Chapter FIVE: Taras Shevchenko

It was a favorable time for poetry, if not for the poet himself. The second quarter of the nineteenth century saw a great flowering of poetry in Russia and in Western Europe. The first wave of interest in folk poetry was reaching its height and together with the Romantic movement was spreading into the Slavonic countries. There was a lively interest everywhere in the collecting of folk songs and not only in Western Europe but throughout the Balkans there were the first rumblings of the new nationalistic interest in language. Goethe was translating and praising the Serb ballads which had been brought to his attention. The Czechs were discussing with vehemence the authenticity of the ancient manuscripts recently discovered by Hanka. Safarik was working on the history of all Slavonic literatures. Mickiewicz had already achieved fame as a poet and his residence in St. Petersburg during the twenties had spread a knowledge of his works throughout Russia. The Polish Romantic movement was dominating the Polish scene and the great trio of Mickiewicz, Slowacki, and Krasinski were doing their best work.

In Russia too poetry was in its Golden Age. It was the period of Alexander Pushkin, the greatest of the Russian lyric poets. Around him was gathered a group of the gilded youth who had mastered the art of elegant verse and who had wide human interests, even though they cloaked them under a mask of aristocratic dilettantism. As their patron and adviser, Zhukovsky was still the master critic. With his excellent court connections, where he was the tutor of the young Tsarevich, later Alexander II, he was able to save the poets from the consequences of their own pranks and to give them good advice on their literary work. More than that Gogol with his Russian stories on Ukrainian and Kozak life had concentrated the attention of the general public on the life of Little Russia, for the name of Ukraine was still taboo in official circles. Now, if ever, was the time in Russia when there might be a hearing for Ukrainian culture, even if there were still no feeling for any change in the political situation. The era of the Russian literary gentlemen was at its climax. That of the plebeian realists was yet to come.

It was an ominous time for the poet himself. The Russian armies, returning from the defeat of Napoleon, had brought with them the seeds of modern democratic and republican influences. This had led the progressive aristocracy to embark upon the ill-fated Decembrist Revolution and when the tragic consequences of that evil day had passed, it was realized that Nicholas I with his narrow bureaucratic tendencies had destroyed the political power of the liberal elements of the country. Many of the literary men had suffered and even Pushkin was for a while under suspicion and in real danger. Then came the Polish revolt of 1831 and the Russian armies stormed Warsaw and destroyed the little autonomy that had previously existed in that land. Nicholas was suspicious of new outbreaks and as he firmly bound the universally recognized Pushkin with golden chains and broke his heart at the Russian court, so he was on the watch for any new malefactors who might venture to preach the hated liberal ideas.

It was just at this moment that a young Ukrainian serf, Taras Shevchenko, arrived in St. Petersburg, little dreaming of the changes that a few short years would make in his life.

He had been born on February 25, 1814, in the little village of Morintsy in the government of Kiev and was therefore a Ukrainian of the right bank of the Dnieper, far to the west of the home of both Kotlyarevsky and Kvitka. His father, though a serf on the estate of Vasily Vasilyevich Engelhardt, was able to read and write. His mother was also of a superior type and the boy always respected her memory and admired her, even though she died when he was nine years old. His father married again but the step-mother was not kind to him, and when his father died in 1826, the twelve year old Taras was left as an orphan amid the hard conditions of serfdom.

He had already been attracted to painting and he made several attempts to study with various local painters but his experiences were so unpleasant that he finally gave up and returned to his native village to pasture the cattle. A new attempt to get permission to study brought from the overseer of the estate merely an order to serve in the bakery but his failure there was so evident that he was appointed instead a page in the mansion.

This gave him at least the opportunity to feast his eyes on the beautiful works of art that it contained and encouraged him in his early attempts to copy them. He had to do this secretly and when his master discovered his copying and painting, the boy was soundly flogged. Nevertheless Engelhardt, like many other nobles of the day, liked to have educated serfs on his estate, and since Taras seemed competent, he took the boy with him first to Vilna and then after the outbreak of the Polish revolt to St. Petersburg and apprenticed him to the painter Shirayev.

Shevchenko learned relatively little here and life was very hard but he had the opportunity to make the acquaintance of the Ukrainian artist Ivan Soshenko. This was a piece of good fortune, for Soshenko soon introduced him to Karl Petrovich Bryulov, the most fashionable painter of the day.

