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Distinguished visitors

Walking through the Kachanivka park, you can’t help imagining all those luminaries — poets, writers, artists, composers and cultural figures, strolling through the park’s alleys conducting quiet and heated conversations, enjoying the views, breathing the balmy air. You seem to hear their voices, to see their shadows…

Probably the greatest of them all was Taras Shevchenko, a cult figure of Ukrainian culture. When Shevchenko came to Kachanivka for the first time — it was in 1843 — he was not a cult figure at all. He was a man of 29, full of vigour and life (and he did not look the canonized Shevchenko in a tall fur hat with drooping moustache, weary and sad, the way he is portrayed now), and he fell passionately in love with Nadiya Tarnovska, Vasyl Tarnovsky’s niece. This love proved to be unrequited, much to the young genius’ dismay. He returned to Kachanivka many years later, in 1859, a man physically broken by years of exile and hardships.

On this second visit to Kachanivka, the poet wrote in Tarnovsky’s guest book: “Even the path that you once strode along, has overgrown with thistles…” — evidently, Shevchenko remembered the torments of love that was not reciprocated. Shevchenko planted an oak in the park saying that he hoped he would rest in its shade some day. He hoped in vain — two years later he died.

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.

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