Hryhory Kvitka came from an old Cossack family and was son of a senior
Black Sea Cossack officer. He could become an ordinary burgher, maybe even
a Privy Counselor, earning enough to lead the balanced life of a well-to-do
civil servant, dozing off in a carriage on his way from the office to the
cozy family estate at Osnova, a scenic suburb of Kharkiv, to be made welcome
by a buxom wife named Pazenka or Prisinka.
His was not a banal lot. The young man made up his mind to set up an
itinerant dramatic group which would travel from one country fair to the
next. He had big plans and then abruptly changed them, filing a petition
for enrollment in the Old Kharkiv Monastery as a novice "with hope of taking
the vows..." His father said no monastery and got him into the Life-Guards
Regiment in 1794. A year later, Hryhory was transferred to a civil post
at the Department of Heraldry. In 1799, he put on the uniform again, joining
Kharkiv's Cuirassier Regiment. Finally he did become a novice at the Kuriazky
Monastery in 1800 where he spent four years with interruptions. There he
was said to have a piano brought to his cell. Beside the icon lamp he placed
an inkstand in the shape of a hermit carrying a haystack with a pair of
female legs sticking out. Blatantly transgressing the canon, he began to
frequent salons, balls, home theatrical performances, and literary-musical
soirees. He was "a monk, actor, poet, and ballroom dancer."
Eventually, he fled his bureaucratic career to his beloved Osnova, but
then returned to the city to become director of the Kharkiv Theater (allegedly
because of an affair with an actress). Later, he worked as office manager
at the Institute for Girls of Noble Birth (to which he contributed all
his assets); then he was a marshal of the local nobility (for the umpteenth
time), later still one of the publishers and editors of Ukraine's first
periodical magazine, Ukrainsky vestnik (Ukrainian Messenger), writing
reports and lampoons under the pen name Falei Povynukhin, and Ukrainian
anecdotes rendered in a literary style that would make Barkov and Marquis
de Sade red with envy, commenting on them, "This is not for publication,
of course but could come in handy sometime."
At 40 he married an Institute teacher Anna Wolfe, half his age. Mykola
Zerov wrote that "his wife exerted considerable influence on him as a writer."
In his declining years he was generously awarded by the Russian Empress:
a chestful of medals, Order of St. Anna for meritorious assistance in the
establishment of the Military School, an Order of St. Vladimir for long
meritorious service, etc.
Then suddenly the 50-year-old veteran with a chestful of government
decorations and an almost spotless biography came up with a series of black
comedies: "Visitor from the Capital or Much Ado in a Provincial Town" (about
a former prankster now a devout patriot), "What Will Waiting Europe Say?",
"Elections of Nobility" (a two-part political farce immediately banned
by the government censor), "Provincial Scribe Shmelenko," "Officer's Servant
Shelmenko" (staged by the Imperial Company as "Ukrainian Diplomats," unaware
of the author's political burlesque), "Matchmaking at Honcharivka" that
went down in history as a "Little Russian opera," a real superhit that
would be associated with almost every major development in the Ukrainian
theater, from Ivan Ozarkevych to Marko Kropyvnytsky to Les Kurbas, and,
of course, "The Traveling Salesmen" ("About what happened once at a tavern
near a small unattractive town by a main road"), an expressive metaphor
of the total chaos in Little Russia. One of the characters declares, "If
I and those I know ever return to your Russia we shall transform it thoroughly.
You can be sure of that, just take a good look at me."
Contrary to bureaucratic protocol, he wrote most of his plays in the
"peasant tongue," Ukrainian, believing that the "Great Russian language
is just a vernacular born of several gubernias, a child compared to our
language, the elder son of Old Church Slavonic."
Naturally, his black comedies changed nothing in the contemporary bureaucratic
mentality. The elite had its own specific taste (in the words of one of
Kvitka's heroes, "I am honored to inform you as town governor and you ladies
and gentlemen in the audience that this day in our town will be marked
by an extraordinary occurrence. A tragedy with dances"). The most popular
entertainment at the time was a show staged by a certain Meckhold who could
"read thoughts" all over Russia. A huge billboard draped in black cloth
would be placed before the audience. The magician would fire a shot, the
cloth would slide from the billboard revealing the spectators' "most intimate
thoughts": a syrupy portrait of Tsar Nicholas I with the inscription "God
save our monarch!"
Hryhory Kvitka's "nonstandard" humor won him scolding from the Censorship
Committee. The author was strongly recommended to further refrain from:
(a) publicly ridiculing governors, governors general, and senators;
(b) addressing humiliating epigrams at clergymen constituting a "stratum
most sensitive to offense in our offending world."
Both (a) and (b) took their revenge in a very special manner: the secular
authorities "canonized" his works by including them in the school curricula;
the clergy got even with the author in 1843, posthumously: the Rev. Innokenty
accepted a fee of 500 rubles for his funeral and then refused to come to
the cemetery.