Bryulov was then at the height of his fame. He was of a French Huguenot family which had long been domiciled in Russia and had been allowed to Russianize his name, only when he received a fellowship to study in Italy in 1821. He stayed there twelve years and took the Italian capital by storm. There he painted his masterpiece, the _Last Days of Pompeii_, which encouraged Bulwer-Lytton to write his novel on that subject. He had come to know personally Sir Walter Scott and the other English authors who visited Italy. Now in 1833, back in Russia, his studio was frequented by the most fashionable people of the day. His courses at the Academy were the goal of all students and the approval of Bryulov meant success or failure for the average artist.

It was this man who took an interest in the young serf and desired to have him as a student, but no serf could be admitted to the Academy. Engelhardt refused to give Shevchenko his liberty but finally offered it in return for 2500 rubles. To secure this sum Bryulov painted a portrait of the Russian poet Zhukovsky and this was sold in court circles by a lottery. The money was easily raised and on April 22, 1838, Shevchenko, then twenty-four years of age, became a free man, just one year after the death of Pushkin. He commenced his formal studies at the Academy of Art and finished the course in 1845 as a free artist.

Probably as early as 1837 he had begun to write poetry but his writings began to attract attention only after he was set free. In 1840 he brought out a slender volume, the first edition of the _Kobzar_, at the expense of a Ukrainian landowner Petro Martos, whose portrait he was painting. There was something new and startling in the quality of this first work with its emphasis upon the decay of the old Ukraine and the pictures of the sufferings of the people. It was typical of the spirit of Shevchenko that one of the poems _Katerina_ (named after his beloved sister) portraying the sufferings of a Ukrainian girl betrayed by a Russian lover was dedicated to Zhukovsky. Incidentally it may be mentioned that Zhukovsky was himself the illegitimate son of a Russian officer and a Turkish girl who had been captured in war.

He then set to work upon the _Haydamaki_, his longest and greatest poem. He finished it in 1841 and published it in the same year.

In 1843 he paid a short visit to Ukraine and everywhere he was received with the greatest honors as the Ukrainian poet _par excellence_. He was entertained by the various magnates including Prince Repnin, the governor, who was of Ukrainian origin, and his daughter Barbara. He visited his native village and he could not fail to be impressed as he never had been with the hardships which the people were compelled to undergo.

As soon as he completed his course in the Academy, he returned to Ukraine and spent the summer of 1845 travelling around the country, visiting the sites of famous buildings. He soon found a position in the Archaeological Commission where his skill in painting stood him in good stead.

He finally settled in Kiev and soon found himself among a group of enthusiastic young men and scholars, including Nikolay Ivanovich Kostomariv and Panteleimon Kulish. Filled with the enthusiasm of youth and stirred by those revolutionary currents which were preparing the movements of 1848, they organized the Society of Saints Cyril and Methodius, for the purpose of creating a great free union of all the Slavonic peoples under a republican form of government. It was typical of the change that had taken place in Russian and Ukrainian life since the time of the Decembrists that this new movement was headed not by members of the gentry or army officers but by a group of professors, scholars, and men of letters. The naturally radical instincts of Shevchenko and his ardent patriotism for Ukraine led him to associate himself with them and he shared their dreams as well as their activity.

The authorities soon heard of the movement and acted swiftly and savagely to suppress it. Apparently its existence was revealed to the authorities on February 28, 1847. The matter was referred to St. Petersburg and on April 5, Shevchenko and his friends were arrested. An investigation and trial followed and on May 30, he received the verdict that he was to be enrolled in the army in the Orenburg Independent Corps with the rank of private and the tsar added in his own handwriting, “under the strictest supervision with the prohibition of writing and drawing.”

Shevchenko had been a free man for only nine years. Now he was back in bondage under an even more intolerable yoke, torn away from his beloved Ukraine and condemned to live as a soldier in the most remote area of eastern Russia on the borders of Asia. At first his service was none too rigorous, for sympathetic commanders attached him to two expeditions to explore the Sea of Aral and allowed him to make sketches for the records of the expedition. When this came to the attention of the authorities in Petersburg, the privileges were speedily revoked and the tsar’s instructions were carried out literally. Finally Shevchenko was sent to the fortress of Novo-Petrovsk.

