JAKUB GAWATOWICZ’S INTERLUDES: DILEMMAS OF INTERPRETATION

Abstract

The article is devoted to the problem of interpreting Jakub Gawatowicz’s interludes as the first Ukrainianlanguage examples of Ukrainian stage culture. Tracing the reception of Gawatowicz’s work in the publications of key researchers of baroque culture, the authors conclude that there is a significant mythologisation of Gawatowicz’s creative heritage, its misinterpretation by a number of 20th-century researchers, which has led to the ‘conservation’ of the distorted image of the baroque interlude in the Ukrainian cultural studies. An unequivocal conclusion about the place of J. Gawatowicz’s interludes in the stage art of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was made by the Polish-German cultural historian Aleksander Brückner at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. These conclusions were consistently supplemented during the first third of the 20th century, and finally took shape in the fundamental ‘History of Polish Culture’. J. Gawatowicz was not the first to use the ‘Ruska’ (Ukrainian) language as the language of the characters in interludes; this practice was widespread in Renaissance literature. The plot of the Lviv writer's main ‘Tragedy’ was not original either – Brückner traced several analogies that have come down to us not only in manuscripts but also in printed copies. In the 1970s, the Ukrainian-American literary critic George Grabowicz, referring to the work of Mykhailo Vozniak and Dmytro Chyzhevsky, concluded that the interpretations of Ukrainian literary historians were wrong not only about the content and significance of Gawatowicz’s interludes, but also about their authorship. The inclusion of Jakub Gawatowicz in the narrative of the history of Ukrainian stage culture, in our opinion, is due to the author’s origin and the Ukrainian-speaking nature of his characters, which was incorrectly perceived by Ukrainian researchers as markers of self-identification for both Gawatowicz and his characters. Instead, the Ukrainian language in the Polish baroque school drama was used to enhance the comic effect and better understand the play among the audience of fairground performances. The conclusions draw attention to the actualisation of the issue of a comprehensive textual and comparative study of Gawatowicz’s ‘Tragedy’ in order to finally demythologise the problem of the birth of Ukrainian theatre and the place of baroque school drama in this process.