volkskunde, vol. 5 (1905), nos. 1–2, pp. 17–32, published in Ukrainian translation in Ivan Franko, Zibrannia tvoriv, vol. 36 (Kyiv, 1982), pp. 68–99. Mykhailo Zubrytsky’s son Petro recalls two visits to his father. Petro Zubryts’kyi, “Ivan Franko v Liutovys’kakh,” in Mykhailo Hnatiuk, comp., Spohady pro Ivana Franka (Lviv, 1997), p. 438. 4 The history of the village was an introduction to a document publication, “Selo Mshanets’ Starosambirs’koho povita. Materiialy do istoriï halyts’koho sela,” Zapysky Naukovoho Tova- rystva im. Shevchenka, vol. 70, book 2 (1906), pp. 114–167. The entire work is republished in Mykhailo Zubryts’kyi, Zibrani tvory i materialy u tr’okh tomakh, vol. 1 Naukovi tvory (Lviv, 2013), pp. 292–447.Subsequent citations are to the 2013 edition. 140 Frank E. Sysyn. The Reading Revolution in the Ukrainian Countryside village life. The fi rst generation of literate peasants, the village youth who now had the tool to engage with a wider world, served as a catalyst for changing the social order of the traditional village. For the Ukrainian national movement, this generation constituted the foot soldiers and consumers for the national cause, especially because, unlike the Romanov Empire, the Habsburgs permitted education in Ruthe- nian, the term then used for Ukrainian. Yet too frequently the individual stories of how literacy spread and what it meant for those youth who responded positively to its potential have been lost in generalized discussion. A microhistory of Mshanets, a mountain village where widespread literacy came relatively late at the very end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, permits us to capture some of these individual experiences and to address many of the issues raised in Volosh- chak’s account.5 The written word had always played a signifi cant role in the life of the Boiko- dialect-speaking inhabitants of the village and their few Jewish cohabitants.6 The written word fi rst came to the village from the Orthodox Church (after the late seventeenth century Uniate) in Church Slavonic texts of liturgical services. Priests and cantors in the village were schooled in this script and tongue, though in early centuries their grasp may have been weak. Though we lack manuscript and printed books from the Mshanets church, we can be sure that the rather numerous services of the Eastern Church in Church Slavonic were passed down.7 The inhabitants of the village would have been read to in this language from the sacred books during liturgical services. We also have Biblical passages in this tongue on the fi fteenth- or early sixteenth-century Mshanets icon of the Last Judgment, likely written at the nearby Lavriv or Spas monasteries.8 In contrast to Church Slavonic that we can presume was read from the time of the village’s foundation, we are less sure about the use of Ruthenian, the Ukrai- nian literary vernacular written under the infl uence of Church Slavonic style and orthography. Ruthenian elements appear on the Mshanets icon. A fuller Ruthenian text survives in only one eighteenth-century manuscript, which we know was read 5 For reading and literacy in East Central Europe, see István Györy Tóth,Literacy and Written Cul- ture in Early Modern Central Europe (Budapest, 2000). Although it deals with the early modern period, many of its topics apply to Galicia at the turn of the twentieth century. On the late spread of literacy among the Ruthenians/Ukrainians of the upland areas of Galicia, see Micha Bacz- kowski, “Analfabetyzm w Galicji w dobie konstytucyjnej,” Naród-Pastwo. Europa rodkowa w XIX i XX wieku. Studia ofi arowane Michaowi Puaskiemu w pidziesiciolecie pracy naukowej, ed. Artur Patek and Wojciech Rojko (Cracow, 2006), pp. 97–113. 6 For Boiko traditional culture and the printed word, see Ivan Fylypchak, “Z istoriï shil’nytstva na zakhidnii Boikivshchyny (vid 1772–1930 r.),” Litopys Boikivshchyny, vol.

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