After the death of Nicholas I, the new tsar Alexander II pardoned him in 1857. Influential friends in the capital interceded for him and he heard in May that he was to be liberated but the official formalities were slow and it was the end of July before he was finally released, and he was able to start on his way home. He had reached Nizhny Novgorod on his way to Petersburg, when he was again detained, for his amnesty had not given him the right of residence in either of the capitals. It was March, 1858, before he was able to go further and even then he had to remain under police supervision. On his way to St. Petersburg, he stopped at Moscow to visit his friend Shchepkin, the celebrated actor, and he was kindly entertained by the Aksakov family.

In St. Petersburg, he resumed his studies at the Academy of Art and he renewed many old friendships, especially with Count and Countess Feodor Petrovich Tolstoy, who had been instrumental in securing his release. At their home he met such literary men as Count Aleksyey Konstantinovich Tolstoy, and in fact all of the conservative and liberal group of cultured writers, who appreciated the real value of art, literature, and freedom.

In 1859 he secured permission to pay another visit to Ukraine for the first time in twelve years and he spent the summer dreaming of marriage and of securing a little home for himself on the banks of the Dnieper. It was all in vain. On his return to St. Petersburg, he did succeed in securing the liberation from serfdom of his family but that was all. His health began to fail and he died the day after his birthday on February 26, 1861, just on the eve of the liberation of the serfs.

It was a sad life that Shevchenko had led. Out of his forty-seven years, he had been a serf for 24, in the army 10, and under police supervision for three and a half, so that there were only nine years under which he could feel himself a free man to come and go as he would. There is hardly any other writer of the same prominence to whom fate was so uniformly unkind. Yet despite it all and despite all the obstacles which he had to face he had succeeded in placing Ukrainian literature on its feet as a recognized literature and it is highly significant that whatever may have been his radical ideas, he retained to the end the friendship and confidence of the Russian aristocratic writers far more than he did that of the liberals. Even Turgenev did not fail to look at him with some hesitation and the liberal critics utterly failed to understand his feelings of love and sympathy for Ukraine. On the other hand Apollon Grigoryev, one of the Slavophile critics, ranked him as a poet above both Pushkin and Mickiewicz.

From his earliest writings Shevchenko was the bard of Ukraine. The fate of the Kozaks and the misfortunes of his unhappy people were constantly in his thoughts and in his early works, in accordance with the Romantic currents of the day, he idealized the life which they had lived, the stern and bitter conflicts which they had waged for independence and he glorified the _kobzars_, the folk bards, who alone preserved for posterity the memory of the heroic deeds of the Ukrainian past.

That is the message of _Perebenda_, the poor old bard who wanders around homeless and neglected, singing of the great heroes of former days, singing wherever he can receive a few coins to eke out his miserable existence, and yet ever returning to the graves of the departed warriors to mourn over the fate of Ukraine. There was much in the old bard that can remind us of Shevchenko himself and of the role that he imagined for himself from his first steps in the art of writing.

There have been many attempts to trace the literary origin of this type of the old peasant bard which was so widespread and common in Ukraine and the other Slavonic lands. Some have tried to find the model in Mickiewicz, in the poems of Pushkin, but perhaps after all, we can imagine without too much fancy that Shevchenko had heard from his teacher Bryulov, the friend of Sir Walter Scott, of the _Lay of the Last Minstrel_. Those words at the beginning of the English poem,

The way was long, the wind was cold,
The minstrel was infirm and old.
His withered cheek and tresses gray
Seemed to have known a better day.
The last of all the bards was he
Who sang of border chivalry.

sets the tone of _Perebenda_ far better than do all the mystical and prophetic bards that have been invoked as models. We have an indirect support of this in the preface of the second _Kobzar_ of 1847, when Shevchenko says that the Russians point to the fact that Scott did not write in his own language, but “he was born in Edinburgh and not in Scotland.... And Burns was also a great national poet.”

