Literature in the modern Ukrainian vernacular began with the publication of Ivan Kotliarevskyi’s Eneida in St. Petersburg in 1798. Its beginnings were fairly modest, since only 31 editions appeared in the Russian Empire during the first four decades of the nineteenth century. Thereafter Ukrainian publishing gained momentum, and by 1876, when the Ems decree limited its scope in belles-lettres, 302 editions had been published in the Russian Empire alone.^[1]One of the characteristic traits of a beginning literary language not backed by a state is a lack of standardization, and Ukrainian was no exception in this regard. In 1876, Ukrainian still lacked an authoritative grammar and dictionary. The Ukrainian alphabet, too, was still subject to discussion and differing opinions.
In standardizing a new literary language that previously existed only in the vernacular, some areas leave a larger scope for deliberation than others. Grammar is to a great extent dictated by the spoken language, and even concerning vocabulary, reform is possible only up to a certain point, unless the people are called on to change their main language to another. The absence of a traditionally established script offers a somewhat wider scope for deliberation and innovation in orthography, because the reforms do not violate any traditional routines. In addition, a great variety of orthographic principles can be found in European languages. In the absence of criteria for judgments that all the writers in a language might share, political and national motivations easily influence the process in which orthography takes shape.
The questions related to linguistic standardization of the Ukrainian language in the nineteenth century were ripe with political connotations, the most prominent of which was the distance of the Ukrainian to the (Great) Russian language. While Mykhailo Drahomanov proposed accepting Russian loanwords for concepts that did not have an equivalent term in Ukrainian,^[2] Mykhailo Starytskyi spent much effort in inventing suitable autochthonous neologisms.^[3] Their opinions reflected differing attitudes to the (Great) Russians and the Russian Empire, while linguistic considerations played a secondary role. Like the vocabulary, the Ukrainian alphabet and orthography, too, were political questions, and were often understood as such. However, apart from political motivations, the discussion of Ukrainian orthography followed from the Ukrainian sound system, which indeed does differ from that of the Russian. In the two languages, similar words are pronounced in a somewhat different way. To mention just one example, where the Russians write г and pronounce [g], the Ukrainians most often pronounce [h], but sometimes [g]. Either the actual Ukrainian pronunciation or Russian orthography could be taken as the point of departure for the construction of Ukrainian orthography. The first choice made reading easier to learn for those previously illiterate, while the latter made the text more comprehensible for those literate in Russian and without prior knowledge of Ukrainian. In general, a phonetic orthography that followed the actual pronunciation was more convenient for Ukrainian national aims, while the use of Russian orthography as the model for the Ukrainian put the status of Ukrainian as a fully separate language into doubt. However, the question was not as simple as that, for the differences in sound values of the same letters were bound to exist, even if writers wanted to have a Ukrainian orthography as close to the Russian one as possible. For instance, if г were used in the “similar” way as in Russian, it would have one sound value [g] in Russian, but two [h, g] in Ukrainian. For a long time, intermediate variants between the phonetic and etymologic orthographies were proposed and widely circulated, a fact that reflects both the complexity of the standardization task and the precarious character of Ukrainian national identity, especially in the first half of the nineteenth century.
The aim of this article is, first, to present an overview of the alphabetic discussion between Ukrainian cultural and national activists, with a focus on political aspects of the phenomenon. I shall then venture into a study of government attitudes on the Ukrainian alphabet. While it has not been possible to cover all the orthographies and alphabets that were used in Ukrainian publications, a wide scope of different usages and arguments that were used in favor or against them is presented. I shall focus exclusively on the alphabets and orthographies that were used in legal publications within the Russian Empire. Thus illegal publications and those published in the Austrian Empire are excluded. This does not indicate a denial of their relevance, but rather an admission of the limits of the present study. The time limit of the study is set at 1876. In that year, the Ems decree stipulated that all Ukrainian publications had to use the “general Russian orthography.”^[4]This indeed standardized Ukrainian orthography in legal publications and, for a time, put an end to the alphabet discussion, although in a manner highly undesirable to Ukrainian national activists.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF UKRAINIAN ORTHOGRAPHY

