| Date | Time | Location |
|---|---|---|
| Friday, November 1, 2013 | 2:00PM - 5:00PM | External Event, Room 107, Alumni Hall, 121 St. Joseph Street |
In July of 1863, the Russian Minister of Internal Affairs Valuev banned a large portion of publications in “the Little Russian language.” On November 1, 2013, four scholars will reflect on the event and its meaning for the development of Ukrainian culture, as well as wider implications of banning and restricting the usage of languages and dialects in global history.
PROGRAM
“Neither Dead Nor Alive”: Ukrainian Language on the Brink of Romanticism, Taras Koznarsky.
This presentation explores statements about, attitudes toward, and classifications and conceptualizations of the Ukrainian language in the cultural discourse of the Russian empire in the first two decades of the nineteenth century, a transitional period before the advent of romanticism. In particular, it focuses on the conceptualizations of Ukrainian language in ethnographic descriptions of Ukraine (Markovych, Levshin), in the first grammar of Ukrainian by Oleksii Pavlovsky (1818), and in literary applications of the Ukrainian vernacular in poetry and prose in the early nineteenth century.
The Valuev Circular and the language that “has not, does not and cannot exist,” Michael Moser.
This presentation explores the following questions: Has the language that was, according to the Valuev Circular, “the same as the Russian language, with the exception of some corruptions from Poland,” actually ever been “the same as the Russian language”? When does a language exist or not exist? With regard to the concept of modern standard languages, to what level had the Ukrainian language developed by 1863? And what did the Ukrainian activists themselves think about it?
Fiction and forgery in official information about Ukrainian national movement in the beginning of 1860s, Johannes Remy.
Russian imperial authorities used intentional disinformation and even forged a revolutionary proclamation in order to discredit Ukrainian national activists in the 1860s in order to convince doubters in their own ranks concerning the Ukrainian question and their repressive policy. The myth of the Ukrainian movement as a Polish creation was created and disseminated for this purpose.
Ivan Nechui-Levytskyi and the Prohibitions on Publishing Ukrainian Literature,
Maxim Tarnawsky.
The impact of the Valuev Circular and Ems Ukaz on Ukrainian culture is a complex question that warrants a finely tuned and nuanced examination. The paper attempts to measure the impact of the Valuev Circular (and the later Ems Ukaz) by tracing their influence on the career and the writing of Ivan Nechui Levytskyi. Most of Nechui’s adult life was shaped in one way or another by these repressive measures. Of course, they hampered his ability to publish his works, but they also contributed to his developing relations with a number of other figures, particularly publishers in Lviv and the Kyiv Hromada. These links were instrumental in creating a robust and effective mechanism for the development of a unified and attractive Ukrainian cultural movement.
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