The pathos of the last minstrel, as Scott draws him, is close to the message of _Perebenda_, but Shevchenko adapts him perfectly to the Ukrainian scene. There is less of the beautiful romance about the Ukrainian situation. There is a deeper sadness and a deeper pathos, as the burden upon the lower classes was heavier and more intolerable. Scott described a situation of two centuries before and conditions had changed and mellowed with the passing of time. Shevchenko, the freed serf, was thinking of the life which he had once personally known and of the battles in which there had participated men whom he had known in Ukraine. In the _Kobzar_, he laid his main emphasis on the struggles between the Kozaks and the Poles. Moscow and the Russians play a subordinate part, for after all Shevchenko was from the right bank of the Dnieper where the bloody Kozak wars against the Poles had been fought in the preceding centuries.

The only poem that describes the relations with the Russians is _Katerina_, the story of the young girl who has a child by a Russian officer who has seduced her and then cast her off. When she finally overtakes him, he is unwilling to recognize her or his child. This social theme was to grow in importance as Shevchenko matured, but it rests upon his observation of the present rather than his regard for the past.

The _Kobzar_ marked an epoch in modern Ukrainian literature. For the first time a poet had arisen to pour out his heart in his native tongue and to express the sufferings of his people and their past. Shevchenko was not like the earlier authors who had developed Ukrainian but who had also worked extensively in Russian. He did very little in the Russian language and even that little belongs to the most unimportant part of his work. He was a Ukrainian first, last, and always and he never was attracted by any of the compromises that were so convenient and popular.

The next year saw the publication of the _Haydamaki_, the greatest poem of Shevchenko and the masterpiece of Ukrainian epic poetry. It goes back to the last struggles in Western Ukraine in the eighteenth century, to the last uprising of the peasants and the Kozaks in a futile attempt to secure relief from their Polish masters. His grandfather had told him stories of this struggle, the Koliivshchina, which spread fire and sword through part of Ukraine in 1768, and in the poem Shevchenko reworked these legends on the basis of eye-witness accounts. As he says:

My grandsir was there and my father who’s dead,
It happened one Sunday on closing the book
And drinking a cup with a neighbor of ours,
My father asked grandsir to tell us a tale
Of Koliivshchina, how there they had fought,
How Zaliznyak, Gonta had punished the Poles.
His aged old eyes flamed afresh as the stars,
His words came out fluently, youthful, and strong;
How they finished the Poles, and how Smila was burned.
The neighbors in fear and in sorrow were dumb
And I in my youth more than once set to weeping
In grief for the sexton.
But no one did notice
How wept the young child in the still of the cabin.
Thanks, grandsir, for all that you kept in your head,
The glory that once was the pride of the Kozaks,
Now I to my grandchildren tell the same tale. (I. 2421ff)

In the preface the poet speaks in the same mood, bewailing the invariable tendency of the day to treat Ukrainian themes as a source of gaiety and merriment while “Ukraina’s weeping.” To him a country and a culture that had produced such warriors as the bards had sung of was not something to be mocked and treated as of small esteem. The hetmans and the atamans of the past were worthy of a better fate and a better regard among following generations.

There is nothing mild about the poem. The convulsion of the Koliivshchina had been too terrible for that. It was a tale of savage massacres, one of those wild outbursts which was a war to the bitter end and where the oppressed, once they had taken up arms, could look only for victory or death. Yet the best passages in the poem are not the battle scenes--in one sense Shevchenko slurs over them--nor are they the pictures of devastation and of slaughter, but rather the preludes to the action, the gathering of the clans, the blessing of the weapons, scenes of the country which was so soon to be overwhelmed with bloodshed, and apostrophes to those leaders who had carved out for themselves a place in legend and in folklore and whose most patriotic efforts had met only with failure and disaster.

The prologue and the epilogue show us the enthusiasm of the poet and his spirit. Shevchenko was not bloodthirsty. He was not a military man. Yet as he looked out at the world, he could not fail to see the difference between the past centuries, when the Kozak hetmans moved in the most aristocratic circles of Poland and matched wits and swords with the Polish magnates and the present time when the poor serfs were denied the least human rights.