The first author to pay conscious and outspoken attention to the question of Ukrainian orthography was Aleksei Pavlovskii, the author of the first grammar (1818) of what he called the “Little Russian dialect.”^[5]Despite the author’s origins in the Ukrainian linguistic area, the Putivl’ district of Kursk Province, he did not consider himself a Little Russian and was not a native speaker. Pavlovskii noticed the differences of the Ukrainian sound system from that of the Great Russian and proposed a pair of orthographic solutions to express them. Where the Ukrainian sounds differed from those of the Great Russians, Pavlovskii wrote them according to the phonetic principle, that is, as he thought they were pronounced, rather than what was the correct equivalent in Great Russian. All of Pavlovskii’s innovations marked the sounds that indeed do exist even in present-day standard Ukrainian. He proposed to write the equivalent of the Russian г as кг in those cases when it is pronounced as [g], today written as ґ. The etymologic equivalent of the Russian и he wrote as ы, which was how he found it pronounced, whereas it is today written either as и or і. The letter h he heard and wrote most often as і, like in the word dilo (cause, case, thing). In this way, he ended up creating the first specifically Ukrainian orthography, without however adding any new letters.^[6]Pavlovskii’s orthographic innovations were based on the actual sound system rather than on any conscious attempt at linguistic nation-building. To be sure, he was fascinated by the Ukrainian language and gave it the status of “almost a proper language.”^[7] Nevertheless, he considered the Little Russians a part of the Russian nation, found the crudeness of the Little Russian pronunciation its most important difference from the Great Russian one, and predicted the extinction of the Little Russian dialect.^[8]
Prince Nikolai (Mykola) Tsertelev, the publisher of the first Ukrainian folk-song collection, criticized Pavlovskii’s orthography in his review of the grammar.^[9] Tsertelev argued that Pavlovskii wrote many words “incorrectly” because he had not been guided by the “best” of the dialects, the one spoken in Poltava province. According to Tsertelev, instead of writing кг and і the author should have placed as a diacritical mark two points over the usual signs in Russian orthography, г and h. This first disagreement in Ukrainian orthography entailed a contest between the different dialects, but it was hardly relevant to the perception of relationship between Ukrainian and the Great Russian language.
The development of Ukrainian orthography reached a new level with Mykhailo Maksymovych’s collection of folk songs, published in 1827.^[10] In its foreword, Maksymovych was the first to call “Little Russian” a language, finding for it a place at the center of the Slavic language group. Maksymovych proposed his own orthography, through which he tried both to express the specific Ukrainian sounds and to retain the traditional letters of the Great Russian and the Old Slavonic. In order to reach both his ends, Maksymovych often placed the diacritical mark ^ above vowels. In this way, where the Russians spoke kon’ (horse) and Ukrainians kin’, he wrote кôнь. His explicit motivation was the wish not to put too great a distance between the Ukrainian and Great Russian languages:

“I do this, first, since I write not only to the Little Russians, but also to the Russians, to whom much will be incomprehensible if I write according to pronunciation and do not attempt to bring the Little Russian orthography but a bit closer to the Russian one. Besides, there is not any language in which the pronunciation of the letters would not have specific variations and special signs, and I introduce rather few. One cannot read exactly like we write in the Russian, but it would be incorrect also to write as we speak.”^[11]
Maksymovych presented the further argument that the Ukrainian middle vowels changed in different cases so that, for instance, the nominative case kin’ switched to konia in the genitive case. Because this variation occurred within a single word, Maksymovych found it incorrect to change the middle vowel in writing according to the case, as it is done in modern literary Ukrainian. In addition, in some dialects somewhat different sounds were pronounced, like kuin for “horse” in the Pereiaslav district. Maksymovych found that his orthography retained a balance between all the different Ukrainian dialects: everyone could pronounce the vowels according to his own dialect, and the pronunciation of a single dialect was not forced upon the others. Maksymovych may have been the first to claim that the Ukrainian etymological equivalent of the Great Russian и [i] was pronounced somewhat differently as a middle form between the Russian sounds и [i] and ы []. Because of this sound [I], modern standard Ukrainian orthography has altogether abandoned the letter ы. Maksymovych, however, found it fully permissible that a single sound was marked through two different letters, advising his readers to pronounce both и and ы in a similar manner, as the middle sound between their Russian equivalents. As there indeed were differences in the pronunciation of this sound between the dialects, the claim of standard pronunciation was an act of deliberation rather than an objective linguistic fact. However, what is most important is that Maksymovych separated his orthography from the phonetic principle in his attempt to bring the Ukrainian closer to the Great Russian language.
Maksymovych’s orthography reflected his national and political position, the claim of the existence of a separate Little Russian/South Russian ethno-linguistic nation that nevertheless retained a close and specific relation to the Great Russian nation. In his Beginnings of Russian Philology (1848) Maksymovych claimed that the language expressed the individuality of a nation (narod). He emphasized that in the Slavic languages the word iazyk meant both language and the nation that spoke the language. Thus the existence of two separate nations, what he called the North Russian (severnorusskii) and the South Russian (iuzhnorusskii), followed from the existence of the corresponding languages.^[12] On the other hand, according to Maksymovych, North Russian and South Russian were held in specific relation to one another: they were the closest of linguistic relatives and together, of all the Slavic languages, they had retained the most ancient of proto-Slavic traits in their respective sound systems. Moreover, Maksymovych credited the North Russian language with a specific role in the whole Slavic world as ‘superior’ to all the other Slavic languages.^[13]
Following Maksymovych, some other Ukrainian writers in the 1830s and 1840s, like Mykola Kostomarov (Ieremyi Halka), used the diacritical mark ^ in their works.^[14] However, in general Kostomarov followed the phonetic rather than the etymological principle proposed by Maksymovych, even introducing in his collection Branch (Vitka, 1841) a letter that did not exist in Russian orthography, the Latin g to express those relatively few cases when the etymological equivalent of the Russian г was pronounced as [g] and where today ґ is written. Taras Shevchenko’s Kobzar, too, had an orthography that was based on the phonetic principle, without however containing any new letters or diacritical marks.^[15]Shevchenko used the ы to mark the vowel [I] that is today written as и, while he used и for what is today the і [i], occasionally even writing і. Shevchenko’s orthography was fully based on the letters that existed in literary Russian, and he used them roughly to mark the same sounds as they did in Russian. The prominent prose writer Hryhoryi Kvitka-Osnov’ianenko, too, preferred the phonetic principle. Kvitka altogether abandoned the letter h, thus distancing the Ukrainian from the Russian; on the other hand, he used both и and ы to mark the same sounds as they did in Russian orthography.^[16]The almanac Sheaf (Snip) edited by Aleksandr Korsun, which appeared in 1841 and contained works from all the most prominent Ukrainian writers, used two specific letters that did not exist in Russian orthography: the Latin j, which marked [i], roughly the phonetic equivalent of the Russian и, and the Latin g, used in a way similar to that in Kostomarov’s system.^[17]Thus the title of the almanac was actually written Snjp.
In 1839, Amvrosyi Metlynskyi, at the time a postgraduate student at Kharkiv University, but later a professor of Russian literature, at first in Kharkiv and then at St. Vladimir’s University of Kyiv, proposed a compromise between the phonetic and etymological principles, slightly modifying Maksymovych’s orthography closer to the Ukrainian sound system. Where Maksymovych wrote ф and к and the Ukrainians pronounced [і], Metlyns’kyi wrote ы. His solution was not very consistent, for he ended up defining three different sound values for the letter и, while what he perceived as one and the same sound [i] could be written through three different letters: и, ы, or h.^[18] In his South Russian Collection published in 1848, Metlynskyi ostensibly retained his previous principal compromise between phonetic and etymological orthography. Indeed, he came much closer to the phonetic principle through dropping the letters ы and h altogether and ъ everywhere, except where the latter marked the absence of palatalization of consonants in middle syllables, leaving for it the same role that it has had in Russian orthography since 1917. Instead of ы, Metlynskyi wrote и to express the Ukrainian [I]. To express the diphthong [jε], he introduced a new letter, є, which was absent in Russian orthography, although it was used in the Old Slavonic alphabet.^[19]
In his literary activities, Metlynskyi was motivated by Ukrainian national ideas. He knew from Kostomarov about the existence of the Slavic Society of St. Cyril and St. Methodius, the first Ukrainian underground political society that aimed at a Pan-Slav republican federation, with Ukraine as one of the constituent federal states.^[20]Metlynskyi expressed a positive opinion about the Society’s plans to publish books for the common people. However, he would have preferred an informal group in order to avoid criminal responsibility for establishing an illegal society. He also recommended that the group should practice some official-sounding rhetoric in support of Orthodoxy and autocracy, writing to Kostomarov:

