Page - 98 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

98 ♦  Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 From the 1860s, different Ruthenian political groups established their own educational organizations that represented their political alignment and language projects. In the end, populist Ruthenian organizations, including the educational literary society Enlightenment (Prosvita, established in 1868) and its scientific branch, the Ševčenko Scientific Society (Naukove tovarystvo imeni Ševčenka, established in 1873), became extremely influ- ential.34 By the late 1880s, however, they were being seriously challenged by the Russophile Kačkovs’kyj Society (Tovarystvo imeni Kačkovs’koho).35 It is nonetheless reasonable to assume that the political conflicts among Ruthenian cultural projects did not slow the development of scholarly in- stitutions. The Enlightenment society and Kačkovs’kyj Society frequently cooperated since their anti-Polish sentiment and the issue of cultural demar- cation of Ruthenians from Poles clearly outweighed any internal divisions. Both were also instrumental in building a larger Ruthenian-speaking public, which would later benefit as the main recipient of Ukrainian scholarship. I turn later to the question of scholars’ patriotic engagement in the pro- cess of cultural boundary work, but certain characteristics of Ruthenian arguments from around the turn of the century require more careful analy- sis here. As noted earlier, two main arguments were commonly mobilized for and against language change in the empire: from the viewpoint of cul- tural dominance, instruction in a national language could be allowed only if that language was sufficiently developed, whereas from the viewpoint of a national culture, only instruction in the national language would allow a national culture to develop. The Ruthenian (and also Czech) arguments followed the latter, arguing that a national university would not be the result of cultural development but rather a means to achieve it. Ruthenian profes- sors stated, for example, in an open memorandum in 1907 that a Ruthenian university could “bring the conditions that favor the peaceful development of science and further cultural development of our nation.”36 Moreover, the press saw it almost as a panacea to cure all the problems Ruthenians were facing in Galicia. In 1907 the daily Svoboda (Freedom) argued that with a Ruthenian university “economic development will be easier, and Moscowphilism will melt like wax in fire. The university will be the final aim and center of the political struggle for the independence of the nation. From the university the great voice of the nation will resound.”37 The most prominent proponent of Ukrainian nationalism, Mychajlo Hruševs’kyj, from 1894 a professor of general history with special consid- eration to eastern Europe at the University of L’viv, discussed establishing