TARAS SHEVCHENKO
The Poet of Ukraine

SELECTED POEMS

Translated with an Introduction

by

Clarence A. Manning

Acting Executive Officer
Department of East European Languages
Columbia University

UKRAINIAN NATIONAL ASSOCIATION

Jersey City, New Jersey

1945

Copyright 1945 by
UKRAINIAN NATIONAL ASSOCIATION
JERSEY CITY, NEW JERSEY

Taras Shevchenko is the poet of Ukraine. There is hardly a Ukrainian home from the humblest to the richest that does not contain a portrait of the poet who during his short life touched every chord of the Ukrainian heart. He shared the fortunes of his people and during his unhappy life he suffered all the hardships of serfdom, of exile, of police supervision that was the fate of the greater part of his compatriots. Seldom has a poet lived and suffered to the full as did Shevchenko and rarely has a man so fully incorporated all the aspirations of his people.

That is not all. As an artist and a thinker Shevchenko deserves the sympathetic knowledge and understanding of the entire civilized and democratic world. He deserves it as the representative of his people, a nation of forty millions who have so far failed to receive that independence for which they have long struggled. He deserves it also for himself, for his own writings, since it can be truly said that he is one of those men who have a message for all humanity, for the suffering and the downtrodden, the victims of injustice and oppression everywhere.

It is the object of this book to make available in English translation some of the masterpieces of this poet whose works have lived for a century with an ever widening influence and an ever increasing appreciation of his genius both at home and abroad. It has been a strange fate that has confined knowledge of his works to some scanty references in books on literature, while lesser men in other languages have received fantastic praises. Such was fate. In his lifetime many of the most penetrating critics in Russia saw fit to place him above Pushkin and Mickiewicz for his mastery of language and for the depth and sincerity of his ideas. Yet they were in the minority, for the vast multitudes were only inclined to see in him a young serf writing in his native language and they passed him by with a shrug of the shoulders.

He formed part of that great flowering of poetry which commenced with the period of Romanticism in Europe and he was one of those men who passed by a natural evolution to the great period of realism and of sensitiveness to the social problems of the day. Now in the twentieth century we are learning as never before to judge him for himself, as a flowering of the Ukrainian character and as a man who has a message not only for his own times and country but for the entire [Pg vi]world. He has stood the test of time and he deserves due recognition in these days when the entire world is sunk in war and desolation.

There can be no doubt to-day that Taras Shevchenko is one of the great Slavonic poets. He is one of the great poets of the nineteenth century without regard to nationality or language and his fearless appeal to right and truth and justice speaks as eloquently in the New World as it did in the Old or in the little village where he was born, the city to which he was taken or the treeless steppes to which he was exiled.

The half century before Taras Shevchenko began to write saw the beginning of those tendencies which were to develop to their full power at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. It was a period of transition in which the principles and ideas which had dominated Europe for centuries were being steadily shaken and losing all authority over the minds of men. They were questioned logically by the leading thinkers of the day but they were with equal vigor attacked by the uneducated masses who were vaguely hoping for better conditions of living. At the same time these new ideas with a few exceptions had not been translated into effective political and economic action and the resulting situation was the despair of both the reformers and the conservatives. There was an uneasy stalemate which differed from land to land and even from district to district.

On the positive side the successful revolt of the American colonies and the establishment of the Republic of the United States left a deeper imprint upon European thought, even in the east of Europe, than we usually think. There is no need to exaggerate this but for good or ill the ideas of federation, as shown by the new country in the West, penetrated into distant lands and was hailed as a substitute for the centralizing policies of the autocratic monarchs who were working to destroy on paper as well as in practice the local liberties and traditions which had existed for centuries.

This had been followed by the French Revolution and then the Napoleonic Wars. The confusion and hostilities had aided the ambitious plans of such rulers as Catherine II of Russia who had used the preoccupation of Europe with the West to finish the dismemberment of Poland and the annihilation of the last Ukrainian organizations. It comes as something of a shock to realize that the Zaporozhian Sich, long reduced to only a shadow of its past greatness, was not destroyed until 1775, and the last vestiges of the Hetmanate, which had been practically turned into an aristocratic regime, were wiped out in 1783 and the territory was divided into governments and ruled on the Russian pattern. Thus so far as Ukraine was concerned, the final extinction of the old liberties came precisely at the period of the American Revolution. In 1792, with the division of Poland, Russia [Pg 2]took over the region of Kiev, the area where Shevchenko was later to be born, incorporated that into its grandiose structure, and reduced the population to the status of Russian serfs.

The final end of local liberties was thus hardly carried into practice when Russia was compelled to face the Napoleonic Wars. The officers of the aristocratic and Europeanized classes were brought face to face with the new ideas which they met definitely in Paris and in the contact with their allies during the campaigns and they began to dream of introducing into their native country some of the modern practices which they had seen in the West.

These men were however too weak and too scattered to combine their influence for an effective movement and when they attempted it in the short-lived Decembrist revolt of 1825, they were decisively checked, and their leaders were executed or exiled to Siberia. The Polish revolt of 1831 fared little better and by the time that Nicholas I was securely established on the throne, he could in his own imagination breathe easily and forget that there had been such turmoils in the governmental organization.