“…then something about the nationality which is indissolubly bound with Orthodoxy and autocracy, following the example of the Geographic Society and the like (you understand that it is necessary to leave something for the reader to comprehend and to follow not only the national, but also the official forms).”^[21]
Metlynskyi did not share the radical social egalitarianism of the members of the Slavic Society of St. Cyril and St. Methodius, for he disapproved of the idea of the struggle against the nobility.^[22]In the South Russian Collection he called Ukrainian “a language or a dialect.”^[23]However, the contents of Metlynskyi’s letter indicate that support for the so-called “official nationality” was for him a practical matter and not a primary question. He was somewhat closer to full-fledged Ukrainian nationalism than Maksymovych, for whom official all-Russian patriotism entailed a genuine emotional appeal. However, Metlynskyi was not ready to get involved in underground revolutionary activities either, which differentiated him from Kostomarov and other members of the Slavic Society of St. Cyril and St. Methodius. As to the orthographic disputes, Metlynskyi attributed to them a national relevance: “I do not think, as you wrote and write, that the orthography war is useless, since the script and pronunciation is a characteristic emblem (znamia kharakterna) also of the essence of nationality.”^[24]Despite his cautious and loyalist outlook, Metlynskyi indeed perceived his orthographic proposals as national activism.
However, the impact of Maksymovych’s and Metlynskyi’s proposals was limited. Between the years 1849 and 1855, Father Vasyl Hrechulevych was the only Ukrainian author who attempted to write for the common people. In his phonetic orthography, he used neither diacritical marks nor any letters that did not already exist in the Russian alphabet. In his religious books, Hrechulevych indicated the [I] with ы and the [i] with и.^[25]At the end of the reign of Nicholas I, any wide agreement on Ukrainian orthography did not exist.
Apart from the discussion of Ukrainian Cyrillic orthography under Nicholas I, a Latin alphabet, too, appeared in a bilingual Polish-Ukrainian book that was permitted by the censors: Tymko Padurra’s Ukrainian Songs with Notes (Ukrainky z nutoju), published in Warsaw in 1844.^[26]In his romantic poetry, Padurra glorified Ukraine’s Cossack past and downplayed the conflicts between the Cossacks and Poles, depicting their joint campaigns against the Turks and Crimean Tatars. Although the author emphasized Slavic solidarity, he mentioned Russians only once, and then as enemies.^[27]Padurra was a private teacher, the Polish son of a steward from the province of Kyiv, and a veteran of the underground Patriotic Society in the 1820s. He may have participated in the Society’s negotiations with the Decembrists. He had participated in the 1830-1831 insurrection.^[28]
Padurra’s book is a good indication that by the 1840s, Polish nationalism was as yet not fully shaped into an ethnic mold, and the ideas of a multiethnic Polish nation were perfectly permissible within the national movement. As long as Ukrainian identity remained non-exclusive, it did not necessarily present a problem for Polish nationalism. Across the border in Austrian Galicia, the minority Polonophile part of the Rusin intelligentsia used the Latin script in Ukrainian during the revolutionary events of 1848.^[29] The use of the Latin alphabet may have had some support among the members of the Slavic Society of St. Cyril and St. Methodius. Among Mykola Kostomarov’s confiscated papers, there was a handwritten copy of Taras Shevchenko’s Kobzar in Latin letters. However, at least the published part of the investigation documents does not bring any additional light to this enigmatic fact.^[30]
The orthography proposed by Panteleimon Kulish in his Essays on Southern Rus in 1856 was to have a great future, in any case, for it became the basis for the development of modern standard Ukrainian orthography. Following Metlinskyi, Kulish altogether abandoned ы, sharing with Maksymovych the opinion that the corresponding sound did not exist in the Ukrainian:

