Ivan Kotliarevsky

Ivan Petrovych Kotliarevsky (Іван Петрович Котляревський; 9 September 1769 – 10 November 1838) was a Ukrainian writer, poet and playwright, social activist, regarded as the pioneer of modern Ukrainian literature. Kotliarevsky was a veteran of the Russo-Turkish War.

Biography
Kotliarevsky was born in the Ukrainian city of Poltava in the family of a clerk Petro Kotliarevsky of Ogończyk Coat of Arms. After studying at the Poltava Theological Seminary (1780–1789), he worked as a tutor for the gentry at rural estates, where he became familiar with Ukrainian folk life and the peasant vernacular. He served in the Imperial Russian Army between 1796 and 1808 in the Siversky Karabiner Regiment. Kotliarevsky participated in the Russo-Turkish War (1806–1812) as a staff-captain (something of 1LT or junior CPT) during which the Russian troops laid the siege to the city of Izmail. In 1808 he retired from the Army. In 1810 he became the trustee of an institution for the education of children of impoverished nobles. In 1812, during the French invasion of Imperial Russia he organized the 5th Ukrainian Cossack Regiment in the town of Horoshyn (Khorol uyezd, Poltava Governorate) under the condition that it will be left after the war as a permanent military formation. For that he received a rank of major.

He helped stage theatrical productions at the Poltava governor-general's residence and was the artistic director of the Poltava Free Theater between 1812 and 1821. In 1818 together with Vasyl Lukashevych, V. Taranovsky, and others he was the member of the Poltava Freemasonry Lodge The Love for Truth (Любов до істини). Kotliarevsky participated in the buyout of Mikhail Shchepkin out of the serfdom. From 1827 to 1835 he directed several philanthropic agencies.

The first modern Ukrainian writer
Ivan Kotliarevsky's mock-heroic 1798 poem Eneida (Енеїда), is considered to be the first literary work published wholly in the modern Ukrainian language. It is a loose translation of an earlier poem (Вирги́лиева Энеи́да, вы́вороченная наизна́нку) published in 1791 by the Russian poet N. P. Osipov, but his text is absolutely different. In 1845, Vincent Ravinski wrote a Belarusian version of "Eneida travestied" in the Russian magazine Mayak. Although Ukrainian was an everyday language to millions of people in Ukraine, it was officially discouraged from literary use in the area controlled by Imperial Russia. Eneida is a parody of Virgil's Aeneid, where Kotliarevsky transformed the Trojan heroes into Zaporozhian Cossacks. Critics believe that it was written in the light of the destruction of Zaporizhian Host by the order of Catherine the Great.

Kotliarevsky's two plays, also living classics, Natalka Poltavka (Natalka from Poltava) and Moskal-Charivnyk (The Muscovite-Sorcerer), became the impetus for the creation of the Natalka Poltavka opera and the development of Ukrainian national theater. Where the love for the Motherland inspires heroism, there an enemy force will not stand, there a chest is stronger than cannons. (Любов к Отчизні де героїть, Там сила вража не устоїть, Там грудь сильніша од гармат.)

Legacy

 * The Kharkiv I. P. Kotlyarevsky National University of Arts, in Kharkiv, Ukraine, is named after him.
 * MMonuments to Kotlyarevsky were erected in Kyiv (sculptor G. Kalchenko, architect A. Ignashchenko) and in Poltava (sculptor L. Pozen, architect A. Shirshov).
 * Numerous boulevards and streets in Ukrainian cities are named after the poet, the largest ones being in Kyiv, Poltava, Chernihiv, Vinnytsia, Khmelnytskyi, Chernivtsi, Pryluky, Lubny and Berdychiv.

English translation
Partial translations of Eneida date back to 1933 when a translation of first few stanzas of Kotliarevsky's Eneida by Wolodymyr Semenyna was published in the American newspaper of Ukrainian diaspora Ukrainian Weekly on 20 October 1933. However, the first full English translation of Kotliarevsky's magnum opus Eneida was published only in 2006 in Canada by a Ukrainian-Canadian Bohdan Melnyk, most well known for his English translation of Ivan Franko's Ukrainian fairy tale Mykyta the Fox (Лис Микита).

List of English translations:
 * Ivan Kotliarevsky. Aeneid: [Translated into English from Ukrainian by Bohdan Melnyk]. — Canada, Toronto: The Basilian Press, 2004. — 278 pages. ISBN 978-0921-5-3766-3.