Horlenko, Vasyl

Horlenko, Vasyl [Горленко, Василь], b 1 March 1853 in Yaroshivka, Romny county, Poltava gubernia, d 13 April 1907 in Saint Petersburg. Literary critic and art scholar. After graduating from the Sorbonne in Paris he returned to Ukraine in 1882 and maintained close ties with such Ukrainian cultural figures as Mykola Kostomarov, Panas Myrny, Porfyrii Martynovych, Mykola I. Storozhenko, and Mariia Zankovetska. A frequent contributor to Kievskaia starina, he wrote numerous surveys of Ukrainian literature, articles about dumas, book reviews, and literary portraits of such writers as Taras Shevchenko, Ivan Kotliarevsky, Hryhorii Kvitka-Osnovianenko, Ivan Nechui-Levytsky, P. Myrny, Ivan Franko, and Yakiv Shchoholiv. In these portraits he combined, under the influence of Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve and Hippolyte Taine, a esthetic judgment with historical description. He also wrote studies of such Classicist artists as Dmytro H. Levytsky and Volodymyr Borovykovsky.

Part of Horlenko's works were collected and published in Iuzhnorusskie ocherki i portrety (South-Russian Sketches and Portraits, 1898), Ukrainskie byli (The Ukrainian Past, 1899), and Otbleski: Zametki po slovesnosti i iskusstvu (Reflections: Comments about Literature and Art, 1905). His letters to Panas Myrny were published in 1928. A monograph about him by Dmytro Doroshenko was published in Paris in 1934.

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 2 (1988).]