Chapter THREE: Ivan Kotlyarevsky

Four years after the death of Skovoroda, there began to circulate in the country near Poltava manuscript copies of an amusing travesty of Vergil’s _Aeneid_, written by one Ivan Kotlyarevsky. It attracted attention not only because of its subject matter and treatment but because the author had for the first time endeavored to write in the ordinary vernacular of the day. In other words, modern Ukrainian literature had been born.

To understand the value and significance of this, let us glance at the political situation in Eastern Ukraine. In 1764 Catherine the Great had induced the last of the Hetmans, Cyril Rozumovsky, to resign his post, and in return he received from the Empress large grants of land. The position of Hetman was replaced by a Little Russian Board which worked strenuously for the Russifying of the country. There still remained the Zaporozhian Sich which had lost much of its former power but which still gathered around it many “unruly” Kozaks. In 1775 after the war with Turkey and the suppression of the revolt of Pugachev, Catherine sent a large army against this and confronted with overwhelming force, the Kozaks were obliged to submit. The regular Russian system of landholding was introduced and the Kozaks who did not join the Russian army had to become serfs. A large number refused to accept either of these alternatives and during the next years emigrated to Turkey. Then in 1783 the last remains of the Hetman state were abolished.

Thus perished Ukrainian autonomy in the Russian Empire and a large number of the officers and the gentry willingly Russianized in order to reap the advantages of their new position. Ukrainian songs, manners, and customs became a subject for popular jesting. At the same time many of these Russianized Ukrainians not only distinguished themselves in the Russian service but also in Russian literature. Such men as Vasili Kapnist made a name for themselves in literature and played almost as great a role in the Russian eighteenth century as the Kievan scholars had done in the pre-Petrine period.

The new culture of St. Petersburg that had succeeded the old Byzantine formalism of Moscow was heavily under the influence of the pseudo-classic culture of eighteenth century France. The leading writers vied for the honor of being the Russian Vergil, the Russian Racine, the Russian Molière, etc. They carried the use of classical allusions to an almost ridiculous extreme and outside of the comedies, there was little about their works that was distinctively Russian. Their originality lay in an almost unconscious caricature of the French models and it was the vigor and energy of the authors that kept them from being as ridiculous as they might have well become.

In addition to that, the theoreticians of Russia found it necessary to develop in Russian the three styles of poetry as outlined by Boileau. There was the high style to be employed in odes, tragedies, and epics and the language of these forms was to have the highest proportion of Church Slavonic words. Then came the more ordinary styles, and finally in the low style of comedies there was to be the pure vernacular speech. It was all carefully arranged by the scholars and the arbiters of fashion by _a priori_ reasoning and not by practical experience or literary skill. It could not fail to produce smiles and hence there were several attempts to write burlesque epics and to poke a heavy fun at the excesses of the more egotistical authors.

Yet it is to be noted that humor of this kind had long been a characteristic of Ukrainian writing. The intermezzos that had been inserted in the mystery plays were full of such burlesque exactly as they had been in the West in an earlier period and the Academy in Kiev had developed despite its formalism the comic element which was inherent in the Ukrainian character.

All this brings us back to Ivan Kotlyarevsky, the talented founder of modern Ukrainian literature. He was born in 1769 in Poltava in an impoverished noble family. This was just five years after the abolition of the Hetmanate and but six years before the destruction of the Sich. When the boy was sixteen, the last vestiges of Ukrainian autonomy were abolished. Thus in his youthful years he passed through the depressing atmosphere of the downfall of the Ukrainian state. He studied in the Seminary at Poltava and won a certain reputation as a poet. This did not give him a livelihood and so for several years he remained as a private tutor in the homes of various nobles. Then he entered the Russian civil service and later served in the army as a captain. When he retired from this, he secured a position as inspector in one of the Poltava schools for the children of impoverished nobles. Later as a welcome guest at the home of the Governor General Repnin, he became director of the theatre at Poltava. He died in 1838.

His was a life lived in general superficial agreement with the new order. There is no record that Kotlyarevsky met with any difficulties because of his use of the Ukrainian language or because of his ideas and it is perhaps a little extreme to credit him with far-reaching separatist ideas. At the same time he clearly recognized the difference between the Ukrainians and the Russians. He had a lively interest in the conditions of his people and he deeply regretted that history had not developed differently. He was not afraid to say that conditions as he knew them were not ideal but it would be rash to press his views too far, when we consider the general atmosphere of his times.

