Who is the “Ukrainian Shakespeare”? Many people call Ivan Kotliarevskyi the “Ukrainian Shakespeare.” Not because he wrote plays like Shakespeare, but because he did something just as big for the language. Ukraine had printing houses as early as the 1500s. Books were printed in Kyiv, Lviv, and Ostroh. But they were mostly religious, academic, or official texts and they were written in church or imperial languages, not in how people actually spoke. In 1798, Kotliarevskyi published Eneida, a funny, bold, playful retelling of a classical story, written in real spoken Ukrainian. For the first time, an everyday Ukrainian appeared in print as literature. That’s why he is called the founder of modern literary Ukrainian. So, unlike Shakespeare, who invented a lot of English words, Kotliarevskyi didn’t invent Ukrainian made it visible on the printed page.