THE GROWTH OF THE MODERN NATION 53no interest in Polish or Lithuanian political aspirations and no cultural or senti-
mental attachment to the Great Russians. For this purpose, some of their lead-
ers revived the ancient tribal name of Kryvicianle (Kryvicians) — a label banned
by Tsarist and Soviet censors alike. Their language, which had originally been
classified by scholars both from St. Petersburg and from Warsaw as a Polish
dialect, did not gain official recognition from the Tsarist authorities until 1906,
and was written both in the Cyrillic and Latin forms. Their literature, like that
of the Lithuanians, grew on Polish models, and was developed by writers like V.
Dunin-Marcinkevic (1809-94) or F. Bohusevic (1840-1900) who wrote both in
Polish and Byelorussian. Their national territory, as first defined by Rittich in
1875, was supposed to stretch from Bialystok in the west to Smolensk in the east,
and from the Dvina in the north to the Pripet in the south; their population,
according to the same source, stood at 3,745,000. In Polesie, the primitive
'Poleshchuki', who had little consciousness of any national affiliation what-
soever, were claimed both by the Byelorussians and the Ukrainians. In Polish
eyes, the Byelorussian movement was no more than a cultural curiosity, and a
political irrelevance.^54
To the south-east—that is, in the South-Western Land of the Russian Empire,
and in Austrian Galicia—the Poles ran into conflict with the Ukrainian National
Revival. The process whereby this numerous branch of the East Slavs was meta-
morphosed from a motley assortment of 'Ruthenians' into a coherent Ukranian
nation was as long and as complex, as the growth of the Polish Nation itself. It
began in the Cossack lands which were separated from Poland in 1667, and
which, until its suppression in 1787 had formed a semi-autonomous 'Hetman
State' under Russian suzerainty. Later it spread to the territories awarded to
Russia and Austria by the Partitions. In the late nineteenth century, the process
was far from complete, and in the world at large, the essential distinction
between 'Ruthenians' and 'Russians' - analogous to that in Western Europe
between 'Dutch' and 'Deutsch' — was not generally known. In the Tsarist
Empire, where the Ruthenian population was largely Orthodox, political sepa-
ratism was weak; but demands for the recognition and development of the local
language and literature were strong. It was here that early Ruthenian leaders
had first adopted the label of 'Ukrainian' as a means of avoiding their humiliat-
ing designation by Tsarist officialdom as 'Little Russians'. (To western readers,
this new trade-mark can best be understood in the light of the parallel adoption
of the geographical label of 'Nether-landers' by the Dutch population of the
United Provinces. In both cases, the crucial consideration was to avoid
identification with their more numerous, and culturally expansive, Russian or
German neighbours.) In Tsarist Ukraine, the seminal texts of the cultural renais-
sance were published by the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius prior
to their forcible dissolution in 1847. The Books of the Genesis of the Ukrainian
Nation of Mykola Kostomarov (1817-65) and the powerful romantic poetry of
Taras Shevchenko (1814-61) served the same purpose for the Ukrainians as the
works of Mickiewicz, Slowacki, and Krasinski for the Poles, and to some extent