During his lifetime also there began the intense interest in folk songs and folk customs. Rousseau had taught an interest in the lives of the simple people and Herder as early as 1773 had begun to write his glorification of the folksongs of the people. Everywhere in Europe this form of study was growing. Scientists and poets alike worked on the same themes and hardly a year passed without some new work in this field. Macpherson’s _Ossian_ was already known in Russian as well as in French and German. During the reign of Catherine the _Armament of Ihor_ had come to light and in the early nineties scholars and courtiers “discovered” the idol of Tmuturakan and established a vogue for “South Russian” antiquities.

Yet it is very significant that Kotlyarevsky in his first Ukrainian work did not produce anything along these lines. Neither did his interest in the people and their speech lead him to make a scientific study of the language of the people. In this he differs sharply from the Czech scholar Dobrovsky and he differs equally sharply from Lomonosov and the other writers who founded modern Russian literature. Poland too had its own development on the basis of French pseudo-classicism which later passed into the Romantic period. Kotlyarevsky started on the basis of the old classical culture of the Ukrainian schools and stood nearer to the enlightened sceptics of the eighteenth century than to the younger group of Romantic authors.

There is a story that he had commenced the _Eneida_ during his studies at the Poltava seminary and had worked over it for many years. It is perhaps possible, for there is much in it that reminds us of a work conceived in a school perhaps as a definite and humorous reaction to the excessive Latin training that was customary at the time.

It was a bold idea to undertake a travestying of the _Aeneid_ but it was something that might be done under the conditions prevailing, as other authors of Russia had done. The use of the vernacular was only a slight extension of the normal usage for a burlesque epic should not, under the strict rules, have been written in the high style and we can therefore understand the course of Kotlyarevsky’s reasoning in starting upon this work.

The most significant fact is that the author definitely decided to depict Aeneas and his companions as Ukrainian Kozaks wandering around Europe in search of a new home. The comparison was obvious but it took a mind of considerable penetration to grasp the situation. Then as now the vast majority of classical students insisted upon seeing the ancients in a vacuum which had no relation to present reality. On the other hand in the very first paragraph Kotlyarevsky sets the key note.

Aeneas was a clever fellow
And he was a superb Kozak.
He stood all ills and did not bellow,
Surpassed his men on every tack.
But when the Greeks old Troy had fired
And made of it what they desired,
He took his pack and drew a sigh.
A group of Trojans he did rally,
All banished boys, to make a sally
And showed his heels to Troy for aye.

The very opening stanza could not fail to bring to the mind of every Ukrainian the parallel between Aeneas and the Kozaks from the ruined Sich and with that as his text Kotlyarevsky worked on, following the Aeneid very closely and yet modifying the adventures of the Roman hero so that they would fit perfectly into the position of the Kozaks. His skill in selecting the proper details and episodes show his amazing talent in this difficult task.

Of course there were passages that were entirely unsuited to his purposes. There was nothing in recent Ukrainian history which he could use as Vergil used the destruction of Troy. Even aside from difficulties with the censor there was no possible similarity between the capture of the great city and the surrender of the Sich. None of the older sieges which the Sich had undergone would have fitted into the picture, as the source of the migration, and so Kotlyarevsky merely assumes the fall of the home of Aeneas and goes on with his story.

For the same reasons he slurs over those episodes which take place upon the sea and it is in these passages that the work becomes rather a burlesque upon the original poem. In their earlier and happier days, the Kozaks had made many a raid down the Dnieper and across the Black Sea against the Turks but for a couple of centuries their exploits were associated with the land and so Kotlyarevsky could not adapt the scenes at sea with the same skill and wealth of allusion that he could the episodes on land.