Thus in the Russian Empire, it seemed as if the powers of the reaction had been definitely established. The ideas of the Holy Alliance and of Prince Metternich seemed as solid as the monolithic structure erected in Moscow by Peter the Great. On the political side the conservative and reactionary factions were in full control and the rulers no longer, as in the days of Catherine, played with new ideas, even if they had no serious intention of practicing them. There were peasant disorders but there were no more such convulsions as that led by Pugachov and his Cossacks which seriously menaced the established order and which demanded the use of large military forces to save the regime.

In the meanwhile every step forward in the Europeanization of the Russian aristocracy meant an increase in the exactions demanded of the serfs. This was a process that had been continuing especially since the reforms of Peter the Great, when there was inserted a steadily deepening wedge between the manorhouse and the peasant. Long hours of forced labor on the nobleman’s lands and the ever diminishing size of the serf allotments because of an increase of population made the life of the poor unfortunates more and more miserable. This was especially marked in those areas where the Russian system had been but recently introduced and where traditions of an older and happier time still lingered on in the minds of the older inhabitants.

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Along with this political and economic stagnation and retrogression went a new intellectual and artistic development. This made itself felt throughout the whole of the Empire. It had both its good and its bad sides. On the positive side, there was in Russia the appearance of a new art, a new literature which tried to imitate and then to adapt the French pseudo-classic culture of the eighteenth century. Nobles who had previously known little but the traditional Church Slavonic conceptions, handed down from antiquity, were fascinated by the new innovations. New methods of literary composition were introduced. A new language was devised. New influences from Western Europe came in.

All this could not fail to draw away a large part of the intellectually alert landowners from their original moorings. During the eighteenth century the Ukrainian educated class tended more and more to accept the Europeanized Russian culture. This was the easier, because the Ukrainian centres, as the old Academy of Peter Mohyla in Kiev, had busied themselves entirely with Church Slavonic and theological subjects. The system of education had not included any of the results of Western development, the language used was artificial and differed markedly from the colloquial speech of the villagers, and even such a man as Skovoroda in the eighteenth century had not taken any definite step to assault the entrenched system except by the power of his own personal refusal to bend himself to its demands. Where in the seventeenth century the Kiev schools had sent scholars to reeducate Moscow, now after the absorption by Russia, they contented themselves with a continuation of the old policies. As a result there was a growing exodus of the young men to the dominant center of St. Petersburg and there was a consequent fall in the culture and educational resources of the Ukrainian lands and a rise in Russian influence.

These tendencies were again counterbalanced by a new series of developments in Western Europe which could not fail to create a reaction throughout the whole of the continent. On the one hand, Rousseau in France developed his theories that the natural man had a higher moral virtue than the man of civilization and culture. There started a return to the primitive which could not fail to turn people’s attention to the condition of the serfs, while at the same time the renewed theories of the rights of man attracted attention to their misfortunes.

Side by side with this there were the doctrines of Herder as to the [Pg 4]superiority of the folk song as a form of literature and the focussing of the attention of the educated on the speech of the common people and on their poetic productions and artistic practices. Those tendencies which had manifested themselves in Percy’s Reliques, a collection of Scotch ballads, which had continued with a desire to collect German folksongs, in which even Goethe took part, and the later interest in the Serb popular ballads naturally spread into Russia and resulted not only in the discovery of the byliny in the far north but in a revaluation of the Ukrainian folk songs which had passed unnoticed outside of the villages or which had been treated with amused disdain by the polished noblemen. A new wave of interest was therefore set into motion and it came so soon after the disintegration of the old order that parts of it could be easily absorbed into the new movement.

It was in this environment that Ivan Kotlyarevsky published in 1798 the Eneida, the first work to be written in the Ukrainian vernacular. It is to be noticed that the author in his humorous adaptation of the old Latin story to the Ukrainian scene rested rather on the old classical traditions of the eighteenth century and the practices of the Kiev Academy than on the newer ideas which were beginning to appear on the intellectual horizon. Yet the work appeared at a critical time and it showed to the people still smarting under the newly imposed yoke that it was possible to develop the vernacular and to produce outstanding works of literature in it. This was all to the good and it in a way corresponded to the revival of the Czech language which was being started by the philologically inclined Josef Dobrovský.

Yet before the vernacular literature could take a firm foothold, some other idea was necessary. This was found in the beginnings of Romanticism which swept with startling rapidity throughout Europe. This was a complicated movement and its form varied with the individual countries.

It made its appearance in Russia largely through the influence of Vasily Andreyevich Zhukovsky, who was for nearly half a century the leading critic and adviser of the young aristocratic poets who developed at the Lycée of Tsarskoye Selo at the imperial court of Alexander I. This circle included Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin, the greatest of Russian poets, although in his composition there was always more of the older classical ideas and practices than it was fashionable to admit at the time.

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Zhukovsky, who was an excellent translator, acclimatized in Russia the whole apparatus of the weird, the supernatural and the mediaeval that was being developed in Germany. He early translated Bürger’s Lenore, the story of the dead lover returning to claim his living bride. He gave his people poems and stories of mediaeval chivalry and he translated many of the ballads of Goethe and Schiller. Very soon he added to this movement the influence of Byron and for some fifteen or twenty years the gilded youth of the Russian capital not only imitated Lord Byron’s poems in their writings but they acted out his ideas in real life and considered themselves to be wanderers persecuted by the world.

