Ukrainian literature : $b Studies of the leading authorsManning, Clarence Augustus
History
Ukrainian literature : $b Studies of the leading authors
Manning, Clarence Augustus
Ukrainian literature -- History and criticism
The next century and a half is a sad tale of broken promises and of
political intrigue. Moscow and Poland alike repudiated every agreement
which was made with the Kozaks and the Ukrainians. Discord arose in
the ranks of the Kozaks between the officers and the privates, for
the former tended to adopt the manners and customs of the neighboring
nobles. As Russia steadily increased in power, she kept attempting to
reorganize the whole of Russian Ukraine on the same lines as the rest
of the Empire. Then Catherine the Great abolished the post of Hetman.
She followed that up with the destruction of the Kozak centre, the
Zaporozhian Sich, and finally liquidated all Ukrainian institutions and
rights and bound the peasants to the soil.
Things were little better on the Polish side. There were the revolts of
the Haydamaki and other groups but they were put down by Russian troops
who were lording it over Poland. Finally when that unfortunate country
was divided by Russia, Prussia, and Austria, Austria took most of the
Ukrainian section of Galicia and Bukovina and added the Ukrainians to
the ethnic confusion that formed the Hapsburg Empire. For this group
Lviv was now the principal centre but the mode of living there and the
methods of control of the Ukrainians or the Ruthenians as they were
usually called in Galicia were very different from that exercised in
Russia.
There was by the end of the eighteenth century really two Ukraines.
There was the Great Ukraine under Russian control with its religious
culture mainly Orthodox and there was Western Ukraine or Galicia under
the Hapsburgs with the Uniat Church as the predominant religious body.
Life moved at a different pace in the two sections but there were the
same tendencies to denationalization, Russian in one case, Polish in
the other, and the future of the people and their culture seemed very
dark.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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