HARVARD UKRAINIAN STUDIES - See also - Harvard University

UKRAINE BETWEEN EAST AND WEST 177part, clad in the Polish kontusz 3 —the later Habsburg impact was limited inspace and time—and its principal cultural message in the decisive turningpoint between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was carried by thePolish variant of the Counter-Reformation. The Jesuits were introducingLatin and new pedagogical methods and the Orthodox were taking theseover. Even the new interest in Greek was merely a reaction to the inroadsmade in Ukraine by Latin and by Latin ways. One result of all this was that,in the first half of the seventeenth century, for the first time in the history ofthe Ukrainian elites a possibility arose to establish a direct contact with thesources of antique culture. This was so because the Rus' of Kiev knew verylittle Greek. Still, in practical terms, high culture was reaching the Ukrainiansnot through Latin and Greek but through Polish; the victorious campaignwaged by this language had as a result the emergence of a suriylâ ofsorts that was used in writing, and perhaps in speech as well, by the localOrthodox and Uniate elites in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.This offensive coming from the West called forth in part an adaptationand in part a hostile reaction by the threatened Ukrainian elites. We call thismovement the rebirth of Rus' faith. This rebirth found its expression in thepolemical literature and in the creation of the Ostroh and Mohyla collegesas well as of other schools stemming from these two institutions. The straggleagainst the seemingly invincible West was waged officially in the nameof the Greek faith of the forebears, but, in fact, it was waged with the helpof the same weapons to which the West owed its success—that is, the Jesuitinstructional methods, Catholic scholarship, and Catholic belles-lettres.In such a way the West, more than the Greeks, provided most of theUkrainian elites with stimuli and the means with which Byzantine culturalvalues could be defended. This defense of the Ukrainians' "own" East withthe help of Western panoply was not a unique phenomenon in the Europe ofthe sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Parallel mechanisms functionedalong another frontier area between the cultures of the Western and Byzantinevarieties respectively. They operated on territories which were Greekspeakingbut which had been conquered from Byzantium by Venice after1204. This phenomenon was especially pronounced on the island of Crete.To be sure, on that island no Greco-Venetian surźyk emerged; somethingsimilar occurred instead, however, namely, the heavy penetration of3This word (a borrowing from Hungarian or Turkic) came to denote a Polish nobleman'snational dress (an upper garment with slit sleeves).4A mixture of wheat and rye; hence, a mixture of Ukrainian and Russian, still used by a partof the working-class population in urban centers such as Kiev. A mixed language. Here, alanguage composed of Polish, Ukrainian-Belorussian vernacular, and Church Slavonic elements.