Turning the pages back...

August 9, 1823

Oleksander Navrotsky was born into a Kozak nobleman's family on August 9, 1823, in Antypivka, a village in Zolotonosha county, just across the Dnipro from Cherkasy in the Poltava gubernia.

While a student at Kyiv University, he joined what writer and critic Mykola Kulish called the Kyiv circle, which "enthusiastically upheld the apostleship of brotherly love." In part because of his cousin Mykola Hulak's influence, Navrotsky joined the Brotherhood of Cyril and Methodius soon after it was formed in 1845, and together with his cousin he stood somewhere in between those who sought moderate reform within the tsarist regime (Mykola Kostomarov) and those who called for bloody revolution (Taras Shevchenko).

This moderation got him a moderate sentence when the police began rounding up members of the brotherhood in March 1947. They nabbed him in Poltava soon after his graduation. He was mprisoned for six months in Viatka, then exiled for six years to Elabuga and Kursk (all in Russia).

Upon his release in 1953 he worked as a tsarist functionary, mostly outside Ukraine (St. Petersburg, Novocherkassk, Yerevan, Dagestan), although he did enjoy a brief stint in Mykolaiv.

Influenced by Shevchenko (or perhaps giving in to an irrepressible generally Ukrainian urge), he began writing poetry the year of his arrest. A few were published in his lifetime, in the journal Osnova (1861). The rest appeared posthumously, in the journal Kievskaia Starina and in M.N. Petrov's history of 19th century Ukrainian literature.

However, Navrotsky's translations were his principal contribution. He translated around 140 literary works, producing the first Ukrainian renderings of Heinrich Heine's poetry, and successfully tackled the works of Byron, Goethe, Lermontov, Mickiewicz, Milton, Pushkin, Shelley and Schiller. He also completed monumental translations of Homer's "Illiad" and "Odyssey."

Navrotsky died in Temir-Khan-Shura, Dagestan, on October 22, 1892.

Sources: "Navrotsky, Oleksander," "Cyril and Methodius Brotherhood" Encyclopedia of Ukraine, Vols. 1, 4 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984, 1993); G.S.N. Luckyj, "Between Gogol and Sevcenko," (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1971).

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, August 10, 1997, No. 32, Vol. LXV

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