Ukrainian literature. The 19th century

Nineteenth-century Ukrainian writers greatly contributed to the reawakening of Ukrainian national consciousness under the Russian Empire. Indeed, practically the entire development of Ukrainian literature in the 19th century occurred under official Russian disfavour; in 1863 and 1871, for instance, all publications in the Ukrainian language were prohibited. Not until 1905 did the Russian Academy of Sciencesconcede that Ukrainian was indeed a separate language.

Ivan Kotliarevsky, classicist poet and playwright, inaugurated modern Ukrainian literature with his "Eneyida" (1798), a burlesque travesty of Vergil's "Aeneid" that transformed its heroes into Ukrainian Cossacks. Kotlyarevsky's works were very popular with the common people and spawned a number of imitations.

In the 1830s the city of Kharkiv became the centre of Ukrainian Romanticism, and under the latter's influence the authors Izmayil Sreznevsky, Levko Borovykovsky, Amvrosy Metlynsky and Mykola Kostomarov published ethnographic materials and collections of folk legends and Cossack chronicles. In western Ukraine Romanticism was represented by the "Ruthenian Triad": Markiyan Shashkevych, Yakiv Holovatsky and Ivan Vahylevych. In the 1840s these two outlying areas were bridged by the development of Romanticism in Kiev; the Romantic movement reached its peak there and found its highest expression in the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius (1846). This group's ideology was reflected in Kostomarov's biblical Knyhy bytiya ukrayinskoho narodu ("Books of Genesis of the Ukrainian People"), which called for an end to tsarist rule and the creation of a free, democratic Ukraine within a Slavic federation.

The early poetry of Taras Shevchenko, the outstanding Ukrainian poet of the 19th century, expressed the interests of the Romantics but soon moved to portrayal of Ukrainian history, especially in the long poem "Haydamaky" (1841; "The Haidamaks"), and to works satirising Russia's oppression of Ukraine, e.g. "Son" ("The Dream"), "Kavkaz" ("The Caucasus"), and "Poslaniye" ("The Epistle"). His later poetry, written after his release (1857) from exile, treats broader themes. After Shevchenko, the most important Romantic was Panteleimon Kulish, poet, prose writer, translator, and historian ("Chorna rada"; "The Black Council").

Ukrainian realism, which begins with Marko Vovchok ("Narodni opovidannya", 1857; "Tales of the People"), was long confined to populist themes and the portrayal of village life. Realist poetry developed with the work of Stepan Rudansky and Leonid Hlibov. The novelist Ivan Nechuy-Levytsky's work ranged from the portrayal of village life in "Kaydasheva simya" (1879; "The Kaydash Family") to that of the Ukrainian intelligentsia in "Khmary" (1908; "The Clouds"). Panas Myrnv (pseudonym of Panas Rudchenko) was the major representative of Ukrainian realism. His depiction of social injustice and the birth of social protest in the novel "Khiba revut voly, yak yasla povni?" (1880; "Do the Oxen Low When the Manger Is Full?") has a new psychological dimension. Ivan Franko wrote dramas, lyric poetry, short stories, and

children's verse, but his naturalistic novels chronicling contemporary Galician society and his long narrative poems "Moysey" ("Moses"), "Panski zharty" ("Nobleman's Jests") and "Ivan Vyshensky" mark the height of his literary achievement.

The modernism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries is first evident in the poetic dramas of the finest Ukrainian woman writer, Lesya Ukrayinka, and in the prose of such writers as Mykhaylo Kotsyubynsky and Vasyl Stefanyk.

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