Andrei Kiselev traces the history of Ukrainian literati in Berlin…
In 2010, a plaque commemorating Lesya Ukrainka was unveiled at Johannisstraße 11, a ten-minute walk from the Embassy of Ukraine in Berlin. One of Ukraine’s most famous writers, and an activist to the core, she lived at the address for several months in 1899. Other Ukrainian literati kept coming and going—to study, for medical treatment, fleeing into exile—but most of their movements and traces of their lives remain unmarked.
Although the University of Kharkiv was founded six years before Berlin’s Humboldt University, its academic staff consisted mostly of foreigners. The Kharkiv authorities soon realised their university needed some new vigour and inspiration and started to send young teachers and prominent graduates to Europe for more advanced studies. Among them was linguist and philosopher Alexander Potebnja, who set off to Berlin in 1862 after publishing his renowned work Thought and Language.
Potebnja’s address in Berlin was Dorotheenstraße 76, a stone’s throw from Humboldt University, where he attended lectures and studied Sanskrit with Albrecht Weber. In his letters from Berlin, Potebnja reflected on the concept of a future university and recommended certain western educational practices be set up in his homeland.
He cheered Berlin’s low prices and affordable public libraries, but later complained about a kind of “depressing loneliness” that he’d never experienced at home, “the loneliness neither promenades under the linden trees nor theatres could heal.” After a year in Berlin, Potebnja’s depression was “exhausting” and he decided on an unauthorised return to Kharkiv in August 1863, where he later became a professor at the university there and presided over the Kharkiv Historical-Philological Society.
Another Berlin attraction for foreigners…