Turning the pages back... January 27, 1790 (01/25/98)

Turning the pages back...January 27, 1790

Petro Hulak-Artemovsky was an erudite man of letters whose mark in literature has been etched both by his own accomplishments and by the Ukrainian bard Taras Shevchenko's contempt for his inability to take them still further.

Born into the family of a priest on January 27, 1790, in Horodysche of the Kyiv gubernia, he studied at the Kyiv Theological Academy until 1813, then taught at various private schools before returning to scholarship at Kharkiv University. In 1818 he was appointed lecturer of Polish language and literature there. Three years later he defended a dissertation in history, and in 1825 he secured a post as professor of Russian history and geography. In 1829-1841 he served as dean of the institution's faculty of Slavic studies, and from 1841 to 1849 he served as the university's rector.

Immediately upon his arrival in Kharkiv in 1817 he began to publish, joining that city's group of writers who contributed to the journal Ukrainskii Vestnik. Influenced by Ivan Kotliarevsky and classicism, he wrote travesties of Horace, and affected by the growing mood of romanticism, he translated Jean Jacques Rousseau (into Russian) and wrote Ukrainian ballads such as "Rybalka" (The Fisherman) and "Tvardovskyi" based on the works of Goethe and Adam Mickiewicz.

Best known is his "Pan i Sobaka" (The Master and His Dog, 1818), based on a fable by Polish writer Ignaci Krasicki, which satirizes the brutality of the serf-owning gentry, and which has been the object of a critical tug of war ever since. Some, such as Ivan Franko and Soviet academics, claim that the story is an impassioned critique of the social order and a call to abolish serfdom. Others, such as Serhii Yefremov and G.S.N. Luckyj, point to Hulak-Artemovsky's epicurean careerism and reactionary politics of subsequent years (coming to light after the failed anti-tsarist Decembrist revolt of 1925), which quickly doused any reformist (and even literary) spark.

Indeed, in the 1830s, Hulak-Artemovsky was grousing to Hryhorii Kvitka-Osnovianenko that it was impossible to write anything serious or genuinely moving in Ukrainian, which prompted his interlocutor to produce "Marusia," the first work of modern Ukrainian prose.

In the end, it's hard to argue with a national prophet. In 1847, in his last year of freedom, Shevchenko wrote the oft-quoted introduction to the second edition of the "Kobzar," in which he skewers Kotliarevsky's "Eneyida" as a "farce for Muscovite tastes" and pillories Hulak-Artemovsky for "becoming a lord" alienated from his own people.

Unfazed, Hulak-Artemovsky lived on comfortably as a university administrator and member of various Moscow- and Warsaw-based literary circles, and died in Kharkiv on October 13, 1865.

Sources: "Hulak-Artemovsky, Petro," Encyclopedia of Ukraine, Vol. 2 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988); G.S.N. Luckyj, "Between Gogol and Sevcenko," (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1971); Serhii Yefremov, Istoria Ukrainskoho Pysmenstva (Kyiv: Femina, 1995, republished from the 1919 Kyiv-Leipzig original).

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