“Until now the letter ы, through which the authors have expressed the soft Southern и, has unpleasantly disturbed the eyes of the unaccustomed reader… However, it is so inappropriate to South Russian speech that an inhabitant of Poltava or Chikhirin even in a Great Russian book cannot pronounce the sounds vy, my (вы, мы) etc. He will pronounce something like the words vi, mi (ви, ми), but never will he say vy, or mi [sic?] in such a hard way (tverdo) as a northern inhabitant pronounces it. The sound ы does not at all exist in the Little Russian language, which is embodied for me in the dialect most common to the Little Russians, namely that of Poltava and Chikhirin; that is why I have excluded it from my orthography.”^[31]

Kulish solved the postulated orthographic problem by writing и instead of ы and і instead of и. Both these letters existed in Russian, although і was later abandoned. However, as Kulish used these letters in a way different from the Russian, his reform made the Ukrainian texts look different from the Russian ones. Without presenting any explicit arguments in favor of his decision, Kulish also abandoned the letter h, writing most often і in accordance with the actual pronunciation. Kulish also followed Metlynskyi in using the letter є [jε], which the latter had introduced. This letter was arguably needed because of the perceived difference between the Russian and the Ukrainian pronunciations: while the Russian е occurs more often in a yotized form as [jε], the Ukrainian е is often a simple [ε]. However, Kulish adopted the є [jε] to express the pronunciation that is rather similar with the Russian one and that occurs especially at the beginning of words and after vowels. While this innovation could be grounded in the consistent application of the phonetic principle, it, too, made Ukrainian orthography different from that of Russian. Moreover, Russian has the letter э to express a sound fairly close to the Ukrainian [ε], but Kulish dropped the first without presenting any arguments. Further, he abandoned most of the diacritical marks used by Metlynskyi and Maksymovych, but he adopted new ones in order to express the stress where it deviated from that of the Russian.^[32] In his primer Hramatka, published in the same year, Kulish adopted even the Latin g in a similar manner as the Sheaf and Kostomarov had done in 1841.^[33] However, later he abandoned this last reform.^[34]
Kulish’s orthographic innovations were based on both political considerations and the actual Ukrainian sound system. In a private letter, he explicitly stated his aim to safeguard the Ukrainian language from Russian influence.^[35] In a private letter written in 1858, Kulish was the first to express the idea of complete independence as the final aim of the national movement,^[36] although he qualified this statement with the opinion that it would take place only in the distant future after his own lifetime.^[37] Whatever its motivations, the radicalism of Kulish’s orthography should not be exaggerated, for all its innovations had been previously proposed by other Ukrainian writers. In the field of orthography, Kulish was a compiler rather than an innovator.
Kulish’s orthography, the so-called kulishivka, was in the following years widely adopted, and it became the first system to reach a dominant position. The only two lawful organs of the Ukrainian movement in the Empire, Foundation (Osnova, 1861-1862) and Chernigov Leaflet (Chernigovskii Listok, 1861-1863), both used Kulish’s orthography. Kulishivka even influenced a brochure that the Kharkiv provincial authorities published in 1862 in order to explain the terms of emancipation to the peasants: although the є was not used, the ы was excluded, and the use of и and i followed Kulish’s guidelines.^[38]The reasons for this success were clarity and consistency in application of the phonetic principle, but also Kulish’s own activities: of the 123 Ukrainian or bilingual editions published in the Russian Empire in the years 1856-1863, at least 47 were printed on Kulish’s printing press in accordance with the rules of his own orthography.^[39]
Despite its success, the kulishivka was not universally accepted. The second edition of Taras Shevchenko’s Kobzar was printed by Kulish in the kulishivka.^[40] However, in the primer that he wrote and published shortly before his death in 1861, Shevchenko himself used the letter ы and included it in the Ukrainian alphabet. Indeed, the alphabet of the primer was identical to the Russian alphabet of the time, including also the h, but no letters that were absent in Russian.^[41]Vasyl Hrechulevych, the most productive writer for the common audience in the 1850s and 1860s, returned to his previous orthography, which had closely resembled the Russian one, after using kulishivka in one of his collections of sermons.^[42]The semi-underground Hromada group of Kyiv, the most active and forward-looking part of the national movement, at least outside the imperial capital, accepted kulishivka only partially: its own publications directed at the reading public missed the є, although the Latin g was used.^[43]Maksymovych, too, continued to write and publish using his own orthography.^[44]Another officially inspired brochure that the authorities published in order to explain the emancipation and land reform to the peasants kept close to Russian orthography.^[45]Of the other challenges to kulishivka, perhaps the most interesting ones were presented by Mykola Hattsuk and Kalynyk Sheykovskyi. In a primer published in 1861, Hattsuk rejected the modern Cyrillic script as a Petrine innovation not suitable for Ukrainian, preferring the Old Slavonic alphabet with some modifications, like the additional letter iґ to express the diphthong [ji] that is nowadays written as ї.^[46]Hattsuk adhered to extreme linguistic purism, managing to teach readers to count money without mentioning the word “ruble.” He defended his choice of alphabet by its autochthonous character, ancient use, and religious benefit:

