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December 31, 1877

One of the leading figures of Ukrainian modernism in literature, dramatist, novelist, short story writer, translator and an influential teacher and proselytizer of Ukrainian folk music was Hnat Khotkevych, born in Kharkiv on December 31, 1877.

In 1899, he organized a groundbreaking performance of kobzars and lirnyks at an archeological conference. The following year, he graduated from the Kharkiv Technological Institute and began work as a railway engineer. Politically persecuted for being one of the leaders of a railwayman's strike in 1905, he was forced to emigrate to Galicia, where he lived in Lviv, and then in Kryvorivnia, Kosiv county.

Already passionately interested in folk culture, he was profoundly affected by his new environment in the Carpathians, which inspired him to write profusely for the stage and the printed page. In 1910, he founded the Hutsul Theater. In 1911, he published his literary masterpiece, "Kaminna Dusha"(The Stone Soul), a stirring romantic work centered on his own version of the legend of the Hutsul Robin Hood, Dovbush.

Returning to Kharkiv in 1912, he gave public lectures, founded a workers' theater (which staged over 50 plays in the succeeding three years), and edited the literary journal "Visnyk kultury i zhyttia." Once again the focus of official disapproval, he was banished from Ukraine in 1915.

Back in Kharkiv after the February Revolution in 1917, he was opposed to the Bolshevik occupation of Ukraine, but from 1920 was an active participant in the republic's cultural life, although he steered clear of literary discussions. He wrote historical dramas, including the "Bohdan Khmelnytsky" tetralogy (1929) - which included a condemnation of the Treaty of Pereyaslav that was used to bind Ukraine to Russia.

Khotkevych's literary and artistic interests were wide and varied. He wrote studies on Hryhoriy Skovoroda, the 18th century itinerant philosopher, on Ukrainian folk music and instruments, on Galician folk and medieval theater, and on the nation's bard, Shevchenko. He also translated the works of Shakespeare, Moliere, Friedrich Schiller and Victor Hugo.

He was arrested during the Yezhov terror in the 1930s, and perished in unknown circumstances.

Source: "Khotkevych, Hnat" in Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 2 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988).

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, January 3, 1993, No. 1, Vol. LXI

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