The visit to Ukraine in 1843 seems to have made a great difference in his ideas. The first ideal of Shevchenko was the free Kozak state, the Sich where the men made and unmade their officers, and he emphasized in his early poems the great struggle of these lovers of freedom against the Polish nobles. Later in the Hetman state, the rights and privileges of the ordinary Kozaks had been largely curtailed and a new form of aristocracy had grown up among the Ukrainian people. It was this new race of aristocrats that had made the treaty of Pereyaslavl with Moscow and had fashioned the Russian yoke upon the Kozaks. Much as he admired Bohdan Khmelnitsky, he could not help feeling that this act was the cause of all the troubles of Ukraine. He was not enough of a student of history to appreciate the complications of the situation in which Bohdan found himself and he did not see the difference between the great Hetman and his lesser followers who allowed themselves to be deluded and deceived by the Muscovite ambassadors in the seventeenth century. Perhaps there was more than a grain of truth in the artistic insight of the poet but he differed sharply with the scholars of his day, including his friend Kostomariv, and went on his own way. He was more fascinated by the figure of Mazepa who joined with Charles XII of Sweden against Peter the Great than he was with Bohdan seeking Muscovite support against the Poles. From 1843 on, Moscow and the Russians were for him the chief enemy of Ukraine. He was still free and had not yet met the personal disillusionment with the Russian regime. Still his return to Ukraine and the startling effect that the sufferings of the serfs made upon him seem to have swung his sympathies into a social channel and away from the romantic pictures of life in the Sich.

This is the theme of the _Great Grave_ (_Veliky Lyokh_), a curious but effective mystical poem, in which under various forms Shevchenko pictures the past, the present, and the future of Ukraine. The lost souls come from three crucial periods of Ukrainian history. One had cooperated with Bohdan in surrendering to Moscow, the second opposed Mazepa in his attempts at liberation, and the third had aided Catherine in abolishing the Sich. Then come the three crows, the Ukrainian which recognizes what has happened to bring the land to its doom, the Polish which expresses the fate of Poland and the Muscovite which boasts of its success. There are the poor singers who in their misery are endeavoring to collect alms for praising Bohdan. Finally there is the excavation of the graves, the little one where lie the bones of Bohdan and the great one in which are buried the spirit and the independence of Ukraine and which will also one day be excavated so that the nation can rise again. The poem is one of the most famous of Shevchenko’s and perhaps nowhere does he express more powerfully and bitterly his disapproval of the oppression of Ukraine by Moscow and the Russians.

In the _Caucasus_ he sympathized with the still continuing struggle of the mountaineers to maintain their independence from the Russian yoke. He sees the pathos of the natives and he compares it with the fate of Ukraine before the Moscow arms.

At the same time Shevchenko commenced to pay more attention to the suffering that he observed among the poor of his country. He had alluded to social ills in _Katerina_. Now he repeats and repeats the same message as in the _Hireling_ where the poor deceived girl never confesses to her son that she is his mother, until she is on her death bed. All her life long she has had to treat him as the child of the kindly couple who have taken her in and given her protection when her own parents had cast her out. The sufferings of the girl at the hands of Muscovite lovers and the cruelty of the village toward those who have transgressed its moral code weighed upon his soul and more than once he returns to this theme which was to be one of the chief subjects which he treated in later days.

Another result of the dreams of the Society of Saints Cyril and Methodius is the _Heretic_, dedicated to Safarik and singing the praise of the great Czech patriot Jan Hus, who was burned at Constance for his religious and political views. Yet the treatment of Shevchenko is characteristic for he sees in Hus not so much the national hero or the great scholar as he does the representative of the common people. This is the first time when he went outside of Ukraine for a subject but we can see very clearly how those qualities which he glorified in Hus are precisely those which he desired for his own people and if we are to interpret any of his works symbolically we can do it here and feel that Hus is another lost leader of the Ukrainian people.

A deeper and more tragic note appears in his works as the hour came for his arrest. There is more of the purely personal lyric, more of a feeling of pessimism as he realizes that he had attained a certain freedom for himself but that this only laid upon his shoulders the heavier burden of securing it for his own people. He could not enjoy his personal success while he remembered that his people and his family were still in bondage. More and more he came to draw inspiration from the Old Testament and the sufferings of Israel.