With it all, the twenties and the thirties were the Golden Age of Russian poetry. Pushkin especially soon outgrew the narrow imitation of Byron. He added to the influences to which he was subjected those of Sir Walter Scott and Shakespeare. He wrote historical poems conceived in a profound admiration for Peter the Great as Poltava but at the same time in The Captain’s Daughter and other works he showed a strong appreciation of the career of that doughty old rebel Pugachov. Yet during the last years of his life he expressed more sympathy as in the Brazen Horseman with the sufferings of the poorer class of the people. The collapse of the Decembrist movement and the silencing of the reforming elements among the aristocracy gave rise to the beginnings of a more critical literature based on an attempted understanding of Western ideas and sharply divided Russian thought between the Slavophiles who were primarily conservative and attempted to find differences between Russian development and that of Western Europe to the advantage of the former and the Westerners, conservative and liberal alike, who sought to emphasize the backwardness of Russia and to demand the remodeling of the country on western lines. By 1840 these men, led by the furious Vissarion Grigoryevich Belinsky, had secured the ear of most of the literary journals and were well on their way toward the formation of a realistic school and the radical intelligentsia.

The Romantic movement therefore had but a short life in Russia. This is not to be wondered at, for the Russian mediaeval history was not of a character that lent itself easily to the glorification of the past and of the feudal period that was so effective in German. Chivalry as an organized movement had not taken root in mediaeval Moscow with its strong Tatar and Asiatic influences and Russian Romanticism always lacked a certain basis which was found in [Pg 6]the Western European countries where for centuries the lords and barons had waged petty warfare with many deeds of individual daring.

A special position in this movement was held by Nikolay Vasilyevich Gogol, the son of one of the early writers in Ukrainian. In his Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka and later in Mirgorod and especially in his powerful Cossack tale of Taras Bulba, he pictured the romantic side of Ukrainian or Little Russian tradition (to use the name which he gave it himself) and he told tales of the happier side of the life of the region where he had been born. His works really introduced into Russian literature a Russianized Ukrainian school of writing which by its color and charm attracted wide attention.

On the other hand in Poland, even after the division, there was the same outpouring of the Romantic spirit. Adam Mickiewicz who had started his brilliant poetical career in Wilno and Kaunas and had then been exiled to Russia and had finally gone abroad was the leading figure. One of that group of Polish patriots which had gathered around the University of Wilno, he had raised Polish literature to a new level of excellence. He was ably seconded by other writers as Juljusz Slowacki and Zygmunt Krasiński, the two other Romantic poets who were also forced into exile. The writings of this group were more in the conventional Romantic style and exercised an even stronger influence on Poland than did the Russian Romanticists in the narrow sense. Many of the writers of this time as Antoni Malczewski were familiar with the picturesque aspects of Ukrainian life, its rich supply of folksongs and its elaborate peasant rituals. As a result they introduced so-called Ukrainian themes into Polish literature and relying upon their Galician experiences, they made the Ukrainians or Ruthenians as they called them really popular.

In the meanwhile the energetic young group at Wilno were preparing for revolt which finally took place in 1831. Despite initial successes, the Russian Tsar speedily got control of this as he had of the Decembrist uprising among the Russian aristocrats. He suppressed it as brutally and for some decades the Poles were compelled to maintain abroad in France their chief literary activity, which continued to emphasize the principles of Romanticism with a strong feeling for their dismembered country.

Finally we cannot overlook the first halting steps of that movement which was destined to be labelled Pan-Slavism or the Slavonic brotherhood. It was really launched in Bohemia by the Slovak Jan Kollár who [Pg 7]in 1824 published a collection of sonnets, the Daughter of Slava, in which he pleaded for a brotherhood of all the Slavonic races. His work set the key for much of the later Czech literature and his ideas expanded in more prosaic form by Pavel Šafařík and others slowly permeated all classes of thinking Slavs. To Kollár and his friends this undoubtedly meant a free brotherhood with Russia as the most powerful member and protector against the Germanic world. To the Russians it meant the absorption of the other Slavs by Russia and the Slavophiles easily took many of the current ideas of the German philosophers and crossed them with conceptions of the Russian Orthodox Church to create a theory for their new nationalism.

All of these various impulses combined to influence the newly born Ukrainian literature. There was much that directly appealed to the writers. For example the Ukrainians were conscious of their past, at least those who were conscious of anything. They knew that the exploits of the Kozaks were exactly the sort of thing that had attracted the attention of the Romantic poets of both Russia and Poland. They knew the wealth of their folklore, the number of weird themes that they had at their disposal. They realized the potentialities of the description of their folk customs. Besides, tales of the unhappy peasant, the seduced girl, the serf were common in the Romantic literature and the everyday life around them gave them countless examples to illustrate their writings.

It required the work of a master to put the new modern Ukrainian literature on its feet. Kotlyarevsky had made a start in fashioning the language in which they could work. Kvitka-Osnovyanenko had carried on the work with his prose tales but there was needed an outstanding author who was sincerely devoted to the Ukrainian cause and was at the same time a master of the language, to weld together the various elements and to produce in Ukrainian works which would be on a par with those of the two conquering cultures which were then at their highest stage of poetic development. With the loss of most of their educated classes and with the hard conditions and the scanty opportunities offered to the peasants and the serfs, it might seem as if the man could not be found and as if the Ukrainian start was from the beginning foredoomed to failure. To the surprise of even the most optimistic, a great poet suddenly appeared, Taras Shevchenko.

