Wings to Lift the Truth Up High: The Role of Language for the Shistdesiatnyky

This essay describes the importance and the meaning of the use of Ukrainian language for the generation of the shistdesiatnyky, the Ukrainian intellectuals of the 1960s. The paper stresses that for these artists and critics Ukrainian language played an important role both as a medium of information and as a cultural patrimony that they longed to study and preserve. The disagreements among the shistdesiatnyky (in particular between Dzyuba and Moroz) are therefore analysed also as different opinion on the usage of their mother-tongue and on the consequences of certain actions of the usage of the language.