Ukrainian literature in its present phase may be modern but Ukraine and the Ukrainians are not a new phenomenon in the world’s history. They have played their part under one name or another for over a thousand years on their native soil and they have had a rich past which furnishes the present with the soil on which it can operate. What then is Ukraine? Who are the Ukrainians? What is the Ukrainian language? A simple answer to these questions opens up the entire Ukrainian problem, one of the most complicated in the whole of modern Europe and yet superbly simple if the idea is once adopted that the Ukrainians are a separate people who wish to live their own lives in their own way in their own land. The Ukrainian language is an East Slavonic tongue which is closely akin to Russian but which differs from it very sharply in many important grammatical and phonetic ways. The language is spoken by a people of some forty millions in number who inhabit an area that was included between 1939 and 1941 almost wholly in the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic and was after 1941 occupied by the Nazi invaders. Before the Second World War, the country was divided between the Soviet Union, Poland, Rumania, and Czechoslovakia. Before the First World War, it was divided between Russia and Austria-Hungary, and we have to go back for centuries before we find a free and united Ukraine. Yet at that time the land was not called Ukraine but Rus, and even before that it had had a long and complicated history revealed only by archaeological exploration and scattered references in ancient authors. There are many gaps in our knowledge but enough remains to show that the organization of the state in the ninth century was but the last act of a drama that had resulted in the development of an important pre-Christian culture. After the adoption of Christianity, its history is better known and we realize the importance which the country played in the world. Under the name of Kievan Russia, it has been treated by Russian historians who wish to deny that there ever was a Ukrainian culture which differs in any degree from the northeastern neighbor, Moscow. Its name, its culture, and its literature have all been preempted by Moscow which refuses to admit that there ever was a culture in the south which might develop in its own way and along other lines than did the tsardom of Moscow or Muscovy. Yet in those days the ancient Rus or Ukraine embraced territory that was never again to be brought under the control of the tsars. Ancient travellers talk of a Rus that extended from the neighborhood of Prague to the east and they then speak calmly of passing from there to Muscovy for the old state was markedly different in area from many of the common conceptions.