“I did not follow the Petrine alphabet, which is not suitable to our language, but preferred the one used in the Church, …orthography that we really had and that is rooted in our ancient texts…^[47]Everyone who will learn well this alphabet and become literate in it will more easily proceed to the Psalter and read the Holy Scripture, which is most necessary for everyone in the world.”^[48]

It is rather likely that Hattsuk had adopted an adherence to the Old Slavonic alphabet from Austrian Galicia, present-day Western Ukraine, where it was widely used in publications in Ukrainian.
Sheykovskyi, an activist of the Kievan Hromada, proposed his phonetic orthography in a two-volume primer published in the years 1860-1861.^[49] The author’s aim was to find a distinct letter for all the nuances of Ukrainian pronunciation. Because of this, he added many new letters that were never accepted by anyone else, like the џ [dZ], nowadays written дж, as well as a multitude of diacritical marks. Following Kulish, Sheykovsky used the є to express the [jε], but he retained the э to express a non-yotized [ε], as well as the ы against which Kulish had so eagerly protested. Sheykovskyi’s orthography was too complicated to be widely accepted. In 1870, he dropped all the diacritical marks, and retained only the use of ы as the sole difference from the kulishivka.^[50]
In 1863, a circular of the Minister of the Interior, Petr Valuev, banned all literature in Ukrainian that was directed to the common people.^[51] As a result, Ukrainian publishing activities almost ceased, and only seven editions were published in the years 1865-1868. Thereafter a slight recovery began; 27 publications appeared in the years 1869-1873. The three years 1874-1876 marked a new peak of Ukrainian publishing activities, when 71 editions were published.^[52]During this short period, publishing was concentrated mainly in Kyiv, and it was connected with the activities of the Kievan Hromada. Most of the publications followed a further modified kulishivka, which also abandoned the hard sign ъ in word endings after consonants and introduced the letter ї to express the diphthong [ji].^[53] By 1876, this orthography came to have a more dominant position than any other had held previously, and was widely considered to be the Ukrainian orthography.^[54] However, there were still dissenting voices. Of the prominent Hromada activists, Mykhailo Drahomanov wanted to bring orthography closer to the Russian. He wrote in the Galician journal Truth:

“Not abandoning the phonetic principle in orthography, Ukrainian writers should, however, also avoid attempts at graphic originality, which is now often mistaken for the phonetic principle. This is because by inventing new combinations without a real need we only hinder our common people from reading our publications, for they study with Russian books at school; we make more difficult the access of our books to the elementary schools…
If we, against all probability, were to gain for our textbooks the exclusive position in the schools (which would demand a rapid and broad expansion of Ukrainian literature and such a great and instant growth of Ukrainian national ideas among the local public, which is hard to imagine without a miracle), then a very different orthography would hinder the access of our people to Russian literature, which indeed has the chance to be richer than the Ukrainian one.”^[55]

This proposal, too, reflected a political position, namely, Drahomanov’s wish to see a transformed and democratic Russia as the core of a greater Slavic federation.^[56]Drahomanov found it possible that Russian would gain the position of a common international language of high culture for all Slavs, but who would nevertheless also continue to use their own languages, including Ukrainian.^[57]The enactment of the Ems decree in 1876 shattered his hopes for a specific Ukrainian contribution to the policy of a democratic Russia.

