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Laying a Legend to Rest: The Poet Kapnist and Ukraino-German Intrigue

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

William B. Edgerton
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For seventy-five years a furiously controversial legend has hung over the name and reputation of the eighteenth-century Russian poet Vasilii Vasilievich Kapnist. It began at a meeting of the Polish Historical Association on December 7, 1895, when Professor Bronislaw Dembiński, of the University of Lwów, read a report about his discovery of a document in the Preussisches Geheimes Staatsarchiv stating that a Ukrainian gentleman named Kapnist had secretly gone to Berlin in April 1791 and talked with the Prussian minister of state, Count Ewald-Friedrich Hertzberg, about the Ukrainians’ desire to get Prussian help in freeing themselves from Russia. Professor Dembinski's paper, published in 1896, was promptly brought to the attention of Ukrainian readers by the Ukrainian historian M. S. Hrushevsky, who expressed the opinion that the Kapnist who secretly visited Berlin was “undoubtedly none other than the well-known author of Chicanery [Kapnist's comedy Iabeda].“

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 30 , Issue 3 , September 1971 , pp. 551 - 560
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1971

References

1. Bronistaw Dembinski, “Tajna misja ukrairica w Berlinie w r. 1791,” Prseglqd Polski (Krak6w), 3 (1896): 511-23.

2. “Sekretna misiia ukraintsia v Berlin! r. 1791,” Zapysky Naukovoho tovarystva im. Shevchenka, 9 (1896): 7-9, “Miscellanea.“

3. “Kozats'kyi proiekt Vasylia Kapnista,” S'ohochasne % mynule (L'viv), 2 (1939): 16-22.

4. Ukrainian Concise Encyclopedia, vol. 1 (Toronto, 1963), pp. 667 and 943

5. Matsai, A, “Iabeda” V. V. Kapnista (Kiev, 1958), p. 78 Google Scholar.

6. Kovalenko, L, “O vliianii frantsuzskoi revoliutsii na Ukrainu,” Voprosy istorii, 1947, no. 2, p. 83 Google Scholar.

7. Berkov, P. N., “V. V. Kapnist kak iavlenie russkoi kul'tury,” in XVIII vek: Sbornik, vol. 4 (Moscow and Leningrad, 1959), p. Leningrad Google Scholar.

8. Modzalevsky, V. L., Malorossiiskii rodoslozmik, vol. 2 (Kiev, 1910), pp. 284–85 Google Scholar

9. Kapnist, V. V., Sobranie sochinenii v dvukh tomakh, ed. Babkin, D. S. (Moscow and Leningrad, 1960)Google Scholar ; hereafter cited as SS.

10. Oksman, Iu. G. and Chernov, S. N., eds., Vospominaniia i rasskazy deiatelei tainykh obshchestv 1820-kh godov, 2 vols. (Moscow, 1931-33), 1: 407–8 Google Scholar; this volume is hereafter cited as Oksman.

11. Ilko, Borshchak, Napoleon i Ukrama (L'viv, 1937), p. 123 Google Scholar.

12. Georg, Sacke, “V. V. Kapnist und seine Ode ‘Na rabstvo, '” Zeitschrijt fiir slavische Philologie, 17 (1941): 291–301Google Scholar.

13. Sacke, “V. V. Kapnist,” p. 294; Vigel, F. F., Zapiski, 7 vols, in 3 (Moscow, 1891-93), 3: 145–46Google Scholar.

14. Sacke, “V. V. Kapnist,” p. 299.

15. The addressee of this letter is given as Kapnist's wife, but this is evidently a typographical error.

16. Modzalevsky, , Malorossiiskii rodoslovnik, 2: 282–Google Scholar; and Lobanov-Rostovsky, A. B., Russkaia rodoslovnaia kniga, 2 vols. (St. Petersburg, 189S), 1: 237–39 Google Scholar. In reality, there is some doubt whether he really was the son of his father's second wife. The poet's great-great-granddaughter, M. R. Kapnist, told the late Professor Berkov that according to family tradition Vasilii Kapnist was born on February 23, 1756, exactly two years before the date given by the poet himself, and was the illegitimate son of V. P. Kapnist and a captive Turkish girl. When V. P. Kapnist was killed in battle in 1757, the family tradition relates that his captive Turkish paramour committed suicide and his legal wife took the baby Vasilii and brought him up as her own son (see Berkov, “V. V. Kapnist,” pp. 257- 58). If this story is true, then the Ukrainophile poet Kapnist who wrote in Russian had no biological connection with either the Ukrainians or the Russians: he was half-Greek and half-Turkish.

17. Oksman, pp. 314-16. This view of Nikolai is also found in the biography of the poet's grandson, Peter Ivanovich Kapnist, written by his daughter Ina Petrovna, who described Nikolai as “the least sympathetic of the brothers,” an eccentric, and a family despot ( Kapnist, Peter Ivanovich, Sochineniia, 2 vols. [Moscow, 1901], l: xv Google Scholar).

18. Oksman, p. 320.

19. 55, 2: 441; Modzalevsky, Malorossiiskii rodoslovnik, 2: 284.