Innovations of the Modern Commentary on Shevchenko’s Story “The Twins”

The paper discusses several controversial issues in the commentary on the story “The Twins” as part of the work on the academic three-volume edition of Shevchenko’s stories. The work is being performed by the Department of Shevchenko Studies of Shevchenko Institute of Literature of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in cooperation with the Institute of Source Studies of Shevchenko Scientific Society in America. For a better understanding of Shevchenko’s text, the researcher provides more detailed explanations, a broader presentation of the literary context, full citation of some prototexts, etc. Special attention is given to the artistic meaning of Shevchenko's ironic reference to the extremely popular “Pismovnik” by Nikolaj Kurganov, the structure and content of which are described in the paper. The author of the song “O falelei! O falelei!” was identified, and the lowercase spelling within the title is substantiated in accordance with the autograph of the story and the text of the songbook. The history of the appearance and distribution of the so-called Berdychiv calendar mentioned by Shevchenko is explained in detail. It is found that the phrase attributed to Bohdan Khmelnytskyi in the story actually originates from Ivan Kotliarevskyi’s “Aeneid”. The paper also deals with the ridiculous engraving “The Last Day of Pompeii,” created on the basis of newspaper descriptions of the painting by Karl Briullov. Shevchenko's comments on Gogol’s poem “Dead Souls” are presented alongside textual parallels from contemporary literary responses to its publication. The name of the inspector of Kyiv University students was commonly misspelled in scholarly sources, and this paper corrects the mistake. Biographical information about him is expanded using reliable documentary sources, and an analogy to the inspector's case described in the novel was found in Mykhailo Chalyi’s memoirs. The reputation of Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz’s dubious dance class is highlighted based on the reference books of the 19th century.