Following the lines of Ivan Kotlyarevsky’s letters

Abstract

The epistolary legacy of the first classic of the new Ukrainian literature by I. Kotlyarevsky is a poorly researched page in domestic literary studies. Therefore, the latter is of great scientific interest, not only as a material for the study of the writer’s biography, but also as a completely original factor, which reflects all the versatility of his spiritual life, individual features of his thinking, style, certain artistic, cultural and social tendencies to which he was involved. It is a kind of reflection of the soul of the writer in which his day was embodied, it is also his certain biography, presented simultaneously in several variants - real and dreamy. It is also a multi-story, multifaceted work with forever lost individual pages, but because of that it is even more interesting and unique.

The complexity of the study of the epistolary in general and I. Kotlyarevsky’s letters in particular is due to the specific nature of the latter: both documentary and subjective, which led to the appreciation of the correspondence of the artist by scholars as secondary material. Thus, the direct content of I. Kotlyarevsky’s letters, the figurative forms of the narrative in them, determine the particular relation of subjective and objective, partial and general, all of which, therefore, clearly problematize the important and specific direction of further scientific studies of the writer’s epistol.