1769–1838
Ivan Kotliarevskyi
Father of modern Ukrainian literature
A native of Poltava and author of the Eneida, the first major work printed in living vernacular Ukrainian (1798). Modern Ukrainian literature is traditionally dated from it, and his plays Natalka Poltavka and Moskal-Charivnyk launched the new Ukrainian theater.
Key accomplishments
- The poem Eneida (first three parts 1798; complete edition 1842), a travesty of Virgil’s Aeneid in the vernacular
- The plays Natalka Poltavka and Moskal-Charivnyk (1819), the start of modern Ukrainian drama
- Headed the Poltava theater (1819–1821)
- During the war of 1812 he raised the 5th Cossack Regiment and was made a major
Who he was
Ivan Kotliarevskyi was born in 1769 in Poltava into the family of a minor official. In 1780–1789 he studied at the Poltava Theological Seminary, then worked as a clerk and as a private tutor in landowners’ families.
His story
In 1796 Kotliarevskyi entered military service. He took part in the Russo-Turkish War of 1806–1812, and during the war of 1812 he raised the 5th Cossack Regiment and was made a major. From 1810 he ran a home in Poltava for the education of children of poor nobles, and in 1819–1821 he headed the Poltava theater. For its stage he wrote the plays Natalka Poltavka and Moskal-Charivnyk (“The Soldier-Sorcerer”, 1819), with which modern Ukrainian drama began.
Kotliarevskyi’s main work is the Eneida, a comic reworking (travesty) of Virgil’s poem in which the Trojans became Cossacks and the gods spoke the language of a Poltava village. The first three parts came out in 1798 in St. Petersburg without the author’s permission. He worked on the poem for more than twenty years after that, and the complete edition appeared only after his death, in 1842. It is Kotliarevskyi, not Shevchenko, who is traditionally called the father of modern Ukrainian literature: the Eneida showed that the vernacular was fit for great literature.
Why it matters today
The Eneida is still part of the school curriculum, and Natalka Poltavka has been staged for more than two hundred years. In 1903 a monument to Kotliarevskyi was unveiled in Poltava; figures of Ukrainian culture from both sides of the then Russian-Austrian border came to its opening.