THE IMPERIAL GOVERNMENT AND UKRAINIAN ORTHOGRAPHY

Orthography as a political question was discussed in government circles, but the discussions concerned mainly the Latin script in Polish, and, after 1863, also in Lithuanian. Under Nicholas I, the introduction of Cyrillic into Polish was seriously discussed in 1844 and again in 1852, but the plans were not executed, perhaps because they evoked opposition even within the imperial elite. To be sure, the government inspired the publication of a selection of Polish literature in Cyrillic in 1852. The idea of introducing the Cyrillic script into Polish was revived after the defeat of the Polish January insurrection of 1863-1864, and a few additional Polish books in Cyrillic script were published. This policy was based on the perception of the Cyrillic script as a Pan-Slav, imperial and Orthodox script, opposed to separatist tendencies and Roman Catholicism. However, no normative rules were decreed that would have established Cyrillic as the only permitted script in Polish publications. On the other hand, the Latin script was indeed prohibited in 1864 for publications in Lithuanian.^[58]
The tendency to distance Ukrainian from Russian orthography ran counter to the unifying tendencies of the government. However, at first government circles perceived as dangerous only the Latin script or its influence. Before the uncovering of the Slavic Society of St. Cyril and St. Methodius in 1847, the authorities did not pay much attention to Ukrainian orthography. Having read Kostomarov’s Branch after the arrests, the Governor-General of Kyiv, Dmitrii Bibikov, wrote to the Chief of Gendarmes Aleksei Orlov that it contained words borrowed from the Polish, and even the Polish letter q [sic, should be g] occurred.^[59]Bibikov’s remarks did not lead to any official regulations concerning orthography. Censorship belonged to the domain of the Ministry of Public Enlightenment, and the Minister, Sergei Uvarov, had a fairly positive opinion of Ukrainian cultural activities.^[60]That is why in the field of censorship the results of the case of the Slavic Society of St. Cyril and St. Methodius were not very serious. Uvarov’s circular called on the censors merely to pay attention to expressions of excessive patriotism of either a “general” or provincial character. He did not at all mention either Ukrainians or the Ukrainian language.^[61]In the actual practice of censorship, the number of publications in Ukrainian did not diminish: while in the years 1841-1847, 11 editions were published, in the years 1848-1854 there appeared 15.^[62] To be sure, it was a heavy blow to Ukrainian literature that the members of the Society were forbidden or lost the opportunity to publish their works.^[63]
The next time that the authorities perceived an orthographic danger was in April 1853. A civil servant named Skrędzewski, presumably a Pole, submitted an article to the censors in St. Petersburg titled: An Inquiry, is it Possible to Write in Russian using Polish letters?^[64]As a result, the Minister of Public Enlightenment, Platon Shirinskii Shikhmatov, banned the use of the “Latin-Polish alphabet” in articles in Russian.^[65]The ban was applicable also for Ukrainian, since it was officially considered a dialect of Russian. In the Ukrainian context, the ban was applied for the first time in 1859. The recently appointed Curator of the Kievan School District, the surgeon and liberal educational reformer Nikolai Pirogov, wrote to the Minister of Public Enlightenment, Evgraf Kovalevskii, and expressed his concern over the Ukrainian publications in Latin letters that were entering the region from Austrian Galicia. Pirogov found that “by the Latin alphabet, the Poles aim at the suppression of the Ruthenian (russinskoi) nationality and its alienation from Russian influence.”^[66]Indeed, at the same time as Pirogov wrote, an attempt was made in Galicia to introduce the Latin script in Ruthenian publications,^[67] and the Curator may well have been aware of it. Moreover, he pointed out that in Kyiv itself a work entitled New Ukrainian Alphabet had recently been submitted to the censors “with the aim of introducing to the common people the Polish alphabet instead of the Russian one.”^[68] Although the Curator did not specify who had submitted the manuscript, it is most likely that the authors were Ukrainian-minded Polish students from St. Vladimir’s University of Kyiv, who were then becoming active. In 1859, they all as yet found the Ukrainian and Polish identities mutually compatible.^[69]Pirogov proposed to forbid the publication and import of all the books in Little Russian that were meant to circulate among the common people and used “any other except the Russian alphabet.”^[70]Referring to the previous decision from 1853, the Main Administration of Censorship now explicitly banned all such Little Russian publications, and a circular to this effect was sent to the local censorship committees.^[71]Despite its ambiguous wording, the decision was directed only against the use of the Latin alphabet, for the Ukrainian specifics in the Cyrillic script were not discussed in this context. Already after the decision, the Director of the School Department of the Holy Synod, Sergei Urusov, not knowing about the decision, wrote to Nikolai Mukhanov in the Ministry of Public Enlightenment, asking him to prevent the publication of the primer mentioned above. Perhaps not being fully aware of the development of a separate Cyrillic Ukrainian orthography, Urusov stated his opinion:

“Little Russians from ancient times share with North Russia a common church and civil alphabets. With no doubt, this kind of separation of the South Russian alphabet from the North Russian or Muscovite one is based on evil intentions: by the Latin alphabet there came about the apostasy of the Western Serbs to Catholicism, and in Galicia under Catholic influence there has already emerged a controversy between the two parties, Ruthenian (Russinskoi) and Polish, the latter of which demands the introduction of the Polish, or Latin, alphabet, instead of the Old Slavonic and Russian ones.”^[72]