Taras Shevchenko was born in Ukraine in the village of Morintsy in the district of Zvenihorod, Government of Kiev on the right bank of the Dniper River. The situation of this community was of great importance in the formation of the character of the poet. It was in this general vicinity that the bloody outbreak of the Koliischchina had taken place in 1768, when the infuriated Orthodox population of the province had risen against their Polish masters and had burned the city of Uman. This war was to be the theme of Shevchenko’s great poem, Haydamaki. The revolt was bloodily suppressed, especially after Catherine the Great had listened to the pleadings of King Stanislas Poniatowski of Poland and had sent her troops to aid in the defeat of the rebels who had erroneously believed that they were acting in accordance with the will of the Russian Empress.

The only result of the war was the still deeper subjugation of the Ukrainian population and the hardening of the rule of the Polish masters. The second division of Poland which brought this right bank of the Dniper under the control of Russia did not aid the unfortunate Ukrainians. They found themselves bound still more strictly to the soil and they soon learned to their discomfiture that Russia would herself back up the claims of the Polish landlords. The demands of the masters were carried to a new high and there was little or no redress for the unfortunate victims. They had only their memories of the past and the traditions and folksongs which they had inherited to remind them that their ancestors and the Kozaks had once been free men and able to control their own destiny.

Among the survivors of this merciless struggle was Ivan Shevchenko, the grandfather of the poet and he lived well into the lifetime of his grandson and was wont to tell him and the other members of the family of the savage events of 1768 and the unfortunate consequences. He was a living contact between the old and the new.

The old man must have been a superior type of peasant for he had seen to it that his son Hrihori Shevchenko had been taught to read and write. The son was a prosperous serf at a time when his prosperity could bring him few advantages, and he constantly sought for a new and better life on the estates of his master, Vasily Vasilyevich Engelhardt. After his marriage to Katerina Boykivna, who seems to have [Pg 9]been also a very kind and intelligent woman, the two lived in the village of Kirilivka, where his father lived, as a carriage maker and he owned a cart with a team of bulls. His father-in-law soon bought him a little cabin and some land in Morintsy about a mile away and it was in a typical Ukrainian peasant cabin that the poet was born on February 25-March 9, 1814. Conditions here were unsatisfactory and it was not long before the Shevchenkos returned to Kirilivka where Taras spent his boyhood.

Kirilivka was a typical large Ukrainian village of the right bank. It was in a fertile region with an abundance of orchards and fruit trees and gardens. Picturesquely located, it seemed a real paradise but beneath the charming exterior, the institution and the practice of serfdom made the village for its inhabitants a perfect hell, where all kinds of evil and injustice prevailed and where the hours of forced labor demanded by the master made life almost impossible.

Taras was the third of six children and was always attached to his older sister Katerina who married when he was still very young. His father tried to give him an education but the opportunities were very scanty. Taras always remembered his parents with the greatest kindness but when he was nine years old, his mother died of poverty and of overwork on the lands of the master. This meant the ending of the happy period of his life.

With six small children, the father Hrihori could not maintain his household without a wife and so he soon married a widow, Oksana Tereshchenchikha, from Morintsy. She brought her three children with her to her new home. The marriage was not a happy one. The stepmother was very cruel to the children of her husband, begrudged them the food they ate, and quarreled unceasingly. It was a sore disappointment for the young Taras and to avoid the perpetual beatings which he received, he used to take refuge with his older sister who was married and living in a neighboring village. Finally when he was twelve years old, his father died too and the young Taras was thrown on his own resources, since his uncle who was his guardian paid little attention to him.

As a means of finding some respite from the cruelty that was going on at home, he went to a village clerk Bohorsky in an endeavor to learn something about painting, for he already had been attracted to this and also had developed a fertile imagination. His stay with Bohorsky was none too successful.

The clerk was an incorrigible drunkard and besides nearly starving [Pg 10]the poor boy, he tyrannized over him in every way but he did succeed in making him literate and in teaching him to read the Psalter. In fact Taras became so successful in this that the clerk sent him out to read the Psalms at peasant funerals and thus allow himself more time for drinking with his friends. Taras finally had his revenge. One day when he found his teacher drunk, he flogged him as hard as he could and then made off with a volume of art works. This was apparently a book containing some of the stock designs for ikon painting and for lettering.

Disgusted with the worthless and brutal teacher from whom he had imbibed only a feeling that violence was wrong, he made his way to the village of Lisanka to study under another clerk. This likewise was unsuccessful. For four days the teacher employed him only in preparing paints and in bringing water from the river Tykych. At the end of that day Taras again disappeared and turned up at Tarasivka, where there was a still more locally famous painter of Saint Nicholas and of Ivan the Soldier, but here again he met only a rebuff. Finally he had exhausted all the clerks in the neighborhood who had any reputation for painting, and there was nothing for him to do but to return to his native village and there as an orphan secure a scanty living by acting as a herdsman for the village cattle and by doing any odd jobs that might appear in the community.

It was apparently at this moment when he was about thirteen years of age that Shevchenko had his first taste of love. While he was pasturing the village sheep, he suddenly started to shed bitter tears and a young girl who was gathering hemp near by came over to console him and kissed him. Her name was Oksana Kovalenkivna and her memory remained with him for many years as a type of sympathetic friend and love. That was all. It was only a moment in the drab life of the poor boy but it gave him an ideal of sympathy and affection that he had not had since the death of his mother and the image of Oksana appeared in many of his later verses.

From this idle existence Shevchenko was suddenly torn away by the overseer of the estate. He had shown little promise in his efforts to master the old fashioned and then decadent art of ikon painting. His physical stature did not promise that he would develop into a valuable laborer in the fields and yet the overseer had no intention of allowing him to live in idleness. So the boy suddenly found himself sent into the kitchen of the manor house to work as an assistant baker. Again Shevchenko failed to acquire the necessary skill and he [Pg 11]was again in disgrace. Another task was sought for him and this time he was appointed a Kozak servant for the young master Pavel Vasilyevich Engelhardt.

