Ukraïns’ka khata

Ukraïns’ka khata («Українська хата»; Ukrainian House [UKh]). A monthly journal of literature, literary criticism, and politics that appeared in Kyiv from March 1909 to August 1914 (66 issues) under the editorship of Pavlo Bohatsky and Mykyta Shapoval. A major forum of the younger democratic, nationally conscious Ukrainian intelligentsia after the Revolution of 1905, it published articles whose authors, particularly Shapoval (pseud: M. Sribliansky) and A. Tovkachevsky, formulated the foundations for a new Ukrainian national liberation ideology and national and social worldview. They promoted Nietzschean principles for the individual and the ideal of an independent, full-fledged Ukrainian culture free of external (ie, Russian and Polish) influences and inhumane materialism. They also attacked the moderate liberal Ukrainophile populists and their superficial ideas, political compromises, and slavish reliance on Russian ‘higher culture’ and social forces. In the esthetic realm they propagated the new trends of modernism and impressionism. The journal's literary critics, particularly Shapoval and Mykola Yevshan, evaluated works on the basis of their esthetic value or their expression of the national ideal. A bitter rivalry and polemic arose between UKh and the more moderate paper Rada (Kyiv). Serhii Yefremov, for example, referred to the views expressed in UKh as those of refined, decadent burghers who had no principles.

UKh succeeded in attracting as contributors many prominent writers of the time. Translations of European contemporary works (by Charles Baudelaire, Knut Hamsun, P. Altenberg, J. Jacobsen, Maurice Maeterlinck, Heinrich Mann, and others), notes on Ucrainica in the foreign press, and a literary chronicle were regular features. UKh was closed down by the tsarist authorities after Russia entered the First World War. A booklet of Bohatsky's and Shapoval's memoirs about UKh was edited by Sava Zerkal and published in New York in 1955.

Pavlo Bohatsky

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 5 (1993).]