Доклад: Kachanivka. National Historical and Cultural Preserve

Mykola Gogol, a Ukrainian who became a towering figure in the Russian literature of all time, was among the regular visitors to Kachanivka. Four times in the period between 1835 and 1850 he came to Kachanivka to relax, to stroll around the park, to get inspired — and to write. It is believed that it was in Kachanivka that Gogol wrote and read to the host and other guests one of his better known novels, Taras Bulba. One of the oaks in the park is claimed to have seen Gogol.

In 1838, Mykhailo Glinka, the then most prominent Russian composer, came to Kachanivka looking for singers for the Imperial Choir. Ukraine was famous for producing excellent singers and Glinka in his travels across Ukraine kept bringing boys and young men to Kachanivka for audition. In Kachanivka, Glinka befriended a highly gifted artist, Vasyl Shternberg, doomed to die young, and a poet, Viktor Zabila whose poetry the composer liked so much that he wrote two wonderful romances which are still performed. It was Glinka who brought to Kachanivka Semen Hulak-Artemovsky, a young singer then, who was to become one of the leading Ukrainian composers of the nineteenth century. And it was in Kachanivka that Glinka experienced a great love of his life — he was enamoured of Mariya Zadorozhna, a niece of Hryhory Tarnovsky’s wife. There must have been something special in the very atmosphere of Kachanivka that inspired love. Glinka wrote his opera Ruslan and Lyudmila based on a wonderful fairy-tale poem by Pushkin, at the height of his loving feeling and the music definitely bears the imprint of love.

It would take much more space than could be given to a magazine article just to mention all those who visited Kachanivka and contributed to the development of Ukrainian and Russian culture. The Kachanivka park deserves a separate story as well. In the Soviet times, Kachanivka was badly neglected but in recent years, with Ukraine’s independence, restoration work began and the park came back to life. I dearly wish Kachanivka would one day become again “the cultural Athens” of Ukraine it once was.