Background
Hnat Martynovych Khotkevych was born on the 17th of December, 1877 in Kharkov, Ukraine in a peasant family. His mother was a domestic worker, though little is known about his father, who left the family in the mid-1880s.
Kharkiv Polytechnic Institute
Actor composer writer Public figure art critic theater figure
Hnat Martynovych Khotkevych was born on the 17th of December, 1877 in Kharkov, Ukraine in a peasant family. His mother was a domestic worker, though little is known about his father, who left the family in the mid-1880s.
As a youth he learned to play the piano and violin and later learned to play the bandura through observing the blind folk kobzars of the region. He completed his tertiary studies in engineering at the Kharkiv Polytechnic Institute in 1900 and then worked as a railway engineer.
After graduation, Hnat Martynovych worked as an engineer on the Kharkov-Nikolaev Railway. In 1906 he emigrated to Galicia, lived in Lviv, where he wrote works on Hutsul themes. Upon his return to Kharkov in 1912, Hnat Martynovych was arrested and kept in prison until 1913. In 1913 he became an editor of the journal Vesnik kultury i zhittya (1913). During the 1st World War, Hnat Martynovych as an "unreliable person" was sent to the city of Belgorod, Kursk region, and then to Voronezh, where he arrived in April 1916.
In Voronezh, Hnat Martynovych worked on the history of the Volchansky county zemstvo of the Kharkov province, recorded folk songs on the phonograph. He returned to Ukraine in 1917. He conducted diverse literary and cultural-educational activities. Hnat Martynovych is the author of numerous novels, short stories, plays, translations, studies in Ukrainian.
