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182 fflORSEVCENKOeighteenth centuries we can follow the impact that modern Greeks, Bulgarians,and Moldavians (who, in part, were trained in the West) exerted uponKievan hymnographical works.On the other hand, Kievan early printed books, including the works ofSimiaon Połacki, found their way to Serbia and Bulgaria: an eloquent testimonyto this is a considerable number of well-preserved copies of theseearly printed books that are being kept today in the library of the Bulgariannational and religious shrine, the monastery at Rila. Finally, in theeighteenth century Myxajlo Kozacyns'kyj, the graduate and later professorof the Kiev Academy, taught in Serbia and wrote on Serbian subjects.I come now to my final remarks. A cultural historian describes; he doesnot dispense advice. There is a way, however, to give advice under theguise of description, and I will yield to this temptation. First, a cultural historianwho has crisscrossed the territory of former empires, the Ottoman,the Austro-Hungarian, and the Russian (I am limiting myself to empireswhich collapsed in 1917-1918), knows that the elites of nations that werecomponent parts of these three entities—the ruling nations clearlyexcepted—were condemned to cultural provinciality, which often was compensatedby exaggerated or even unfounded assertions concerning culturaloriginality. Second, between the end of the seventeenth century and the firsthalf of the eighteenth, the Russians decided that it was more advantageousfor them to turn to the West, not through Ukrainian mediation, but directly,and this decision stood them in very good stead indeed. The unprecedentedlyrapid flourishing of the Muscovite and later Russian culture betweenthe times of Aleksej Mixajlovic and Alexander I, under whom the youngPushkin was writing, is to be explained to a great extent by direct contactswith the West. Among their eighteenth-century wandering scholars, theRussians count Lomonosov, who was taught at Marburg University, whileUkrainians have Hryhorovyc'-Bars'kyj, who was a teacher on the island ofPatmos.In Ukraine, during the period of Soviet domination, ideas concerning theneed for direct contacts with the West were prevalent in the milieu thatbrought forth Xvyl'ovyj and Zerov: we all recall the proposal to renouncethe mediation of the North. We also all know the fate that this proposal metin the 1930s. Today, we are living in new circumstances, and this idea canbecome reality if one approaches the task at hand calmly and withoutpolemics. This time the term "West" should be understood as the wideworld at large. In this wide world, the modern Hryhorovyc'-Bars'kyjs maynot elicit the interest of such highly situated personalities as the ambassadorof his Russian Imperial Highness at the Sublime Porte who questionedBars'kyj in Istanbul about what the latter had seen in his travels; instead, the