“Pan Khalyavsky” of Grigory Kvitka-Osnovianenko as the autobiografical “educational novel”

Abstract

The article analyses the role of the food code in the Russian-language novel “Pan Khalyavsky” (1839-1840), written by the Ukrainian writer Grigory Kvitka-Osnovianenko. This novel was written as a memoir of the Little-Russian gentry. It has traditionally been regarded as a satire on the rude mores of backward and ignorant provincials - both in the assessments of nineteenth-century critics and in the history of the literature of the Russian Empire. One of the arguments for such a classification was based on the motives of gluttony and food abundance in Khalyavsky’s “memoirs” as an indication of the “earthiness” and narrowness of the characters' interests. The description of festive feasts, everyday meals, libations, etc., is compared to Rabelaisian subjects: they are considered to resemble the culinary discourse and the methods of its embodiment in Gogol’s early works and in the novel “Dead Souls”. The analysis of the food motif associated with the body code in the article, however, shows that it is important for creating an idealised picture of the past, and not only the history of Little Russia. The idyllic “good past” constitutes a social patriarchal utopia, which is opposed by a new society, the enlightened nature of which deprives a person of traditions, spiritual purity and moral harmony.