His work here was boring and insignificant. He had only to remain dressed in a Kozak uniform in the anteroom of the master and to serve his slightest whims and needs. It meant long hours of doing nothing, the hardest kind of useless labor. He had to hand the young master his pipe, when he so desired, for it was beneath the dignity of Pavel Engelhardt to pick up his own pipe, even if it were beside him. All his other tasks were of the same non-essential character and the boy accustomed to his freedom was absolutely disgusted with his fate.

There was however one consolation. The master could not prevent the young serf from admiring the objects of art that were scattered around the house. The mansions of the day were very different from the rough houses of the peasantry. The latter were impoverished representatives of the past. The mansions were filled with the newest productions of western Europe and these gave to the sensitive boy a very different conception of art from that which he had received from the rude ikonostases of the village churches. He feasted his eyes upon them and apparently endeavored in stolen moments to make copies of them.

He also had the opportunity to travel. Pavel Engelhardt was perpetually going somewhere and he had to travel with an entire retinue of servants. This meant that the young Shevchenko was torn away from his native village and his native surroundings. In 1829 Engelhardt who was a Guards officer took him to Wilno and for fourteen years Shevchenko did not see again his beloved Ukraine.

It was at Wilno that an accident happened which determined his fate. On December 6 Engelhardt and his wife went out to an entertainment and the young Shevchenko was obliged to stay on watch until they returned. To wile away the time he set himself to copying a print of the Kozak Platon which he had acquired on the way to Wilno. He became so absorbed in this that he did not notice the return of the master who accordingly found him copying by candle light. Engelhardt became enraged at the actions of the boy and scolded him violently because he might have set fire not only to the house but to the whole city. The next day he gave orders to have him soundly flogged. The episode might have ended here but Engelhardt noticed that Shevchenko was making an excellent copy of the work. This led him to inquire further and he saw some of his other [Pg 12]sketches. So, having roundly punished the young culprit, he sent him to the Art Academy of Wilno, where he perhaps studied under Jan Rustem. Still later he transferred him to Warsaw to take lessons from the celebrated Franciszek Lampa.

It was a critical moment in the life of the young man. Now at least part of his ambitions could be gratified but he still remained a serf in his master’s service with no hope of any amelioration of his lot, for the nobles of the day were only too happy to have under their control artists, actors, and learned persons of every description. It was a discouraging situation, for there was little hope of fame or of satisfaction for a man who was compelled under penalty of flogging or banishment to physical labor to draw sketches whenever it suited his master’s whim.

While at Wilno Shevchenko had again fallen mildly in love with a Polish seamstress, Dunia Haszowska, a free woman who spoke to him about the coming Polish uprising. She was an ardent Polish nationalist and apparently her influence, intended to win Taras to the Polish cause, only drove him further in his devotion to the cause of Ukraine.

As the hour of revolt came nearer, Engelhardt suddenly left Warsaw and went to St. Petersburg. It was a safer place in case of trouble and it also gave him more opportunity for his social inclinations. Naturally Shevchenko was taken along with him and here Engelhardt apprenticed him for four years to the painter Shirayev in 1832.

There is something strange in this contract. It probably marked a change in the plans of Engelhardt for his unusual serf. At Wilno and Warsaw he had had him taught by painters in the best sense of the word and had apparently not spared money for lessons. Now in St. Petersburg he did not send Shevchenko to a portrait or landscape painter but to a professional decorator who was already known for his work in several St. Petersburg theatres. There was a plebeian and unidealistic side to this work in the making of designs and transferring them automatically to the walls and ceilings of buildings that displeased Shevchenko. He missed all the artistic inspiration that had apparently inspired him previously and felt that he was becoming a mechanical drudge.

The contract between Shirayev and Engelhardt must have ended by law in 1836 but Engelhardt left him to work further as a laborer in the atelier of Shirayev who was a determined exploiter of his subordinates. Shevchenko had but two methods of relaxation—to [Pg 13]make sketches of a fellow serf, Ivan Nechuporenko, and to copy statues in the Winter Garden.

In 1837 he suddenly made the acquaintance of another Ukrainian artist, Ivan Maksimovich Soshenko, who was then living in St. Petersburg. There are two versions of this meeting. The more romantic is that Soshenko saw him first during one of the white nights of St. Petersburg sketching a statue of Saturn in the Winter Gardens. The other, that of Soshenko himself, is that he heard from a relative of Shirayev’s of this wonderful young Ukrainian artist and decided to make his acquaintance.

In either case Soshenko became enthusiastic over the artistic abilities of Shevchenko and over his possibilities for independent work. He soon took the opportunity to introduce his young friend to the leading men in the Imperial Academy of Arts and desired to have him enrolled there as a student. This was impossible for no serf was allowed to study in this institution. Yet the Secretary of the Academy, Vasily Ivanovich Grigorovich, and the celebrated professor, Karl Pavlovich Bryulov, both desired to have him enrolled as a student. There was only one solution for the difficulty. It was necessary to obtain freedom for Shevchenko. Engelhardt was not sympathetic. He had expended considerable money on the education of the young man and he was not going to be deprived of his services now that he was becoming recognized as an artist. He promptly demanded the payment of 2500 silver rubles. This was an enormous sum and was apparently intended to be prohibitive.

