ABSTRACT
Some fifty years ago, when writing about the formation of Modern Standard Ukrainian in the nineteenth century and its impact on the political and intellectual history of the Ukrainian people, George Y. Shevelov (1980, 155) summarized his analysis as follows:
Contrary to the opinion that languages, to assert themselves, require cultural centers created by economic and political development, modern literary Ukrainian has been the work of a group of men of letters (primarily Ševčenko and Kuliš) as a manifestation of the poetic spirit… the Ukrainian literary language offers the “miracle” of a linguistic development that has given birth to a political movement. The linguistic work of Ševčenko and Kuliš prepared the way for the rise of political parties, states, armies, for wars, struggles and conflicts. Lovers of paradoxes may say that a poet created a language and that the language created a nation. 1
