Turning the pages back... December 8, 1868 (12/07/97)

Turning the pages back...

December 8, 1868

In 1848, the Supreme Ruthenian Council established the Halytsko-Ruska Matytsia as a literary and educational society in order to foster schooling and general cultural enlightenment. In the 1860s, however, it was taken over by Russophiles and began to be the vehicle of an increasingly conservative ideology.

One of its founding members, a populist priest named Stepan Kachala, became disenchanted with this trend. Together with a group of 72 like-minded clergymen and intellectuals, he decided to found the Prosvita (Enlightenment) society on December 8, 1868, in Lviv. Composer Anatol Vakhnianyn was elected as its first president.

Prosvita's first by-laws defined its purpose as "to know and edify the people" and to "collect and publish all the fruits of oral folk literature."

Two years later, the society's mandate was changed to "promoting education among the Ruthenian [Ukrainian] people" by means of popular publications in the vernacular and the organization of district committees, which eventually developed into branches that housed Prosvita's characteristic reading rooms.

Ironically, it was under the presidency of Volodyslav Fedorovych, a wealthy patron of the arts, that Prosvita became a truly popular organization. In 1876, the by-laws were amended, abolishing admission fees, reducing membership dues and providing for the publication of mass-circulation booklets, and focused its recruitment on the peasantry.

Its leaders also began pressuring the Austrian government to establish Ukrainian schools and provide for the teaching of Ukrainian language generally in the education system. In 1881, its activists established the Ruthenian Pedagogical Society, which later became Ridna Shkola.

By 1885 Prosvita had 320 reading rooms under its care, and six years later, following more by-laws amendments, a centralized network was set up. Membership exploded. By 1914, 75 percent of the cities, towns and villages in Galicia had a Prosvita reading room, and 20 percent of the province's Ukrainian population were members.

In the 1890s, the society's success attracted interest among Ukrainian circles in central Ukraine, dominated by the Russian empire, but did not gain real momentum until after the revolution of 1905. However, Prosvita did spread readily to the rest of Europe, North and South America. After 1917, Prosvita enjoyed a quantum leap in activity, and for the next four years moved into the center of Ukrainian national life with its broad-based literacy and general education programs.

The Soviet regime proved to be Prosvita's great nemesis, by 1924 effectively stamping out a movement that boasted 4,500 branches at its height just three years earlier. In western Ukraine, Prosvita groups were dismantled when that territory was seized by the Soviets under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in 1939.

Since independence was declared in 1991, Prosvita has made a comeback, even affording its president, Pavlo Movchan, a measure of political clout in the country.

"Kachala, Stepan," "Prosvita," Encyclopedia of Ukraine, Vols. 2, 4 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988, 1993).

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