His arrest threw these new feelings into the foreground and during his confinement in St. Petersburg, he produced a surprising quantity of excellent songs which expressed his sorrow and his discouragement. Let us take the following as an example:

It makes no difference to me,
If I shall live or not in Ukraine
Or whether any one shall think
Of me ’mid foreign snow and rain.
It makes no difference to me.
In slavery I grew ’mid strangers,
Unwept by any kin of mine;
In slavery I now will die
And vanish without any sign.
I shall not leave the slightest trace
Upon our glorious Ukraine,
Our land, but not as ours known.
No father will remind his son
Or say to him, Repeat one prayer,
One prayer for him; for our Ukraine
They tortured him in their foul lair.
It makes no difference to me,
If that son says a prayer or not.
It makes great difference to me
That evil folk and wicked men
Attack our Ukraine, once so free,
And rob and plunder it at will.
That makes great difference to me.

At times as the difficulties and hardships of life descended upon him in the faraway districts of Orenburg and Aral, he became discouraged but the vast bulk of his poetry was a lamentation for his absence from his beloved Ukraine. He dreamed of the beauties of its fertile soil now that he was in an arid and desolate region and he lamented the sad fate of his beloved country as well as his own. A surprising number of poems deal also with the hardships and the troubles of a young girl who has been left an orphan to make her way in a cruel and unfeeling world. Perhaps in some of these we may easily imagine that the girl symbolizes Ukraine, for the two themes of the ruined country and the ruined girl more than once merge in the thoughts of the sympathetic poet.

As the rigors of imprisonment became still more severe, Shevchenko tried his hand at prose in various stories which he dated from before his imprisonment but he seems to have done this in an effort to avoid the tsar’s prohibition of writing and drawing. These stories, while they are good, add little to his reputation. Shevchenko was primarily a poet and the prose which he wrote contains little new, either in ideas or content. They are largely reworkings of the same themes of the suffering girl, the tyrannical landlord, the Muscovite seducer and oppressor that he had dealt with earlier in more concentrated form in his verse. They have attracted less attention than his poetry and as in the case of Pushkin form the minor part of his work.

We must mention two poems of this period. One is the _Prophet_ in which he sets forth the value of the poet as a proclaimer of the divine ideals but the unappreciative people reject and kill him and choose a tsar in his place. The other is _To the Poles_, in which he laments the feud that the Jesuits had stirred up to destroy the harmony that had once prevailed between the free Poles and the free Kozaks. The poem is far removed from the glorification of the Kozak wars in the poems of the _Kobzar_ and the more romantic dreams of a free Ukraine, but Shevchenko in his life and thinking had passed from the right bank of the Dnieper to the Hetman state and he realized the many conflicting elements that had wrecked Ukrainian existence. He saw now that they were more serious and more complicated than he had once believed and from this time on he rarely alluded to those old battles and never with the anger against the Poles that had once been so manifest. It is however interesting that he never relented in his distrust of and hostility to the Russians and in his condemnation of the tsars for their destruction of the rights of the Sich and the free Kozaks.

On his release from captivity, Shevchenko dashed off in a few days one of his great poems, the _Neophytes_, a tale of ancient Rome and the persecution of the early Christians, dedicated to his friend Shchepkin. We can hardly fail to see in this as in the other poems of the ancient world the influence of his old master Bryulov, who had laid the basis for his fame by his scenes from classical antiquity. Yet the story of the young Christian whose heroic martyrdom for the faith finally converted his mother to Christianity and faith in the Crucified was perhaps a symbol of the spreading power of Ukrainian self-confidence. The comparison between the tyrannical Nero and the Russian tsar was so evident that it terrified some of the poet’s friends as Kulish who feared that new misfortunes would come upon the poet. None did but it is a tribute to the courage and unbending loyalty of Shevchenko to his ideals that he never wavered in them even at the most critical times. His message of freedom and of kindness he would not dilute or hide, no matter what it might cost him personally or how more timid men might take to cover.

Nevertheless Shevchenko had returned a broken man. He produced one more long poem, _Maria_, a story of the Blessed Virgin which differs in some ways from the ecclesiastical tradition. For this he was denounced as irreligious. Yet that is hardly the word to be used, for there is a deep religious feeling in the work and if he has violated the sacred story to make more poignant the character of the Blessed Virgin and to equate her life history with that of the suffering Ukraine, the poem does not deserve the severe abuse that has been directed against it by the more literal minded. He aimed to show the apparent overwhelming of the right and the temporary triumph of evil but he never had in his own mind any doubt as to the final outcome, whether the time of waiting and of suffering were long or short.