Yet the great difference lies in the position of the authors. Vergil as the poet laureate of Augustus was describing the events leading up to the foundation of mighty Rome at a time when Rome was the mistress of the world. It was safe and necessary for him to introduce prophecies of Rome’s coming greatness and of the glories that the descendants of Aeneas were to win. Anchises in the underworld could safely predict the coming of all those great men who were to increase the prestige of Rome and the Julian line for centuries to come. Kotlyarevsky, a contemporary of the emigration of the Kozaks, saw their glory in the past. What was to be their future? As he looked at the wretched inhabitants of Ukraine and the suffering Kozaks abroad, he could only hope and that hope had to be indefinite for the Russian sovereign had decided that there would be no more Ukraine and any prophecy of resurrection might be treated as treasonable. Thus the main differences in the treatment can be explained by the different position of the two authors.

The religious attitude of the authors is also very different. Vergil believed or pretended to believe in the gods of Rome. He had to maintain the proper attitude of piety to the state. Kotlyarevsky treats them as brawling and unidealistic beings, very human individuals with all the vices of the Kozaks and little of their human virtues. Thus Juno, the tutelary deity of the Latins and the implacable foe of Troy, becomes a very ill-tempered _baba_ and she is described accordingly. The gods who drink their fill and beyond are ordinary mortals. In this there is a great deal of the scepticism of Voltaire and the criticism of paganism by the older Christian tradition that believed in the evil character of paganism, perhaps even more than a deliberate satire on the rulers of Moscow with their almost divine pretensions as is thought by Yefremiv (Istoriya Ukrainskoho Pis’mentsva Vol. I, p. 361). We can never forget that Kotlyarevsky was an Orthodox Christian, writing for his coreligionists and that they had been taught that the pagan gods were either non-existent or evil and hence not deserving of a respectful treatment.

It is not so often noted that the _Aeneid_ of Vergil is not the only source of Kotlyarevsky’s poem. He undoubtedly knew his Homer, especially the _Odyssey_, and the gods of the _Eneida_ are often human in a manner similar to those of the Greek poet, although there is not the same naivete in their description and Kotlyarevsky does not feel the need of making them superhuman with the human virtues and vices raised to a high degree. The Greek influence can be clearly seen, for the poet perhaps for metrical reasons is far more apt to name the ruler of the gods Zeves (Zeus) than Jupiter, the regular form in Vergil.

There is also a deliberate slurring over of supernatural incidents. The miraculous plays very little role except in the transformation of the ships of Aeneas into swans. Kotlyarevsky follows Vergil in passing over lightly the episode of Polyphemus but he cannot resist the temptation to bring Aeneas close enough to Circe’s Isle to see the animals into which her different victims have been changed. Thus the Poles have become rams, the bearded Muscovites goats, and the Prussians foxes.

He does not hesitate to depart from Vergil in the account of the visit to the underworld. He definitely says so himself:

For Vergil, may he reign forever,
Was always wise, as we well know.
We would not harm him now or ever
But he lived many years ago.
Besides in hell conditions differ
From what they were when he looked thither.
And when the long departed wrote.
I now will give the present story,
Will change, omit some details hoary,
And from my elders I will quote. (III, 42)

So he includes in hell all those who have transgressed the Kozak spirit and code and all who are working in this world to make unbearable the lot of the poor people.

With these outstanding changes, Kotlyarevsky with good-natured fun and real pathos makes Aeneas and his Kozak followers proceed through the Latin story. They get uproariously drunk at Dido’s court. Aeneas deserts Dido. They conduct the games in Sicily in the Kozak manner, even to the scene where old Entellus, the former champion, is drunk in a ditch and cannot be roused to meet the young challenger until he is promised sufficient liquor, quite like the legends of Ilya of Murom in the old byliny. The Kozaks revel and fight as they did once in the Sich, they are loyal to one another and finally when they do make their way to Italy, they learn Latin out of the same grammar that was taught in the Ukrainian schools of the day and they make their petition to Latinus in a grotesque mixture of tongues which may be well translated:

Aeneas, noster magnus panus
And Troianorum mighty prince
A-roaming o’er the sea, a gypsy,
Ad te, O rex, has sent us nunc.
Rogamus, domine Latine,
Do not destroy our wretched heads.
Permitte us to live among you
E’en for pecuniam or gratis.
We all will thank you always satis
For your beneficentia. (IV, 46)

Likewise in places where Vergil indulges in descriptions as in the catalogue of the Italian clans, Kotlyarevsky gives us long passages of information as to the Kozak leaders of the past and he describes the various Kozak regiments as taking part in the campaign. He does not mention either Khmelnitsky or Mazepa. Both were perhaps dangerous figures to introduce, for the one had brought the Kozaks into connection with Russia and the other was in bad odor with the Russian government. It was therefore more convenient and more in line with the policy of Kotlyarevsky to omit any clear mention of either.

