Mečislav Krhoun and His “Poetic Work of Yuriy Fedkovych” as a Multicultural Intersection

Abstract

The present contribution is based on the author’s previous texts about the work of the Czech specialist in Slavonic/Russian/Ukrainian/Belarusian studies, Mečislav Krhoun, especially about his extensive monograph “The Poetic Work of Yuriy Fedkovych” (Brno, 1973), and attempts to synthesize the personality of Mečislav Krhoun and to examine in more detail his epochal work, which has so far been known only fragmentarily even in Ukraine. The motivation for the contribution is also connected with the project of the Yuriy Fedkovych Chernivtsi National University, specifically prof. Lidiia Kovalets from the Department of Ukrainian Literature and dr. Taras Kovalets from the Department of History of Ukraine, to translate this work into Ukrainian. The aforementioned colleagues contacted the management of Masaryk University in Brno and asked for help in finding the heirs of Mečislav Krhoun for copyright reasons. I was willing and able to help them in this and look forward to the result of their work. This contribution – unlike my previous ones, which were based on the examination of comparative contexts, personal contacts with M. Krhoun and knowledge of his entire philological work – is focused in more detail on individual chapters and partial aspects of the examination of Yuriy Fedkovych’s poetic work as an intersection of multiculturalism, since his purely national work is deeply permeated by the traditions of European culture and literature, and his Ukrainian-German biliterariness includes various stimuli from other national literatures, especially those of the Central European area. This is reflected in the chapters of Krhoun’s monograph examining the existing literature on Fedkovych, his German and Ukrainian origins, the genesis of his poetic work, his genre range, legendary poems, the poetry collections “Am Tscheremusch” and “Dyki dumy” and the last poems. Krhoun’s work is historically anchored in his complex life path, in his life story, but also in the time of the book’s publication, to which the then vice-dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Brno, Jaroslav Burian, had great merit. Krhoun’s methodology is based on internal and external thematological and versological comparative studies of a rather positivist nature, but at the same time, partly also in the spirit of formist and formalist schools; he pays considerable attention to the poetics of Fedkovych’s work, its genesis, cultural background, connection with the poet’s life destinies and especially with his biliterariness, which was largely determined by the state organization and cultural influences in which the territory of Bukovina, as a part of the Austro-Hungarian Cisleithania (Cisleithanien), which it shared with the Lands of the Bohemian Crown, was located. Fedkovych used this to create a broadly conceived work that draws on a considerable breadth of European poetry. The tendency towards synthesis, which runs like a red thread through Krhoun’s entire work, forces the author to use various approaches of literary criticism: in addition to the positivist-comparative method, there is also the poetological, biographical, and partly psychological method, which together form an inseparable whole. Krhoun’s monograph is an original and distinctive part of the Brno school of Slavonic literary comparative studies of Frank Wollman and his disciples. This is complemented by historical anchoring, i.e. a cultural-historical approach. Therefore, Krhoun’s monograph should be viewed with a high degree of sensitivity through the prism of Fedkovych’s time with its language and period contexts and not deprive it of this historicity, i.e. not forcibly modernize his poetic heritage, while at the same time respecting the historical background of the author of the monograph and his courage to publish, in a time that was not very favourable, a very open, deep and factually precise work that anticipated contemporary approaches with its multicultural vision and contributed to deepening knowledge of the work of the Ukrainian classic connected to a specific cultural area.