nor modern Italian, with their softer tones, possess the force of Ukrainian, a force derived, says Vladimir Stepankowsky, a well-known authority, from its strange consonantal combinations and an abundance of the deep sounds of y (ui) and u. It is this peculiarity which has made a modern English authoress speak of its 'haunting musicality. One of its distinguishing features is its unparalleled aptitude for forming diminutives. They are made not only from substantives, as in other languages, but also from adjectives, adverbs, and even verbs. This gives that singular charm referred to by P. Chevalier in 1781: The language of Ukraina is very beautiful, abundance of diminutives and pretty fashions of elegant speech making it very delicate.'

Among its other peculiarities, the fleeting accent of its words, as well as an aptitude for its deliberate extension or cutting down of the number of syllables in the majority of its grammatical forms, together with the retention of some very archaic features, as the dual number, must be mentioned. These qualities make the language wonderfully adapted to verse, and the possibilities of its expressiveness and harmony when handled by a native are almost unbounded.

Another very important feature of the Ukrainian tongue is its curious homogeneity. Spoken by forty million souls, in an area larger than Germany, it exhibits no traces of dialect or differences in pronunciation worth mentioning. Even the fact that the nation has been dismembered for centuries has not affected this remarkable unity of its language. A Cossack of Kubagne, the most eastern member of the race, when talking to a Galiof the sub-Carpathian region will cian hardly notice any difference in the other's speech.

VOL. XI-NO. 572

A natural question that may occur to students of language is how far Ukrainian is removed from Polish and Russian, its two neighboring languages. But to those who do not know at least one of these languages it is very difficult to define exactly the extent of its remoteness, unless one employs a comparison. The position of Italian with regard to French and Spanish may illustrate very nearly the relationship between Ruthenian (as Ukrainian is often called in the Austrian part of Ukraina), Polish, and Russian.

These remarks refer to the spoken Ukrainian language, the literary use of which began to be considerable from no later date than the end of the eighteenth century, when a rich and varied vernacular literature sprang up. Until then, in Ukraina as in other Slavonic countries, the literary means was supplied by the so-called ChurchSlavonic, the rôle of which in Eastern Europe may be compared to the part played in the West by Latin. As is well known, Church-Slavonic was a scholastic product, artificially evolved under the influence of Greek, from the Slav dialects of Macedonia.

The use of the spoken tongue as the literary language of Ukraina is gaining fresh ground every day and triumphantly marching towards complete victory. Just before the outbreak of the World War there were no fewer than several hundred daily, monthly, and weekly periodicals published in it. Thousands of books in Ukrainian were published yearly. In the Austrian part of Ukraina it became the language of the State. In the local parliament, or Diet, of Galicia the debates were carried on in Ukrainian and Polish. Ukrainian became the language of the State railways, the post office, the courts, and the administrative offices of

the province. Public instruction in the elementary, secondary, and high schools was, and is still, carried on in Ukrainian. But before the Revolution the Ukrainian language was in Slavonic Russia banned from every official or public use, and was barely suffered to appear in the press and literature of the day. Even such employment of it is of recent date, since Ukrainian was strictly prohibited until 1905, the year that saw the decreeing of the Russian Constitution. Up to that time its use was confined by a Ukase to poetry and tales, and even then it had to be spelled in accordance with the Russian mode of spelling. It is a curious fact that the Bible in vernacular Ukrainian, published, after its prohibition, by the British and Foreign Bible Society, was regarded as a revolutionary publication, and anyone found in possession of a copy was punished accordingly.

It was the appearance of a great poet in the middle of the last century

a man who dared to write in the spoken language of his countrythat solved at a stroke the problem. of the future literary language of Ukraina. This writer was Taras Shevchenko, the centenary of whose birth was celebrated in 1914 in all the towns and cities of Ukraina, and especially at Kiev and Lemberg.

Dig my grave and raise my barrow
By the Dnieper-side

In Ukraina, my own land,
A fair land and wide.

I will lie and watch the cornfields,
Listen through the years

To the river voices roaring,
Roaring in my ears.

So sang the exquisite poet who, as has been well said by Mrs. E. L. Voynich, whose admirable translation I quote, 'has done for the Dnieper country what Burns did for Scot

land.'* His wish, written in the disciplinary brigade, † in the first or second year of his martyrdom at the hands of those who accused him of 'composing in the Little Russian tongue verses of a most abominable character,' was carried out. There on the banks of the mighty and beautiful river, in view of Kiev and the Steppes, he lies.

