drafted into a punitive battalion in the Russian Imperial army where he began to agitate soldiers with revolutionary propaganda. Tipped off that his arrest was imminent, Vynnychenko illegally fled to eastern Galicia, Austria-Hungary. When trying to return to Russian Ukraine with revolutionary literature, Vynnychenko was arrested and jailed in Kiev for two years with a threat to spend the rest of his life in katorga. After his release in 1905, he passed his exams for a law degree in Kiev University. In 1906 Vynnychenko was arrested for a third time, again for his political activities, and jailed for a year; before his scheduled trial, however, the wealthy patron of Ukrainian literature and culture, Yevhen Chykalenko, paid his bail, and Vynnychenko fled Ukraine again, effectively becoming an émigré writer abroad from 1907 to 1914, living in Lemberg (Lviv), Vienna, Geneva, Paris, Florence, Berlin. In 1911 Vynnychenko married Rosalia Lifshitz, a French Jewish doctor. From 1914 to 1917 Vynnychenko lived illegally near Moscow throughout much of World War I and returned to Kiev in 1917 to assume a leading role in Ukrainian politics. Ideas about the Ukrainian nation Vynnychenko’s political awakening arose, he claimed, at the intersection of social and national experience. Writing in his diary in 1919, he recalled that “from the time the landowner Bodisko beat my father on his estate, fooled him, exploited him, chased him from his plot into the field, where I was tending livestock, from that moment I already took into my soul the seed of hatred for social exploitation, for Bodiskos of all types.” Other youthful experiences added feelings of national humiliation and anger to these social emotions. He recalled, for example, how, as a gymnasium student, teachers and other students (“young gentlemen”) treated him as a “little muzhik” [peasant] and a “little khokhol” [a derisive term for Ukrainian]. Vynnychenko demanded respect and recognition for Ukraine and Ukrainians as a nation. In 1913, he published in Russian an “Open Letter to Russian Writers” that criticized the “unconscious” tendency in a great deal of Russian literature to stereotype Ukrainians and others. The Ukrainian characters who appear in Russian literature, he argued, are much like the stereotypes of Jews and Armenians that Russians also have “a weakness for.” “Always and everywhere [in Russian literature] the ‘khokhol’ is a little stupid, a little cunning, a little lazy, melancholic and sometimes good-natured.” These stereotypes are “shameful” not only for