The Reading Revolution in the Ukrainian Countryside: Mshanets, 1870–1914

In his recent posthumously published memoir about meeting Ivan Franko, the poet Andrii Voloshchak recounts how he had learned to read. 1 He phrases this process poetically, describing the way “I mastered that great and wondrous secret of capturing human thoughts from a written-on leaf of paper”. Born in 1890, Voloshchak relates that when it came time for him to attend school, the newly built school building in Mshanets stood empty. He attributes this situation to the resistance of the village to a Polish teacher who had tried to force pupils to learn incomprehensible Polish patriotic songs. Although Voloshchak maintains that this resistance resulted in the closing of the school, he declares that those “commanding power” (vlast’ imuchchi) were wrong in maintaining that the simple folk did not want to learn. He asserts that the village defended itself from darkness (temriava) and in its own way promoted learning. Here and there, children in the village gathered in the houses of those older villagers who were somewhat literate. According to Voloshchak, it was in these homes by assiduous exercise of an out-of-date and barely effective method of learning, repeating the names of the letters of the Slavonic alphabet, that the youth learned to read. He had learned to read in this manner at the house of his father, who, though a poor peasant, had been among the first nine literates of the village. The literates of his father’s generation had learned to read from an eccentric vagabond who had travelled through distant lands and who in the winter came to the village. 2 There the eccentric was occupied with threshing the grain. He would, after completing some work, run out of the barn, knock a few times with a flail, and enter a house. There he would show those who assembled a certain letter and teach how to read it and write it before returning to his task. At this point in Voloshchak’s account he conflates his own and his father’s experience by saying that the eccentric vagabond recounted “to us” his experiences in Pochaiv and the Caves Monastery in Kyiv and other places where he had been. Voloshchak says that his older brother, who had attended school, had shown him his first written signs, tracing them on a stove plate. He adds that his house was the second in the village of chimneyless houses to have a stove plate and chimney. He avows that books had interested him, and with the help of his brother he had learned to read and write one winter. He read a primer written in etymological script as well as some old church books of his father’s. At that point Voloshchak recounts how he had come to read Ivan Franko’s famous children’s tale Lys Mykyta (“Mykyta the Fox,” first published in 1890) and then had met Ivan Franko in the village.