Vasily Kapnist

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Vasily Kapnist

Zaporozhian host in the region of southern Ukraine.[2]

Life and work

Kapnist was born in Velikaya Obukhovka in the Kiev Governorate of the Russian Empire in 1758. According to family tradition, Kapnist's mother was a captive woman of Turkish origin.[3] His paternal grandfather was a Venetian merchant of Greek origin from the island of Zakynthos. He was a descendant of the Venetian noble family of Capnissi (whose name derives from the Zakynthos surname Καπνίσης[4]), he spent all his life in the manor of Obukhovka near Poltava.

His lifelong friendship with

Leub Guard
. Derzhavin later married Kapnist's sister-in-law and visited the poet and his wife in Obukhovka more than once.

The extension of

serfdom in the Russian Empire dismayed Kapnist and occasioned his two most notable poems, Ode on Slavery (1783) and Ode on the Elimination of Slavery in Russia (1786), in which he chastised serfdom as the principal pest of contemporary Russian society. His later poems belong to the Horatian tradition, anticipating Russian Romanticism
in their social pessimism and admiration of simple family joys.

Kapnist revealed himself as a savage satirist in his most famous work, a satirical verse drama based on the poet's litigation against a neighbour and aptly entitled Chicane (1798). His victims are the judges and officers of law, whom he paints as an unredeemed lot of thieves and extortioners. The play is in rather harsh Alexandrines but produces a powerful effect by the force of its passionate sarcasm. The poem is based on the Russian custom of state-appointed judges, whereas at the time of Cossack Hetmanate the judges were previously elected.

Soviet stamp 1958

Although Kapnist dedicated his play to

Gogol's Inspector General, owe not a little to the crude and primitive comedy of Kapnist.[5]

The letter to Friedrich von Hertzberg debacle

In 1788, Kapnist wrote a petition to Catherine the Great proposing the Empress restore the

war against Turkey. However, when the military situation improved, the imperial government refused to implement this plan.[6]

In 1896 a Polish historian

Ewald Friedrich Graf von Hertzberg, trying to persuade the Prussian government to declare war on Russia in case an uprising of Zaporozhian Cossacks starts against Russian rule. Friedrich Wilhelm II refused to give his own consent for such an action.[7] This letter was attributed by Bronisław Dembiński to Vasily Kapnist. However it is still not clear whether Vasily Kapnist truly could be the author of this letter and it remains unclear whether the real name could be used in the document. According to Olexandr Ohloblyn two of Kapnist's brothers are also possible candidates who could have written such a letter.[8][9]

References

  1. ^ Vasily Kapnist (Oxford Reference)
  2. ISBN 9781442698796
    .
  3. ISBN 9780882333410
    , D. Vasily Vasilievich Kapnist (1758-1823): The fourth and longest-lived poet of the Lvov circle was Vasily Vasilievich... there is a family tradition that his own mother was, like Zhukovsky's, a captive Turkish woman...
  4. ^ B.O. Unbegaun, Russkie familii (Moscow: Univers, 1995), p. 275.
  5. ISBN 0-8101-1679-0
    . Page 56.
  6. ^ Zenon Kohut. Roots of Identity. Studies on Early Modern and Modern Ukraine. Krytyka, Kyiv, 2004. Page 71-72.
  7. ^ Zenon Kohut. Roots of Identity. Studies on Early Modern and Modern Ukraine. Krytyka, Kyiv, 2004. Page 67.
  8. ^ Ohloblyn, Olexandr: Берлінська місія Капніста 1791 року.
  9. ^ https://web.archive.org/web/20160918224255/http://litopys.org.ua/coss3/ohl26.htm

External links

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