There is no need to relate once more all the incidents in Taras Shevchenko's dolorous life. They have been given in sufficient detail in Mrs. Voynich's little volume. Suffice it to say that these six masterpieces sum up a whole life of misery and shattered hopes, while at the same time they express the writer's undying love for his 'dear lost Ukraina.'

A Ukrainian never forgets his native land. However far away he may travel to the north of Russia, however long he may live away from his homestead, his thought always returns to Ukraina, the banks of the Dnieper, and the Steppes. The songs of his native land are ever singing in his heart.

These folk songs, many of which have now been translated into English by Miss Florence Randall Livesay, ‡ form a valuable section of Ukrainian literature.

'Italian songs are glorious, but the singing of the Ukrainian is also a precious pearl in the common treasury of mankind,' writes Paul Crath in the introduction to this collection of old ballads and songs, taken down

*Sir Lyrics from the Ruthenian of Shevchenko. Rendered into English verse with a Biographical Sketch by E. L. Voynich. Elkin Mathews, 1911.

The poet, in 1847, was arrested on a charge of belonging to a seditious body called the Brotherhood of SS. Cyril and Methodius, and, in consideration of his robust constitution,' he was sentenced to military service in the Orenburg 'special' (disciplinary) brigade. He suffered many years of torture at the hands of military tyrants, until at last his heart, as he himself said, was 'beggared.'

Songs of Ukraina: with Ruthenian Poems. Dent Translated by Florence Randall Livesay. & Sons, 1916,

from the lips of Ruthenian or Ukrainian immigrants in Winnipeg:

It was born out of the beauty of the Ukraina, and it is beautiful; it was born on the Steppes, and as the Steppes it is wide; it was born in battles, and it is free; it was born of the tear of a lonesome girl, and it rends the heart; it was born of the thought of the Kobzars, and its harmonies are pregnant with thoughts-this is Ukrainian song.

Rudansky, Vorobkievich, and Fedkovich are also singers of Ukraina. Though of lesser importance than the great poet of the Ukrainian movement for autonomy, they have written many poems which are treasured throughout their country. Fedkovich, whose work is marked by great lyrical beauty, first wrote in German, but on returning to his native Bukovina, to find that he had become famous, he followed the advice of some well-known

patriots to write in Ruthenian. His first sixteen poems in that language were published in 1861.

Turning to Russian writers, we see what a debt they owe to Ukraina. Ukrainian folk songs have been largely drawn upon by both authors and composers, Russian as well as Polish. The chief person to stamp his individuality on the Russian literary language and

The Athenæum

literature was Nikolai Gogol (Hohol), whose style of writing best seen in Taras Bulba, The Cloak, and that inimitable tale, How the Two Ivans Quarreled is typically Ukrainian. It should be noted that Gogol's great ambition throughout his literary life was to write a ponderous history of Ukraina. He studied much toward that end, he made innumerable notes, but never got beyond his Introduction. However, his investigations had the result of focusing his attention on an inexhaustible source of material, some of which he used to very telling effect in Evenings on the Farm near the Dikanka.

In Taras Bulba we find that Gogol has noted all the characteristics of the Ukrainian, whether of the past or of the present: his warlike spirit, his hatred of the Poles, his love of drinking and smoking. It was through pipe that he was captured by the foe. Taras Bulba's inordinate love of his

At the same time this great novel contains some of the finest descriptions of the Steppes of Ukraina ever penned.*

Finally, it should be pointed out that Chékhov, Korolénko, and Dostoevski were also Ukrainian by origin.

*Taras Bulba: and Other Tales. By Nikolai V. Gogol. Dent & Sons, 'Everyman's Library.'

THE publication by the Bolsheviks of a treaty made by Great Britain, France, and America with the Murman Regional Council the accuracy of which our Foreign Office neither affirms nor denies reminds us that previous 'revelations' of this sort by the Bolsheviks have caused needless anxiety to some worthy people. It has indeed become a stock argument with the Pacifists, who love to put their country in the wrong, that the 'secret treaties' made by the Allies in the early years of the war and published without authority by M. Trotsky show the Allies to have cherished 'Imperialist' aims, and prove us to have been as bad as the Germans, on the hypothesis that every 'Imperialist' is a criminal. We must confess to having neglected this new device of the peace-at-any-price faction, because anyone who had troubled to read the Bolshevik disclosures could see that there was nothing in them to surprise or alarm a reasonable man. But as the 'secret treaties' are being used to create sympathy for the enemy, concerning whose diplomatic performances the Pacifists are silent, it may be as well to show that the Allies have nothing whatever to, be ashamed of. In the first place, we may point out that these agreements were made in very trying cir

