Hnat Khotkevych

Hnat Martynovych Khotkevych (Ukrainian: Гнат Мартинович Хоткевич, (also Gnat Khotkevich or Ignat Khotkevich - when transliterated from Russian) December 31, 1877 in Kharkiv, Kharkov Governorate, Russian Empire – October 8, 1938 in Kharkiv, in the Ukrainian SSR of the Soviet Union) was a Ukrainian writer, ethnographer, playwright, composer, musicologist, and bandurist.

Khotkevych was a renaissance man and was multi-talented. Although he was trained as a professional engineer, he is known more as a prolific Ukrainian literary figure, and also as a dramatist, composer and ethnographer, and founder of the modern bandura art.

Khotkevych's mother was a domestic worker, though little is known about his father, who left the family in the mid-1880s. As a youth he learned to play the piano and violin and later learned to play the bandura through observing the blind folk kobzars of the region. He completed his tertiary studies in engineering at the Kharkiv Polytechnic Institute in 1900, and then worked as a railway engineer.

Khotkevych initially began writing as a student having his first stories published in 1897 - "The Georgian lady". Later appeared "The Prodical Son" (1898), "Analogies of life" (1901). "Mountain Aquarelles" (1914). His first major successful work was a novel about life in the Carpathian mountains - "The stone soul" which first appeared in 1911. Other novels followed. "Aviron" (1928), "Berestechko", "Tarasyk". An 8 volume collection of his writing were published in 1928, though many of his unpublished works have been lost.

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