The author showed however an amazing grasp of the manners and customs of the Ukrainians of his day. Without idealizing or degrading them, he pictures the life of Aeneas and his followers exactly as the Kozaks lived, even to their petty virtues and vices. There is almost an atmosphere of folklore study about certain passages and it testifies to Kotlyarevsky’s powers of observation and selection that he was able to do this so successfully.

The _Eneida_ was a revelation to the Ukrainians. Here was a poem in the common vernacular, glorifying the Kozaks. It was very different from the attitude of the historians, whether they were pro- or anti-Kozak, and was nearer in spirit to the popular songs of the day. But what a difference! For in the _Eneida_ Kotlyarevsky had dared to be himself, to play with his material and to break out a new road.

The effect was almost instantaneous. What other writers had not been able to accomplish with serious tracts or flaming denunciations, in the old artificial language, Kotlyarevsky had done with a sure and firm touch, thanks to his appreciation of the language and customs of the people. Those who wished merely to laugh could find an abundance of humor. Those who were more serious could see the sufferings of the people hidden under a perfectly transparent guise. There was a message of hope in the comparison. If Aeneas and his Trojans, the founders of mighty Rome, had to pass through such hardships, then the cause of Ukraine was not lost, so long as any of her sons remained alive.

It is small wonder that the poem speedily became popular and went through three editions in a few years. It touched off the long hidden spark which most had regarded extinct. Henceforth Ukraine had a written language understood by the people, and it was up to them to write in it as well as speak in it. The country and the people had the proof that their ordinary vernacular could be adapted to literature and that real books could be written in it. Once and for all in Eastern Ukraine the artificial language vanished and slowly but surely its place was taken in publications by the vernacular of Kotlyarevsky.

Meanwhile the author kept on with his ordinary work. He did not try to repeat the performance. He did not engage in any propaganda for the new language but his home became the centre for the steadily increasing number of people who were awakening to a self-esteem that had been sadly lacking for many years. That was the highest praise that could be given to a work. Critics can analyze it and try to find the detailed meaning of each allusion. They can seek for the author’s point of view on many questions of the day. They can annotate every line. They can praise or condemn. Kotlyarevsky had done the impossible and opened a literature in a new language and he could rest content.

Meanwhile the years moved on and there was a growing number of books written in the vernacular. Kotlyarevsky retained the friendship of the Governor General and became more and more interested in the theatre and finally was put in charge of the theatre in Poltava.

The Ukrainian theatre was in a bad way. There were troupes of serf actors on many estates and in some of the main cities there were theatres but there were no Ukrainian plays for them to perform. What they did was to give uninteresting performances in a mixture of Russian, Polish and Ukrainian. They satisfied a certain need but the general level of education was so low that the new performances were little more than the degradation of the old religious and school plays.

In 1812 Prince Shakhovskoy, realizing the musical value of the Ukrainian folksongs, produced what he was pleased to call a Ukrainian vaudeville, the _Kozak Poet_. This employed certain Ukrainian themes and was written in what purported to be the Ukrainian language but Shakhovskoy did not know the vernacular speech and his language was neither Russian nor Ukrainian but a hodge-podge of unreal and assumed forms. The _Kozak Poet_ became very popular and its linguistic defects were largely unnoticed, for there was no fully accepted standard, and his work was highly praised, especially by all those who were seeking for advancement in the Russian service.

It displeased Kotlyarevsky, who had already shown some talent in various amateur performances and he determined again to be a forerunner in another field. In 1819 in his own theatre at Poltava, he produced two comedies _Natalka Poltavka_ and _Moskal Charivnik_. (The Muscovite Wizard.) The celebrated actor Mikhail Shchepkin, a Ukrainian by birth, took part in these performances. They were the first real Ukrainian plays written for a modern theatre and they have held their own on the stage for over a century. Let us say frankly that they are not masterpieces of the dramatic art but neither are they to be despised. They are adapted to the stage and it is not only patriotic fervor that has kept them alive.