Urusov expected “results harmful for Orthodoxy” from the circulation of the Little Russian books with the Latin alphabet. Although his intervention did not have immediate effects, as the case had already been decided, it illustrates well the fairly broad international and religious connotations attributed to alphabets in some circles of the imperial administration. Kulish was not the only one to find the alphabet question crucial. The ban on the Latin alphabet in Russian publications was endorsed in temporary rules for the press in 1862.^[73]
Despite their strong disapproval of the use of the Latin alphabet, the authorities had not noticed that a certain Kirill Kadinskii, a little-known Russian author, had in 1842 already legally published a book in St. Petersburg in which he proposed the introduction of the Latin alphabet into the Russian language.^[74] Kadinskii repeated the proposal in 1857 in a brochure that again passed the censorship.^[75] His orthography was to a great extent based on modern French. For instance, Kadinskii found the Latin g the desirable equivalent to the Russian ж and the Latin x the equivalent of the ш. The word жир should have been written gir, the verb шить should have been xith. Kadinskii claimed that the introduction of the Latin alphabet would shorten and simplify the text and even make it more beautiful. Moreover, the Latin script would at once put an end to all the orthographic ambiguities and controversies in Russian that Kadinskii claimed were due to the fact that the Cyrillic script did not have letters for all the Russian sounds, whereas the Latin script did. He enthusiastically denied the connection made between the Latin alphabet and the Poles, and also claimed that the latter would benefit from adopting his orthography, since they would no longer need cumbersome diacritical marks. Russians, Poles, and Czechs should all abandon their “barbarous” scripts and adopt the alphabet of “enlightened nations.”^[76] Indeed, Kadinskii argued that the introduction of his orthography would be politically beneficial, for it would unite the two nations, Russians and Poles, who lived under one government and who differed mainly in their orthographies. He found the difference between the Russian and Polish orthographies more fundamental than the linguistic or religious differences. Although the authorities were inclined to perceive Polish subversion in the attempt to introduce the Latin alphabet, Kadinskii indeed aimed at greater linguistic unity in the Empire.
Kadinskii’s eccentric proposals did not gain popularity. The authorities noticed his activities as a would-be orthographic reformer only after the appearance of two additional brochures in 1862 that were actually written in the Latin alphabet.^[77] This time Kadinskii presented the further argument that the Latin script would make simple Russian texts, like announcements, comprehensible to foreigners. In May, the Acting Minister of Public Enlightenment, Aleksandr Golovnin, informed the St. Petersburg Censorship Committee that Alexander II had noticed Kadinskii’s brochures and observed that they should not have been permitted.^[78] Kadinskii tried to appeal to Golovnin, in vain, claiming that the ban on the “Latin-Polish alphabet” could not be applied to his “Latin-Russian” one. Kadinskii’s letters to Golovnin, written in the Latin alphabet, reveal a curious Westernizing orientation: for instance, he claimed that the ugly letter д, different from its handwritten variant, was retained in the press only “out of hypocrisy in order to be but somehow different from the educated people (chtob xoth cem-nibudh otlichitsea ot lьdei obrazovannhix)”^[79]; he also claimed that the rejection of his orthographic reform would mean that “the Russian nation has to remain forever an illiterate nation (Ruschy narod dollgen na vsegda ostavathsea bezgramotnhim narodom).”^[80]
The initial permission of Kadinskii’s brochures nine years after the ban on the Latin alphabet in Russian texts reflects the general ineffectiveness of the imperial bureaucracy in executing the decisions of the central government. The same phenomenon is evident in the case of a collection of songs, Little Russian Songs, Jokes, and Epic Poems, that a Kievan bookseller, Anton Kocipiński, a Pole, published in Leipzig in both Cyrillic and Latin text.^[81] In November 1861, the censor Orest Novitskii in Kyiv permitted the book for circulation in Russia. For three years, the book was lawfully on sale. Meanwhile the censorship passed from the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Public Enlightenment to that of the Ministry of the Interior in 1863, and Novitskii advanced to the position of the chairman of the Censorship Committee in Kyiv. In this capacity, he wrote a denunciatory letter against Ukrainian literature to the Minister of the Interior, Petr Valuev, in 1863 that started the official process leading to the above-mentioned circular containing the restrictions against Ukrainian publications.^[82]In December 1864, Valuev was informed about the song collection in Latin script from Kocipiński’s announcement in a newspaper. The Minister inquired at the local Censorship Committee how such a transgression of the rules had been possible and which of the censors was guilty. Now Novitskii, who had participated in the enactment of the restrictions against the Ukrainian publications, was suddenly charged of his previous excessive permissiveness concerning the Latin script in 1861. The Censorship Committee sided with him and found no transgression:

“Kocipiński’s publication Little Russian Songs, Jokes and Epic Poems is printed in two alphabets, not one: on the one hand, in the Russian script for Russians, and on the other hand in the Latin-Polish script for Poles, and not only for those of the latter who inhabit this South-Western region, but also to those in the Kingdom of Poland, the Poznań region, and Galicia, and even for the other Slavs as well who use the Latin alphabet…
In this form, the publication does not in the least violate the circular of the Minister of Public Enlightenment of April 7, 1853, since by that circular it is forbidden to print Russian articles in Latin-Polish letters, of course, for distribution among Russians with the aim to polonize them. However, the Committee does not accept the opinion that this decree is applicable to a musical publication that has been printed in Leipzig with the aim to distribute it not only in Russia, but also among foreign nations. Since all the songs… are printed in the Russian script, no Russian will read the other, Latin-Polish text.”^[83]

Unconsciously echoing Kadinskii’s argument, the Censorship Committee pointed out that the Latin script made the text comprehensible to Poles and other Slavs abroad who did not know the Russian script.

