General information
Location
Ukraine is the second largest country in Eastern Europe. Its capital is Kyiv. It borders by Russia to the east, Belarus to the north, Poland, Slovakia and Hungary to the west, Romania and Moldova to the southwest, and
the Black Sea and Sea of Azov to the south. Ukraine is one of the biggest European countries. Its geographical position is expedient due to location in Europe and Asia. Over the past decades, Ukraine has become a link between the two
continents.
Language
According to the Constitution, the state language of Ukraine is Ukrainian, at the same time the majority of people speak Russian, which was the official language of the Soviet Union, and was widely spoken, especially in
eastern and southern Ukraine. Most residents speak Ukrainian as the mother tongue language and Russian as the second one. Ukrainian is mainly spoken in western and central Ukraine. In western Ukraine, the Ukrainian language is the
dominant language in cities (such as Lviv). In central Ukraine, Ukrainian and Russian are both equally used in cities. Russian is more common in Kiev, while Ukrainian is the dominant language in rural areas. In eastern and southern
Ukraine, Russian is primarily spoken in cities.
History of the Literature
The history of the Ukrainian literature dates back to the 11th century after the Christianization of the Kievan Rus. Then the writings were mainly religious and were written in Old Church Slavonic. Historical
texts of those times were called “chronicles”. The 19th century initiated a new period in Ukraine, represented by Ivan Kotliarevsky's work “Eneyida”, the first publication written in the modern Ukrainian. The Ukrainian romanticism
developed by the 1830s, and the nation's most outstanding figure, was romanticist poet and painter Taras Shevchenko. Ivan Kotliarevsky is considered to be the father of literature in the Ukrainian vernacular language; and Shevchenko
is the father of a national revival. The works of Taras Shevchenko have been published in the Arabic language in the 2016 year.
