Eneida
Eneida (Ukrainian: Енеїда, lit. 'Aeneid') is a burlesque poem in the Ukrainian language, written by Ivan Kotliarevsky in 1798. This mock-heroic poem is considered to be the first literary work published wholly in the Ukrainian vernacular. The talented depiction of various elements of the life of the Ukrainian people in the context of language, history, traditions and everyday life brought the poem great success among contemporaries, caused many imitations, and led to the final displacement of the old literary language from the literary use by the vernacular.
Eneida is a parody of Virgil's Aeneid, where Kotliarevsky transformed the Trojan heroes into Zaporozhian Cossacks. It is a loose retelling of N. P. Osipov's 1791 Aeneid Turned Inside Out (Russian: Виргилиева Энеида, вывороченная наизнанку), written in Russian; the latter being a free translation of Aloys Blumauer's Virgils Aeneis, travestiert (1784), which in turn hails back to Paul Scarron's 1648 poem Le Virgile travesty en vers burlesques. Critics believe that it was written in the light of the destruction of Zaporozhian Host by the order of Catherine the Great. The poem was written during the formation of romanticism and nationalism in Europe. At that time, part of the Ukrainian elite was gripped by nostalgia for the Cossack time.
The first three parts of the poem were published in 1798 in St. Petersburg, without the author's knowledge. The complete Eneida was published after Kotliarevsky's death in 1842.
The poem is in top-100 list by "From Skovoroda to modern time: 100 most important works in Ukrainian".
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