comed the entry first of Italy and then of Rumania into the war on their side. If the agreements made in haste by the five Allies had not been all that a sober judgment could approve, no fair-minded critic could have failed to make allowance for the difficulties under which the governments were laboring. It was as if a man suddenly attacked by street robbers were to summon the neighbors to his assistance, promising them any little gratification of which they might care to remind him if only they would render prompt assistance. In such a case we should not criticize too narrowly the wisdom or the propriety of the victim's offers or of his helpers' requests; provided always that he and his neighbors put the robbers to flight, we should say that he was amply justified in paying any price for help. If he contrived not only to drive the criminals away but also to recover from them certain stolen goods of which they were in possession, we should say that he had done well. If, on the other hand, he had stopped to discuss with his neighbors the precise ethical significance of their joint action and the bargains that they made, he and they would have been knocked down by the robbers and separately despoiled. The Allies were faced by a sudden emergency of this kind. They did their best to ward off the treacherous blow by swift coöperation, and they succeeded. It would ill become any Englishman who has been saved by the heroic efforts of the Allied armies to complain if some of the emergency measures of Allied diplomatists were not quite satisfactory.

As a matter of fact, however, there is no need to apologize for any of the 'secret treaties' which purport to have been made by the Allies. On the contrary, these documents, which may or may not be authentic, throw a favorable light on the Allied diplomacy, and contemplate rearrangements of territory that must be made if we are to have a stable peace. The documents, which are given in a convenient form in a new pamphlet by Mr. C. A. McCurdy, M.P., include an agreement of 1915, by which Russia was to receive Constantinople and the Straits, and an agreement of 1916, by which Russia, France, and Great Britain were to take Armenia, Syria and Adana, and Mesopotamia respectively. The Treaty of London of April 26, 1915, under which Italy entered the war, promised her the Trentino and Istria, Dalmatia, Valona, and a protectorate over Albania, a share especially in Adalia - equal to that of her Allies in Asiatic Turkey if it were partitioned, and the prospect of obtaining more African territory if Great Britain and France annexed the former German colonies. Rumania, before declaring war, promised by the Allies the Rumanian districts of Austria-Hungary, including part of Transylvania, the Banat of Temesvar, and part of Bukovina. The Bolshevik 'revelations' included also diplomatic notes from the Russian Foreign Minister, referring to a proposal that Germany should be required to cede not merely the AlsaceLorraine of 1871, but the Provinces as they were in 1792, including the Saar coalfield and the Lorraine iron deposits, and that the left bank of the Rhine outside French territory should be constituted as a neutral bufferState, and separated from Prussia, whose ownership of the greater part of this region does not date very far

was

back. It does not appear that this idea of a buffer-State was ever adopted by the French Government. Mr. Balfour in December last said that the British Government 'were never aware that it was seriously entertained by any French statesman.' M. Doumergue, the French Ambassador to Russia, may have suggested it on his own account, or the Russian Foreign Office may have exaggerated the importance of the proposal in order to press its own demand for 'Russia's complete liberty in establishing her Western frontiers.' In any case, the proposal with regard to a Greater Alsace and the Rhine buffer-State was not a treaty at all and may be left out of account. The real 'secret treaties,' if they are correctly quoted by the Bolsheviks, thus contain nothing novel. The dissolution of the Turkish Empire and the disintegration of Austria-Hungary are obviously among the results that will follow the victory of the Allies. Austria's primary object in forcing the quarrel on Serbia was to suppress the only free portion of the Southern Slav race. We cannot liberate the Southern Slavs and the Czecho-Slovaks without breaking up Austria-Hungary. The Rumanians asked in their treaty with the Allies for no more and no less than the Southern Slavs demand; namely, the right to reunite their race under a free and democratic government. As for Turkey, whose rulers have exterminated the Armenians and are doing their best to root out the Syrians and the Greeks from Asia Minor, it is, we had thought, a truism to say that this monstrous survival of primitive barbarism must be ended once for all. In the interests of humanity, the Turk must be cleared out of Europe and confined to Anatolia under close supervision. The details of the partition may have to be reconsidered now that