Description of Νecropolis in “The Commoners’ Council”: Issue of Sources

Abstract

Both in the magazine publication of 1846 (“Kyivan Pilgrims of the 17th Century”) and in the Russian 1857 version of “The Commoners’ Council” Panteleimon Kulish claimed that the epitaphs from the Assumption Cathedral of the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra were taken from Afanasii Kalnofoyskyi’s “Teraturgema” (1638) and translated into Russian. However, the comparison of the texts shows that the translations were actually taken from Mykhailo Maksymovych’s paper “On Tombstones in Pechersk Monastery” (1840). Other quotations with references to the “Teraturgema” were borrowed from the work of metropolitan bishop Yevhenii (Bolkhovitinov) “Description of Kyiv Perchersk Lavra” (1826).
 The Kyivan episodes of “The Commoners’ Council” were mainly based on two Maksymovych’s papers from “Kiievlianin” (“The Kyivan”) almanac (1840), the aforementioned one and “Overview of Old Kyiv”. Kulish did not mention any of these sources in the novel’s footnotes. This fact should be considered in the context of the system of references that the writer built in “The Commoners’ Council”. Unlike many authors who worked in Walter Scott tradition, Kulish didn’t use footnotes in “The Commoners’ Council” in order to acknowledge and justify certain anachronisms and time distortions.
 The writer referred to the testimonies of the witnesses of historical events, even after he had received an information from the people of the 19th century (Shevchenko, for instance), to the folkloric texts, and his own observations. The works of historians were important for him as far as they offered published collections of the authentic documents, but not as the sources of concepts. No intermediaries could stand between the historian novelist and the depicted age.