Hnat Martynovych Khotkevych (, also Gnat Khotkevich or Hnat Khotkevych, born December 31, 1877 – died October 8, 1938) was a Ukrainian writer, ethnographer, playwright, composer, musicologist, and bandurist. Khotkevych was a renaissance man and was multi-talented. Although he was trained as a professional engineer, he is known more as a prolific Ukrainian literary figure, and also as a dramatist, composer and ethnographer, and father of the modern bandura. Early life and education Khotkevych was born in Kharkiv in 1877. 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. Literature Khotkevych began writing as a student, and had his first story published in 1897, "The Georgian lady". Later there appeared "The Prodigal Son" (1898), "Analogies of Life" (1901), and "Mountain Aquarelles" (1914). His first major successful work was a novel about life in the Carpathian mountains, The Stone Soul, which was published in 1911. Other novels followed: Aviron (1928), Berestechko, and Tarasyk. An eight-volume collection of his writing was published in 1928; many of his unpublished works have been lost. Khotkevych incorporated original folkloric and ethnographic material, in particular folk songs, tales, customs and even dialectical and lingual differences of the region or time which he was writing about. He included many aspects of the modernist style popular in Ukraine at the time. English Translations English translations of Hnat Khotkevych's works include: Short stories: “The Hunger Strike”, “In a Free Country p. 260”, “The Three”, “Facing the Door” and “It Had To Be Thus”.<ref>Khotkevych, B., 1998, '[http://www.languagelanterns.com/brother.htm 'Brother against Brother], pp.252-293, Language Lantern Publications, Toronto, (Engl. transl.</ref> Theatre As a youth he had the chance of seeing a number of theatrical performances in Kharkiv. He was so taken by these performances that in the summers he organized a theatre in the village of Derkachi for the peasants. In 1903 he organized a Ukrainian workers theatre in Kharkiv which was also hugely successful. He produced and wrote over 50 plays. Because his activities addressed social and national issues, he was forced to emigrate in 1905 to Halychyna (part of Western Ukraine) which