Petr Gulak-Artemovskii

Born Jan. 16 (27), 1790, in the village of Gorodishche, in present-day Kiev Oblast; died Oct. 1 (13), 1865, in Kharkov. Ukrainian author. Born into the family of a priest.

Gulak-Artemovskii enrolled in the University of Kharkov in 1817; he became a professor there in 1825 and rector in 1841. He began to publish his works in 1817 and gained fame with the satirical fable “The Master and the Dog” (1818), which condemns the tyranny of landowners over their serfs. This work has a special place among his fables, which are usually directed against miserliness and ignorance (“Solopii and Khivria,” 1819; “Father and Son,” 1827) and sometimes preach submissiveness and resignation (“The Fish,” 1827). In part following the example of I. P. Kotliarevskii, Gulak-Artemovskii burlesqued Horace’s odes, reworking their content in Ukrainian terms. His versions of the ballads of J. W. Goethe (“The Fisherman”) and A. Mickiewicz (“Madame Tvardovskaia”) can be considered early works of Ukrainian romanticism. The late poem “Decline of the Century” (1856) expressed reactionary thoughts on the stability of the system of social inequality.