Tourist and informative route “I am… a natural citizen of Poltava” (Hohol and Poltava)

Mykola Hohol indeed became a favorite writer of millions of souls all around the globe. He captured people’s minds through best expressing Ukrainian identity and mentality. His literary masterpieces show the features of the national character of Ukrainians most fully and vividly.  «Are you in the know what Ukrainian night is like?» - the glorifier of Ukraine would keep asking. «Are you in the know of the Ukrainian soul?» - that’s the way you could continue the words of the glorified Ukrainian by adding: “Are you in the know of Poltava and its surrounding land, or you may have visited it?” If not, then off we go there immediately!

The Poltava period of life, the oeuvre and work of the famous word painter has much broader frames than studying at a training school. It was in Poltava when little Nikosha Hohol had his first experience getting acquainted with such a big and important city and its citizens. It was namely Poltava that affected Mykola Hohol’s creative ideas.  «I am… a natural citizen of Poltava», - Hohol is writing to his mother Maria Ivanivna Hohol in his letter from Saint Petersburg on June 3, 1830. That was the time when he held the position of a scrivener in the Department of counties, having sworn to be an officer and applying to Masonry.

Hohol wasn’t famous back then, but he already was that very Hohol. It was in the evenings and in the night silence, that the humble assistant to the chief of the third table of the second department of the County Department, would turn into the Beekeeper (Pasychnyk Rudyi) Red Panko (that was his nickname). That disguised erudite created the masterpiece of Dykanka, Poltava and surrounding farms. He was in his own element, as the homeland nourished an immensely rich imagination of the beekeeper, and with his virtuoso pen a story that would become immortal was born.

All paths of Hohol are connected with Poltava. He did not bypass it in his childhood, it is skillfully, densely and organically woven into the canvas of his works. All the roads to his homeland, which was in Vasylivka, went through Poltava; the best friends who Nikolai corresponded with lived there.  Poltava became the place from which the great branch of the Pushkin-Hohol clan originated, which now has about one hundred descendants (together with already dead ones). For many decades of the last century, the main center in Poltava was the large family of Sophia Mykolayivna Danylevska - the guardian of traditions and terstaments of ingenious ancestors.

In modern Poltava the memory and reverence for Mykola Hohol is concentrated in the central part of the city: a monument to the writer by Pozen (1936) is in Hohol street near the Poltava Regional Academic Music and Drama Theater named after M. Hohol, where you can constantly see the characters of Hohol's stories.

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