How Ukrainian Peasants Were Taught to Read: Khrystyna Alchevs’ka’s, Borys Hrinchenko’s, and S. An-skii’s Reading Experiments at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

This article analyzes the development of the reading audience in the eastern Ukrainian gubernias of the Russian Empire at the turn of the twentieth century. Among other Ukrainian territories within the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires, Eastern Ukraine was distinguished by its fastest socioeconomic transformation and denationalization of its indigenous Ukrainian population. The education of former peasants in Ukraine’s industrial East played the important role in crea ting the national audience. When Ukrainian educationists laid the ground for the formation of a mass reading audience during the 1860s and 1870s, they had two ideological aims: 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 at selecting reading materials refl ected signifi cant variations in the Populists’ understanding of peasant “enlightenment”: whereas Panteleimon Kulish made teaching in the native language easier by introducing a phonetic way of writing words (the so-called “kulishivka”), Taras Shevchenko did not want to complicate the teaching process and retained all Russian letters, and Mykola Hattsuk utilized the old orthography, which did not facilitate the rapid development of reading.