Let us look a little more closely at the _Natalka Poltavka_, “an opera in two acts,” as Kotlyarevsky calls it, though it is really an operetta. It contains many elements that are typical of the Franco-Italian play of the period. The characters are quite conventional. There is the heroine, a beautiful country girl who has been reduced to poverty by the death of her father but who is still honorable and virtuous. She is a type that goes back through the ages into the ancient world. There is the poor orphan boy who was regarded as unworthy to become her husband and who returns rich at the crucial moment. There is the sincere but ambitious mother. All these are stock characters from world drama and if Kotlyarevsky had merely put these types through their paces, he would have laid a good basis for the Ukrainian theatre. He did more than merely imitate the conventional models. He was deeply conscious of the difficulties of his people and if he was not heroic in the later nationalistic sense, he stood for an ideal that was strange in his day and boldly emphasized various qualities of the Ukrainian temper.

Take the conversation between Petro and the _Vyborny_ and the _Vozny_. Petro had been to the theatre in Kharkiv and had seen there the drama of Shakhovskoy which was creating so much excitement. He boldly declared that he could not understand it because the Moskal did not know how to write the Ukrainian language or draw a Ukrainian character. Here he definitely expresses the author’s sense of literary criticism. It is very interesting that Petro is fully conscious of his difference from the Moskals and that the _Vozny_, the judicial official, no more educated than Petro, corrects the historical mistakes which Shakhovskoy made about Ukraine.

In the _Moskal Charivnik_, Kotlyarevsky also pokes fun at those Ukrainians who endeavor to turn themselves into Russians but this play is far weaker and less clear in its construction. In the _Ode to Prince Kurakin_, he stresses the same points and the hardships of the people.

Both of his dramas contain snatches of poetry, sometimes purely original and sometimes a reworking of the poems of Skovoroda. They end with a chorus as in the traditional dramas of the day and they show Kotlyarevsky’s command of other forms of Ukrainian verse as well as the epic.

The striking characteristic of all of Kotlyarevsky’s work is the democratic character of his writings. The nobility had been pretty well Russianized and it was only the common people who preserved the native language. However, while he depicted them in a kindly humorous way, he never lost an opportunity to speak out strongly about the peasant virtues and to emphasize that democratic tradition which had always been so strong in Ukraine and in the lives of the Kozaks. Thus Natalka in her talk with the _Vozny_ definitely refuses to marry him, because she is of poor peasant stock and he comes from the gentry. There is hardly a literature which took its rise in such a clearly democratic atmosphere as did modern Ukrainian and Kotlyarevsky from the very beginning set the keynote which was to be followed by all of his important successors.

Yet with it all Kotlyarevsky did not present the Ukrainian cause in a manner that would get him into trouble with the authorities. He was not a political agitator nor a man to menace by his actions the social order of the day. He was a literary innovator and the creator of the Ukrainian language and like most of the early leaders of the Slavonic revival in various countries, he did not work in the field of politics. He did not aim at reviving the political independence or the political system which had been overthrown by the Russian Empress. At that time Ukrainian culture had been so buffeted and demoralized that the first and most essential factor was the creation of a new spirit and a new self-respect.

That was his work and he succeeded admirably in what he undertook. It is even said that many of the Russianized nobles were moved to tears when they read in his lists of the Ukrainian regiments and groups their own family names and recalled the old traditions which they affected to have forgotten. Critics of the later day bewailed his frivolity and the light tone in which he worked. Yet those very men were compelled to use the language which he had forged and they profited by all that he had accomplished. That language which had been derided as a peasant tongue was revamped into a literary medium and when Kotlyarevsky died, he could look out at a world in which the great poet Shevchenko was just beginning his career. The creation of the language was the first step toward this flowering and that was the work of Kotlyarevsky who formed the speech out of an unwritten vernacular and taught his people to use it and to use it in a democratic spirit.

The _Eneida_ was really the beginning of a new movement even as the comedies were the practical start of the modern Ukrainian theatre. They stand as a solid monument to Kotlyarevsky and every critic, friendly or hostile, must realize the full measure of his accomplishment.