Jorge Luis Borges, probably the last of the “blind literary giants” of recent history, once pondered the perils of the writer’s glory and concluded that this monster can be tamed only when the author’s creativeness or certain biographic features stimulate his pathos. Projecting this thesis on the situation in Ukrainian literature, one must agree that Taras Shevchenko cuts the most impressive figure. It is saturated with pathos, in terms of both creative heritage and life which many hotheads tend to regard as a road to Calvary. In the case of Ivan Kotliarevsky, it was his first edition of his travesty on the Homeric Aeneid, inevitably followed by his recognition as the “founder of modern Ukrainian literature.”
In fact, Kotliarevsky was not and is still not admired by everyone in Ukraine. Some say that he was “avidly read by the aristocracy” and that he “often portrays the common folk in that same burlesque manner practiced by marketplace shows” (Oleksandr Lototsky). Others blame him for lacking the aristocratic touch, for consciously lowering, almost sabotaging the national aesthetic standard. Others condemn his overstated “Little Russian” allegiance, for his “odes to princes.” Others still for his separatism, particularism, Ukrainian slyness, and position of superficial parody toward the “great imperial context.” Many other critical remarks could be cited (e.g., superficiality, heavy officer’s humor, his having an estate in Poltava, his attitude toward the Swedes and French Revolution, his wearing a diamond ring as a personal present from Alexander I, his freemasonry – some scholars believe that the latter can be read between the lines in Aeneid’s Part IV; this made me reread it a dozen times, but my dilettante’s eye caught nothing except the word “Astraea”).
Many dislike him precisely for his introduction of the Kotliarevsky style, but most agree that he is not to blame personally. He just wrote his work and the style set in, being something very solid, verging on poetastery, extremely imposing and very original, a real continent with an archipelago in St. Petersburg, inhabited by monsters with clamorous operetta names, as a rule double ones dating from the late Cossack period: Biletsky-Nosenko, Hulak-Artemovsky, Maksymovych-Ambodyk, Bantysh-Kamensky, Kostiantyn-Filadelf Puzyna, and Yevhen Hrebinka-Hrebionkin, author of the romance Dark Eyes, which almost instantaneously conquered the imperial court.
Getting back to Kotliarevsky, two hundred years ago a cheerful 25-year-old traveling teacher of children of noble blood, learned in alcoholic beverages as much as in geography, his major discipline, suddenly found himself the author of the world’s first book in vernacular Ukrainian. He spent the remaining 40 years of his life doing important and not so important things. He tried to get married; served in the army; fought in the Napoleonic Wars; finished his Aeneid, gradually realizing that the whole thing was serious, a mission he had to accomplish; headed a drama company, writing the “first national vaudevilles,” ridiculing Skovoroda as someone from Vozny; then proceeded to create the above-mentioned “odes to princes”; collected cooking recipes; and spent his last two decades translating The Bible, suddenly possessed with mysticism and Christian symbolism. He was brilliant if brilliance is to be understood as something in between the unfathomable and chance.
But it makes one happy to know that Ukrainian culture, permeated with martyrdom and tears, still struggling to be free, still retains this sparkling exception to the rule, this burlesque challenge and wellspring.







