I. S. ROMANCHENKO AS A KULISH SCIENTIST: LITTLE KNOWN FACTS OF SCIENTIFIC ACTIVITY

Abstract

The aim of the article is to consider the little-known facts of the scientific activity of the Ukrainian literary critic Ivan Savych Romanchenko regarding his research of the creative heritage of Panteleimon Kulish. It is mainly his monograph “Kulish – a biographer and critic of Gogol”, which was published in 1943 during the German occupation of Romny at the expense of the author.

It was found that the monograph of I.S. Romanchenko written on the basis of his own revised candidate’s dissertation in the postwar years was strongly condemned by Soviet critics for ideological reasons and became the ground to accuse the author of nationalism. In 1947, in particular, he was accused of covering Kulish mostly positively and of actually supporting the reactionary nationalist conception of Kulish’s so-called ethnographic realism. It is also noted and exampled that the monograph of IS Romanchenko during the war received its recognition in the professional environment of the conscious Ukrainian intelligentsia, and in the postwar period its positive assessment continued to exist among scholars of the Ukrainian diaspora. Eventually, this time-tested book was brought back from oblivion in independent Ukraine, where it is again of scientific interest. Relevant publications in which it is mentioned are indicated.

The article also mentions some preserved copies of this rare book, in particular, those that were once donated by Ivan Romanchenko to literary critics Leonid Biletsky, Mykhailo Vozniak, Vasyl Simovych and historian Ivan Krypyakevych. It is noted that one of the copies donated by the author to Leonid Biletsky, which among other books was donated by the Ukrainian diaspora to the Canadian-Ukrainian Library Center in the Regional Scientific Library named after DI Chizhevsky (Kropyvnytskyi), was digitized several years ago and is now available to the general public.