The prologue to the Alphabet War was the publication in 1833 of Vaclav Zaleskyi's book
Polish and Ruthenian Songs of the Galician People (), which was a collection of both Polish and Ukrainian folk songs printed using Polish letters. In the introduction to the book, he expressed the hope that soon all the Slavic people would switch to Latin and therefore join the rest of European literature. For Zaleskyi, the Cyrillic alphabet was a cultural marker that separated European from non-European culture. The first outbreak of the Alphabet War was caused in 1834 by the appearance in the Lviv weekly publication
Rozmaitości Lwowskie of Joseph Lozynskyi's
On the introduction of the Polish alphabet in Ruthenian writing () in which Lozynskyi, under the influence of Zaleskyi and
Jernej Kopitar, proposed the replacement of the " dead" Cyrillic alphabet, which did not correspond to the phonetic system of the Ukrainian language, with a system based on the
Polish alphabet. He called this alphabet
Abecadło. The Polish alphabet, in his view, was more rational, more adapted to the everyday use, and more suited to the learning of reading and writing. In 1835 Lozynskyi published the ethnographic work
Ruskoje wesile, written with Latin letters, to further elaborate on his ideas. Lozynskyi's proposal was sharply criticized, including by members of the
Ruthenian Triad, a literary group that included Galician poet
Markiyan Shashkevych, who published the pamphlet
Azbuka and Abecadło in 1836. Many Ukrainian researchers of the 20th and 21st centuries have agreed with the opinion expressed by
Shashkevych that the Latinization of the Ukrainian alphabet risked the alienation of Western Ukraine from Eastern Ukraine. Critics of the adoption of Abecadło during the Alphabet Wars feared such a division could undermine national unity and the development of a Ukrainian culture in lands that were divided between Austria-Hungary and the Russian Empire, and would increase the threat of cultural assimilation of Ukrainians. Shashkevych's pamphlet played a key role in ending the first "Alphabet War." Lozynskyi's responses to criticism were rejected by a censor, and were not published until 1903, by O. Makovei. Other critics of the adoption of Latin letters included D. Zubrytskyi, who wrote
Apology of the Cyrillic or Ruthenian Alphabet (), and was among the first to oppose Lozynskyi, and J. Levytskyi, who wrote
Response to the proposal to introduce the Polish alphabet in Ruthenian writing (Polish:
Odpowiedź na zdanie o zaprowadzeniu abecadła polskiego do piśmiennictwa ruskiego) in 1834. On the other hand, attempts to introduce Latin were supported by some Polish writers, such as A. Belowski, A. Dombczanski, and L. Semenski. == Second stage ==