The vast majority of his poems after his return, however, are either adaptations and imitations of the Psalms and the Old Testament or they are pathetic expressions of his hope for a little home on the banks of the Dnieper and for at least a few years of happy family life. He was weary of the struggle that he had waged for his people for his entire life. He had succeeded in freeing his own family from serfdom and the broken and exhausted man felt that he could now hope for something for himself. It was not to be and an untimely death struck him down just a few days before the tsar had definitely abolished that serfdom against which he had fought so violently.

The importance of Shevchenko cannot be overemphasized. He was the greatest of the Ukrainian poets and he was more than that. He was the first writer who was purely and thoroughly Ukrainian, who dared to dream of a Ukrainian language and literature that would be completely separate from Russian and would have an independent place in the world.

He had started his career with the romantic dream of perpetuating the memory of the conflicts between the Kozaks and the Poles and of reviving the old days when the free Kozaks were able to carve out a precarious liberty for themselves and their people. Experience and observation taught him that that was impossible. He always valued the positive ideals of the old days, he realized the courage and the heroism of the leaders and still more of the ordinary man of the time. But he soon saw that that was not enough and that those days would not return. It was necessary to build for the future and he considered all that had passed since that fateful treaty of Pereyaslavl the unfortunate consequences of a mistake.

That led him to differences of opinion with many of his most intimate friends, for some of them were hoping against hope that there could be some settlement on the lines proposed by the great Bohdan. Shevchenko did not believe it possible and he dared to express his beliefs. To him a free Ukraine meant exactly what it said, a Ukraine that would be completely independent in every sense of the word, that would not be subject to interference by any foreign ruler, especially the Russian tsar. That was a more immediate danger than the old feuds with the Poles for after the division of that country and the failure of the revolt of 1831, Shevchenko saw that the Ukrainians, particularly those on the right bank and in the Hetman state had nothing to fear from the ruined Poland.

He had an ardent democratic and revolutionary faith in the common people and he recognized that they were the very backbone of the Ukrainian stock. In his lifetime he was friendly with many of the more enlightened members of the Ukrainian nobility and with many of the conservative writers of Russia. Never did he compromise his beliefs that the new order was to be founded upon the rights of the common man who must be educated to enjoy his new privileges. His ideas were often in close agreement with those of the Russian radicals but he did not have much personal contact with them for his belief in a liberal and radical solution of the Ukrainian question on its own territory shut him off from their refusal to recognize the Ukrainians as distinct from the Russians and their attempts to create in Russia an ideal system based only on western ideas and ideologies.

He was a peasant but he realized also that all was not well within the peasant communities and in the peasant way of life. They were cruel and merciless to one another, for example, in their dealings with girls who had transgressed the moral code and it was impossible to blame all this upon the external oppression to which they were subjected. It was perhaps a result of serfdom and of self protection but it was an attitude that needed to be changed, if Ukrainian life was to be enlightened. He felt from his own experience what the people could achieve, if they were awakened to a sense of their own responsibilities and he worked in every way to help them. He understood the need of education and of progress and he did not try to conceal what he felt with the result that he gave us realistic pictures of peasant life, avoiding both undue idealization and excessive condemnation of the people’s weaknesses, for he knew that much of these was due to ignorance.

Born a serf and later a soldier in the Russian army, he accomplished with few opportunities for formal education an amazing amount. He took the Ukrainian language as it had been developed by Kotlyarevsky and his followers and by the force of his own genius made it into a language capable of expressing the most refined emotions and fully adequate to all the needs of modern literature. He voiced in that language and in no other the thoughts and aspirations of his people. He had completely separated Ukrainian from Russian and started it along an independent course and he had made himself its greatest literary master. Taras Shevchenko, the son of a serf with his fanatical faith in the victory of democratic ideals and despite all obstacles, made himself one of the great poets of the Slavonic world and his fame will live as long as that of any of his contemporaries in the other literatures. No one of them believed more firmly or voiced more clearly an unyielding and uncompromising belief that democracy, truth and freedom would win the day and no one worked harder or suffered more to bring it about.