THE LENGTH AND THE STRUCTURE OF THE COPY TEXT OF SHEVCHENKO’S POEM “THE GREAT VAULT”

Abstract

stands in Subotiv village...” to the text of Shevchenko’s poem “Th e Great Vault”. Stanislav Rosovetskyi provided a detailed criticism of this decision in his time, and his counterarguments are consistently considered in the paper. Most of them are refuted or questioned, false statements and inaccurate information are corrected.
 As a result, the following vision of the history of poem’s creation and circulation has been substantiated. In the early October 1845 in Myrhorod, Shevchenko completed the poem “The Great Vault”, the text of which still might not have had an epigraph and epilogue. Probably, a later copy that belonged to Ivan Lazarevskyi indirectly comes from this autograph. While in Maryinske the poet added an epigraph and on October 21 added the epilogue “There stands in Subotiv village...”, marking the date and place of creation. At that time, according to Olexandr Afanasiev-Chuzhbynskyi, whom the poet met in Lubny on October 25 and stayed with in Iskivtsi on October 25—27, the mystery play had no name. After returning to Kyiv, in approximately April — June 1846 Shevchenko rewrote “The Great Vault” along with other works from an unknown autograph to the manuscript collection “Three Years” in such a way that the epilogue of the poem could be mistaken for a separate work, as it was misunderstood by Vasyl Bilozerskyi who copied the mystery without the final fragment. Obviously, the same mistake was made by other copyists, who started the tradition of “Th e Great Vault” without the epilogue. When Shevchenko received an imperfect copy of I. Lazarevskyi, he had no choice but to edit only what it contained.
 Apparently, he did not object to the fact that in the copy of Lev Zhemchuzhnykov the final fragment was called “Subotiv”. It is suggested to increase the distance between the end of the third part of the poem and the beginning of the epilogue in the next academic edition, as well as to reproduce all the graphics of the poetic texts in editions closer to the autographs.