Page - 206 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

206 ♦  Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 demarcating “true” Ruthenians from those “who want to bedight Ruthenian with Church Slavonic and Russian ornamentation,”140 that is, Russophiles, according to the decisive petition, penned by none other than the professor of Romance languages in Chernivtsi, Theodor Gartner, in cooperation with Stepan Smal’-Stoc’kyj, a professor of Ruthenian language and literature at Chernivtsi. The aim of this project was to cleanse Ruthenian orthography of foreign or historical accretions and to establish a codification based purely on folk speech. This issue was highly controversial, leading to opposition by both Greek Catholic church authorities and the Russian movement; both argued that it broke from the historical-religious tradition of Rus’ and served as a step toward assimilation with Polish culture. In contrast, this decision strengthened the narodovtsi, who not only had initiated this reform but also followed it rigidly in their later publications. The question of Ohonovs’kyj’s successor was thus not merely an aca- demic matter because Smal’-Stoc’kyj was a declared proponent of phonetic orthography, together with Gartner, the author of the first Ruthenian school- book that outlined its orthography (1893).141 The direction the new professor in L’viv would take was of vital interest to both Ruthenian political parties and the church. Directly after Ohonovs’kyj’s death, only one person was con- sidered, Oleksandr Kolessa, who had habilitated in 1894 with Smal’-Stoc’kyj in Chernivtsi and habilitated again in L’viv the year after.142 For a long time, the faculty made no decision on the appointment of future professors, leav- ing Kolessa as the auxiliary professor for the chair. In the second half of the 1890s, another candidate strove for the chair, Ivan Franko (Іван Франко), a well-known writer and poet, who was supported within the university but rejected by the provincial government, the ministry, and the Ukrainian narodovtsi, for whom he was unacceptable because of his political radical- ism and his socialist past.143 In his letters, Franko addressed the issue of the vacant chair, stating that the university would not appoint any of the other candidates and would promote him afterward. After the ministry’s rejection, he openly criticized the politicians of the New Era for promoting their own candidate, Kyrylo Studyns’kyj (Studzinski).144 Studyns’kyj was the antithesis of Kolessa. While the latter was naro­ dovets, the former was a Christian Socialist who had studied in L’viv and Vienna (where he, like Kolessa, had graduated in 1894) and then moved to Berlin to prepare his habilitation. A few months after Ohonovs’kyj’s death, Studyns’kyj applied for habilitation in L’viv, which was denied him, offi- cially owing to his low scholarly qualifications.145 With the support of the