The group of artists interested in Shevchenko was not to be discouraged by this demand. They interested in the case Vasily Andreyevich Zhukovsky, who naturally had great influence in Russian governmental cultural circles. He was the tutor of the Tsarevich, later Alexander II; he had been the Russian teacher of the Empress Charlotte of Prussia, the wife of Tsar Nicholas I. He was the recognized authority on European literature in Russia. With his court connections, it was clear that if he would, he could secure the necessary funds. He therefore arranged with Bryulov to paint his picture to be disposed of by a private lottery. A portrait of Zhukovsky by Bryulov was an event for the rich circles of Russia. The money was raised and paid over to Engelhardt and on April 22, 1838, Taras Shevchenko became a free man for the first time in his life.

Shevchenko was almost overcome by his new happiness. From that moment he was free. Like any other citizen of Russia, he was able to [Pg 14]apply for a passport, to choose his own abode, to do what he liked without any fear of the changeable moods of an autocratic master. The world seemed rosy to him and he could hardly concentrate on anything. He at once procured new clothes, filed the act of liberation in the official bureau, and the next day registered at the Academy as a student of Bryulov.

Karl Pavlovich Bryulov was then at the height of his fame. Originally of French Huguenot descent, he had been allowed to take a Russian name when he won a prize in the Academy of Arts and went to Rome. There he had become acquainted with the leading artists and literary men who had thronged to that city during the twenties. His painting, The Last Days of Pompeii, had taken Italy and then France and finally Russia by storm and when he commenced to teach at the Academy of Arts, he raised its popularity and became the very center of everything artistic and cultural in the Russian capital.

The effect of all this upon Shevchenko can hardly be overestimated. Almost over night he had passed from a nobody, a mere serf eternally at the beck and call of his master, to an independent student of the Art Academy and a favorite pupil of the great Bryulov. His sensitive nature could not fail to react to this overwhelming difference.

He worked hard every day in the Academy and made a very creditable success. At the end of the first year he won a silver medal for drawing from nature. Apparently his earlier instruction here came in handy. In 1840 he won a silver medal of the second class for his attempt in painting with oils and in 1841 he received the same award for a painting on a historical subject and for portraiture. He had made good use of his opportunities and had not allowed himself to be distracted by the gay amusements of many of the young artists, although he apparently had his share of entertainments and dinners.

More important than this for the young man were the opportunities which came to him for general culture. His early education was extremely defective. He had not had even the most irregular schooling outside of the elementary instruction in reading and writing offered by the local clerks under whom he had gone through the motions of studying. Now he was able to read at his leisure and he applied himself ardently to making up the defects in his training. He read abundantly in Ukrainian history and he probably was already fairly well acquainted with what there was in the modern Ukrainian literature. Yet he needed more than that and his relations with his [Pg 15]fellow students and still more with Bryulov opened his eyes to the classical and Western European cultures.

While he had been in Rome, Bryulov had been the friend of Sir Walter Scott, Bulwer-Lytton, and the various writers of France and Germany who made Rome their headquarters. His great paintings had been on classical themes and we can well ascribe to his influence Shevchenko’s interest in classical antiquity, for the younger Russian poets were already turning away from the classical tradition that had dominated Russian literature through the period of Pushkin.

He dined frequently at Bryulov’s home and Bryulov came to dinner in his poor quarters. The master warned him against marrying on the ground that geniuses should not marry and then introduced him to the fascinating actress whom he himself intended to marry and from whom he was soon separated.

At the same time Shevchenko was very slow in seeking the society of ladies whom he might consider above his own station in life. He never forgot his origin and his chief romance in this period was with a young girl, the daughter of a neighbor whom he tried to teach to read but whom he found an unserious pupil. At times he enjoyed the society of a higher class but there was something in him which urged him to confine his closest women friends to those of his own class.

At some time during his stay in St. Petersburg, Shevchenko began to write verse. It must have been before his emancipation, for the oldest known poem is the ballad Prychynna (The Mad Girl) which is reminiscent of Bürger, Zhukovsky, and Mickiewicz with a strong admixture of Ukrainian folklore. This was exactly the same type of poem that was practiced throughout the Slavonic world with the coming of Romanticism. It can be dated in 1837 but it is almost too perfect to be the first attempt of the young artist and it must have been preceded by many experiments. The modesty of Shevchenko and his devotion to his painting made him at first very hesitant in regard to his poetic performances and it was more or less by accident that they were brought to the attention of the public. A few of his friends were aware of his activity. Thus in 1838 Hrebinka wrote to Kvitka that there was in St. Petersburg a young Ukrainian named Shevchenko writing verses and excellent ones. Yet the poems attracted little or no comment until at the end of 1839 a Ukrainian landowner, Petro Martos, met Shevchenko and arranged for him to paint his portrait. As he was sitting in the artist’s apartment, he [Pg 16]happened to notice some poetry on various sheets of paper. He succeeded in borrowing them and on reading them became so thrilled that he resolved to publish them at his own expense.

The work appeared in 1840 under the title of the Kobzar and it marked a new era in Ukrainian literature. Kotlyarevsky had died in 1838 and his passing made a gap which had seemed irreparable. Now the appearance of the Kobzar, small as it was, showed to everyone, both friend and foe, that his place had been taken by a still greater author. In vain the Russian critics, including Belinsky and the Westerners, attacked it as insignificant and peasantlike. The Ukrainians throughout the entire area of Ukraine welcomed it and saw in it the answer to their confused hopes for a worthy literature of their own.