“...thus harm does not follow which the government wanted to prevent by the ban on Polish script in the Russian articles for the Russians but, quite the opposite, only a benefit may follow in which case Poles who belong to other powers, and even some of the other Slavs, will learn the melodies and contents of the Little Russian songs and epic poems, in which the Russian spirit is rather strongly expressed.”^[84]

These arguments may have been presented out of opportunistic considerations, but they still contain a somewhat more sober and less nervous attitude to the Latin script than the incidents described above indicate was the dominant mood in the imperial administration. The position of the Kyiv Censorship Committee is one more reminder that the imperial administration should usually not be considered a monolith. Nevertheless, the Committee’s arguments did not impress Valuev. Under Valuev’s chairmanship the Council for Book Printing Affairs, the highest collegial body of the censorship administration, found that Novitskii had acted incorrectly by arbitrarily interpreting the censorship regulations, and obliged him to be directed by them in the future.^[85]
After Kocipiński’s song collection, the alphabet question in Ukrainian and Russian publications did not concern the government for eleven years, until the Ems decree in May 1876 stipulated the use of “Russian orthography” in Ukrainian publications, explicitly banning printing in the “so-called kulishovka.”^[86] This clause of the decree was the first government act against Cyrillic deviations from Russian orthography in Ukrainian publications. Previously, the government struggled only against the Latin script. The reasons for this change in government policy must be sought out in the international aspect of the Ukrainian question: the situation in Austrian Galicia.
The division of the Ruthenian national movement into the Russophile and Ukrainophile orientations emerged from the year 1862. At first both these groups adhered to an identity distinct from either the Poles or the Russians. However, orthography became one of the first questions contested between the two orientations: the Ukrainophiles supported kulishivka, while the Russophiles preferred an etymological orthography that was closer to Russian.^[87] Later more fundamental differences in political orientation and national identity were added to the orthographic ones, when the Ukrainophiles began to emphasize more their differences from Russia, and the Russophiles their closeness to it. After participating in the Slavic Congress in Moscow in the year 1867, the Galician Russophiles started to receive subsidies from the Slavic Welfare Committees for their publications.^[88] For its part, in 1873 the Austrian-Hungarian government asked Russia to permit the circulation of Ukrainophile popular books in its territory, but this request was rejected in the Censorship Committee for Foreign Publications.^[89] The perception of the orthographic differences within the Cyrillic script as a difference between two national identities was most likely adopted in Russian government circles from Galicia, where the orthographic contest was the most intensive. That the government was becoming more interested in the Galician Ruthenian question is evident from the Ems decree, which also stipulated a Russian government subsidy to the Galician Russophiles for the first time.^[90] As the crisis in the Balkans was becoming more acute in 1876, a conflict of interest between Russia and Austria-Hungary seemed possible in the not-too-distant future. The ban on kulishivka was most likely brought about by these international considerations, while it served simultaneously as a domestic act that would not provoke Austrian protest.

CONCLUSIONS

The seemingly innocuous question of Ukrainian orthography had a real linguistic basis in the Ukrainian sound system. However, from the 1820s onward, the orthographic discussion was dictated and motivated mainly by the political orientations of the participants. Mykhailo Maksymovych’s etymological orthography was the first attempt to bring the Ukrainian script closer to that of the Russian, despite the phonetic differences between the two languages. And despite Maksymovych’s attempt, the orthographic discussion was, in time, all the more influenced by Ukrainian nationalist ideas, whose adherents wanted to draw a clear demarcation line between the two nations. As a result, both Ukrainian and Russian languages today have rather similar sounds [i, I, , ε, jε] that are nevertheless written using different letters. The dominant position of the modified kulishivka in the Kievan publications of the 1870s marked the success of the Ukrainian national movement, but even within the Kievan Hromada no general agreement upon orthography existed at that time.
While the Russian government did not always pay much attention to the orthographic question, it was concerned with possible attempts to polonize not only Ukrainians but even Russians through the Latin script, which was perceived to convey much greater force than it actually did. Because of the tendency of the authorities to see the Ukrainian question only as a by-product of the Polish question, for a long time attention was directed only against the introduction of the Latin script. The government reacted strongly to the rather unimportant incidents when the Latin script was used in either Ukrainian or Russian, but the attempts to separate the Ukrainian orthography from the Russian one were paid scant attention. Beginning from the 1840s, the Ukrainian national movement managed indeed to create its own orthography. Although the government began oppressing Ukrainian publishing in the Empire in the Valuev circular of 1863, it did not contain any rules about orthography, which allowed the kulishivka (associated with the national cause) to gain dominance in the first half of the 1870s. When the government finally reacted against the kulishivka in 1876, the Ukrainian movement was already attributed not only to the Polish, but was also associated with a perceived possible Austrian threat. On the Ukrainian side, the ban on the kulishivka was rightly considered an act of arbitrary oppression. However, this should not delude scholars of the Ukrainian national movement into forgetting that Taras Shevchenko accepted the letter ы in 1861, the year of his death. The letters may remain the same, but their perception evolves and changes over time, both receiving new connotations and dropping old ones.