Ivan Kotlyarevsky

Ivan Kotlyarevsky (born Sept. 9 [Aug. 29, old style], 1769, Poltava, Ukraine, Russian Empire—died Nov. 10 [Oct. 29, O.S.], 1838, Poltava) was an author whose burlesque-travesty of Virgil’s Aeneid was the first work written wholly in the Ukrainian language; it distinguished him as the father of modern Ukrainian literature. The Eneida (1798) transmutes Aeneas and the Trojans into dispossessed Cossacks of the period after the suppression of the Zaporizhska Sich (Cossack territory) in 1775. The work brings together valuable materials not only from the vernacular but also from various distinctive idioms; e.g., those of seminarians, wanderers, and thieves. Kotlyarevsky held a position in Poltava’s bureaucracy and also wrote several plays that still form a part of the classic Ukrainian repertoire.