This talk will introduce the audience to two mock versions of Vergil’s Roman national epic The Aeneid. One was written in Russian by Nikolai Osipov and another by a Ukrainian author Ivan Kotliarevsky. Both poems contributed to the shaping of their cultures’ literary canons and identities. But while Osipov’s poem sunk into oblivion, Kotliarevsky’s oeuvre became the cornerstone of Ukrainian literary vernacular. The talk will offer some insights as to why these poems had such different receptions in posterity.
Zara Martirosova Torlone is a Professor in the Department of French, Italian, and Classical Studies and a member of the Core Faculty at the Havighurst Center for Russian in Post-Soviet Studies. She is the author of Russia and the Classics: Poetry’s Foreign Muse (2009), Latin Love Poetry (co-authored, 2014), and Vergil in Russia: National Identity and Classical Reception (2015). She has also authored articles on Roman poetry and novel, Russian reception of antiquity, Roman games, and textual criticism. Her most recent publications are a co-edited volume on Classical Reception in Eastern and Central Europe, to which she also contributed (2017), and a co-edited volume Virgil’s Translators, also with her own contribution (2018). She is currently working on a monograph Shapes of Exile: Ovid in Russia, which will be published by Oxford University Press. Her article on mock Aeneids in Russia and Ukraine will be coming out in 2023 in Modern Language journal.