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57 Chapter Three Apelles’s Gallery: Kvitka-Osnov’ianenko and the Critics (1833–1843) Apelles . . . exhibited his finished pictures in a gallery for passers-by to see. He used to hide behind the pictures and listen to what faults people found, reckoning that the general public were more perceptive critics than he was himself. The story is told of a shoemaker who criticized him because in drawing sandals he had omitted a loop on the edge. Next day the critic was so proud that Apelles had corrected the mistake to which he had previously drawn attention that he found fault with the subject’s leg. Apelles was indignant and, looking out from behind the picture, said to him: “A shoemaker should stick to his last!” [Ne sutor ultra crepidam.] —Pliny the Elder, Natural History1 W H E N H RY H O R I I Kvitka-Osnov’ianenko (Kvitka) retold this Alexandrian episode in Ukrainian, he recast Apelles as a Ukrainian artist, Kuz’ma Trokhymovych, who displays his painting at a rural fair. In Kvitka’s 1833 “Saldatskii Patret” (“The Soldier’s Portrait”), a bootmaker, who finds fault with the artist’s rendering of the soldier’s footwear, returns to critique the pant-leg. The artist Kuz’ma repeats Apelles’s remonstrance: “‘But don’t you know?’ Kuz’ma Trokhymovych cried out from behind his market stall. ‘Cobbler know your cobbling, but don’t butt into the tailor’s trade! [Shvets’ znai svoie shevstvo, a u kravetstvo ne mishaisia!]’”2 A growing number of Ukrainian writers in the nineteenth century shifted from writing in Russian, the language of the empire, to Ukrainian, but like the Greek artist Apelles, they ran the perpetual risk of encountering harsh critics who were more than willing to overstep their bounds. The period that saw Gogol’s rise in popularity among Russian readers Jews and Ukrainians in Russia’s Literary Borderlands 58 also saw a Ukrainian national revival in both left-bank Ukraine, the territory to the east of the Dnieper River, and right-bank Ukraine to the west.3 The Herderian ethnographic trends of the turn of the early nineteenth century not only played a role in Gogol’s repackaging of his native landscape for export , which appealed to his Russian readership’s vague image of Ukraine’s countryside, ethnicities, and material products. These trends also gave strength to intellectual interest, within the Russian Empire, in literature in Ukrainian.4 According to Vadim Skurativs’kyi, the Ukrainian language was, with its “written folklore, first and foremost [peredusim pys’mennym fol’klorom], an important artistic tool for the grandiose lyrical transformation of Ukrainian literature.”5 The paternity of what is commonly called “New Ukrainian Literature” (Novoukrains’ka litaratura) is usually assigned to Ivan Kotliarevs’kyi (1769– 1838), a nobleman from Poltava whose six-part Virgilic travesty, Eneïda, appeared in fragmented epigraphs to Gogol’s Dikanka tales. Shevchenko, Ukraine’s Romantic poet, artist, and national symbol, is also a contender for the position.6 Hryhorii Kvitka-Osnov’ianenko (1778–1843), though hailed by many as the first Ukrainian prose writer, is a more problematic candidate to be Ukrainian literature’s founding father, for critics have remained divided about the quality of his work, and he has never been quite politically , or artistically, correct in either the Ukrainian or Russian cultural climate . Kvitka’s conservative approach to bolstering Ukrainian identity frustrated many Ukrainian critics, who prioritized resisting an imperial Russian cultural hegemony. Although some Russian critics saw him as a nationally conscious Ukrainian writer who was eager to forge a positive relationship with Russia, others accused him of appealing to uncultured readers. Unlike Gogol, who altered Ukrainian themes in the interest of creating an artful story, Kvitka took a rigorous approach to ethnography, prioritizing cultural authenticity over aesthetics. “According to old Kharkov residents,” Nikolai Sumtsov recounts, “Kvitka could be found at the bazaar on Sundays and holidays , where he wandered around and observed subtle details of folk habit and sayings.”7 Descriptions of Ukrainian markets abound in Kvitka’s Russian and Ukrainian work. For Kvitka, the commercial landscape is both a source of authentic Ukrainian behavior and speech patterns and an allegory for the critical reception of Ukrainian literature in the nineteenth-century Tsarist Empire. The most notable example of this is “A Soldier’s Portrait.” Hryhorii Kvitka-Osnov’ianenko (usually called simply “Kvitka” or “Osnov’ianenko”) was more than thirty years Gogol’s senior. The Ukrainian writer’s relative late start, however, made the two...

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