The next year there appeared the Haydamaki, the longest of the epics of Shevchenko. There was the same criticism of his work by the Russian and Polish critics and the same enthusiastic reception of it by the Ukrainians. The edition was soon sold out and Shevchenko received a considerable amount of money for it. More than that, he was sought out by all the Ukrainians who had occasion to come to St. Petersburg and many of his later friends he came to know in this period. He had in a very real sense become a national figure and was more sure of himself in his relations with society and with all those whom he had to meet.

Yet despite the apparent success of all that he undertook, things were not going too well with him. He had many firm friends in St. Petersburg and his relation with his teacher Bryulov remained as close as before. Yet he seemed to be dissatisfied. He was dissatisfied with the Academy, perhaps because he was not making as much progress in his use of colors as he would have liked. It is to be noted that he won no prize after 1841, that is, after he had become famous from his writings, but there is no evidence that this was due to any antagonism on the part of the authorities to his ardent Ukrainian attitude. It could not be that he had neglected his painting for his writings, for it is remarkable that at this same time he had almost stopped writing and 1842 was one of his least productive years.

Undoubtedly his dislike for St. Petersburg affected him. He had seen his works hostilely reviewed or scorned by the Russian critics, especially those of the liberal camp from whom he might have expected to receive consideration. He was busy with portraits and with his social life, but at the same time he was struck by the contrast between the life that he was leading and the misery of his brothers and [Pg 17]sisters in Ukraine. He had not seen them for fourteen years and he was becoming homesick and he wanted at all costs to pay a visit to his native land.

So in the summer of 1843, he succeeded in securing a leave of absence from the Academy and obtained permission of the authorities to go home. His return to Ukraine was a real event. He paid a visit to his family but he was no longer a mere serf. He was the poet of Ukraine and all the landowners and the persons of prominence vied with one another in entertaining him. His trip was one triumphal procession, as he passed from estate to estate. Almost everywhere he was asked to paint one or more of the members of the family and the trip was successful not only from the social but even more from the financial point of view.

Among the families which entertained him, one of the most hospitable was that of Prince Repnin, the former governor general of Kiev and the friend of Kotlyarevsky. He was now living on his estates and was in disfavor with the government, for his wife was a granddaughter of Kyrylo Rozumovsky, the last of the Hetmans, and his enemies had charged that he was endeavoring to recover the title, even at the cost of separation from Russia. Repnin was a good type of the Russianized Ukrainian landlord who had not lost his interest in the people under him and who was sincerely opposed to serfdom.

It was here at his house that Shevchenko met his daughter, Princess Barbara. She was six years older than the poet but the two were attracted to one another. The Princess was a little nettled that the poet showed more interest in the beginning in a young friend than in her but she was sincerely impressed by his personality and ability and set herself to induce him to do more serious work and to avoid the company of the more frivolous and gay young people to whom he might be attracted. Shevchenko appreciated her interest and called her his guardian angel. For a while it seemed as if they might fall in love but the difference in their social position was a barrier to such a union, and although the two were ardently in love, yet neither betrayed it except through an extreme friendship in which they addressed each other as brother and sister.

By the end of the summer Shevchenko, whose painting had considerably improved, seriously considered not returning to the Academy. He even went so far as to write to the Secretary, Grigorovich, to ask his advice and when he was urged to come back and received a [Pg 18]two months extension of his leave, he paid a hurried visit to Moscow and was back in St. Petersburg shortly after the beginning of 1844.

Yet this short trip greatly changed the temper and the work of the poet. He was able to see the evils under which Ukraine was suffering not through the memories of a young serf but through the eyes of an enlightened and progressive and successful man of the world. His old conceptions based upon the tales of his grandfather that these ills were a result of Polish hostility and the suppression of the Koliishchina were proved false. The worst evil was in the present and that was a direct result of the Russian overlordship and the suppression of Ukrainian liberties. The evils which came from the union with Moscow by the so-called Treaty of Pereyaslav were more real than the danger threatening from an already vanquished and broken Poland. Henceforth his poems turned against Russia and he abandoned the romantic scenes of the past that had formed such a large part of the Kobzar. At the same time he increased his emphasis upon the injustice of the villagers among themselves. He had touched this in the Katerina but he had learned in his native village of the sad fate of Oksana Kovalenkivna whom he had once loved. She had been seduced by a Russian and had later become insane, after she had been disowned by her parents.

He occupied himself during this year with the bringing out of a series of sketches, Picturesque Ukraine, and continued his usual life at the Academy and with his friends. The ferment of opposition to injustice was however working in him and toward the end of the summer he finished the Dream, one of his most powerful attacks on the present situation in Ukraine. It was impossible to think of publishing such a poem with its caricature of the Empress and its open condemnation of both Peter the Great and Catherine the Great. It did however begin to circulate in manuscript form among the friends of Shevchenko and the adherents of Ukrainian liberties.

This was no exceptional thing under the regime of Nicholas I. Even such a masterpiece of Russian literature and such a harmless satire on the social life of the day as the comedy Sorrow out of Intelligence by Griboyedov was refused publication by the censor, despite the fact that it was the favorite reading of St. Petersburg society and the work of a distinguished and trusted diplomat. Most of the poems of Pushkin and Lermontov were still unpublished, and it was generally understood that there was in the two capitals a large amount of literature by the leading writers which were known only to the [Pg 19]reading public and the police chiefs unofficially. The circulation of a poem as the Dream which might have serious consequences would therefore not be threatening until it might suit the officials to take cognizance of it. Shevchenko probably spent some anxious moments when he first showed it to friends but apparently he gave very little thought to the possibility that he might be denounced to the authorities and he continued during the next years to write his great poems attacking the alien domination of Ukraine.

On March 22, 1845, Taras Shevchenko finished the course at the Academy of Arts and received the right to call himself a free artist of the Academy and later in the same year on December 10 a diploma was formally issued to him confirming this fact, granting him the rights and privileges pertaining thereto and allowing him “with complete freedom and liberty to enter the service into which he as an artist desires to go.”

Without waiting for the arrival of the formal diploma, Shevchenko returned to Ukraine. In fact he went within two days of his formal departure from the Academy. He travelled by way of Moscow where he saw again old friends as Prof. Bodyansky and the celebrated actor Mikhaylo Shchepkin who had taken part in the first performance of Kotlyarevsky’s drama Natalka Poltavka. He spent the summer travelling around Ukraine and then in the late autumn he secured a position with the Archaeological Commission which had been formed by the Governor General Bibikov to study the ancient monuments of Ukraine. For this he was recommended to receive the sum of 150 rubles a year. It was a trifling sum even for those days but there was attached a permission to travel and with his fame and the possibility of making portraits, it was possible for him to live without too much hardship.

The year 1845 was one of his most productive years literarily. It was the time when Shevchenko had the opportunity to acquaint himself personally with all of the ancient monuments of his country and to observe for himself the terrible conditions under which the people were living. The year saw the continuation of the tendencies described in the Dream and in such poems as the Great Grave, the Caucasus, and the Epistle to my dead, living and unborn countrymen in Ukraine and not Ukraine, he expressed his bitter indignation at the denial of independence and liberty to his people. He was skating on thin ice in these poems but the blow which was hanging over him was deferred.

[Pg 20]

At this time in Kiev there was a very active intellectual life. There had gathered around the University a group of young men who were destined to become famous in the Ukrainian movement. Here were Mykola Kostomariv, the historian, Panteleimon Kulish, Vasil I. Bilozersky, and many others. They were all attracted by the ideal of doing something for Ukrainian independence but their patriotic fervor was largely tinged with romantic dreams.

The traditions of the Decembrists of 1825 were still alive among a large part of the younger Russian thinkers, even though the centre of activity had passed away from the aristocratic officers who had risked their lives and careers in that abortive movement. They dreamed of a liberated Russia and they apparently like most of the Russian conservatives and radicals did not conceive of any dismemberment of their country. On the other hand in 1824 the Czechoslovak writer Jan Kollár had published the Daughter of Slava, a series of sonnets appealing for Slavonic liberty and stressing the brotherhood of all the Slavonic races. Kollár’s work gradually spread throughout the Slavonic world and produced marked reactions everywhere. Some of the Russians played with the idea. It found strong repercussions in the Balkans. In Kiev it affected this group of young thinkers and its influence was aided by the studies of Slavonic antiquities and general Slavonic literature by Pavel Šafařík, another Czech scholar.

The immediate result was the organization of the Society of Saints Cyril and Methodius in January, 1846. The young enthusiasts of the Society dreamed of a great Slav republic which was to embrace all the Slavonic nations with the various groups organized as states. Perhaps there was much of the Masonic organization in this but there is the strong likelihood that the example of the American Constitution played a considerable role in the final method of government that was proposed. For an internal policy the Society urged the development of education to fit the people for their new responsibilities.

There was nothing particularly dangerous about this Society. It contained the same kind of potential explosiveness as such modern organizations as Union Now and similar plans for world organization. The members seem to have believed in the possibility of peaceful change and the very unmilitary character of the leaders could easily have shown the Tsar that they were little more than idealists who might have been used to further the interests of the Russian Empire. Yet to Nicholas I, anything which savored of free institutions was actually and not only potentially dangerous. Russia was rushing [Pg 21]on to the debacle of the Crimean War and the Tsar was engaged in a futile effort to stop all discussion and the appearance of western ideals. It was evident that danger threatened the entire group and they were compelled to act as a secret organization. They adopted their own flag, their own seal, and ritual.

During the summer of 1846, the members of this Society scattered on their own business. Shevchenko passed the time on various estates and dreamed of going abroad to Italy to continue his studies in painting. He had received an offer of assistance and he did not realize that Anna Bilozerska, who was marrying Panteleimon Kulish, was planning to sell her jewels to secure for him the necessary funds which were to be given anonymously. At the same time he was building high hopes on the possibility of receiving a definite position as teacher of painting at the University of Kiev, and this was definitely given him in February, 1847.

Everything seemed to be favorable for a happy future, when the blow suddenly fell. Shevchenko had returned to Kiev for the wedding of Mykola Kostomariv and several of the friends assembled at the same time, while Kulish who had been called to St. Petersburg and then given a fellowship to travel abroad was on his way to the border. Unknown to them, Oleksy Petrov, a student who had lived in a room near that of Bulak, another member of the group, had listened to the lively discussions that had gone on at various times when some of the scattered members had come to Kiev during the preceding months, and had become convinced that there was some conspiracy afoot. Perhaps he had even made friends with Shevchenko with the idea of discovering something about the society.

At all events on February 28, he suddenly informed M. V. Yuzifovich, the supervisor of education in the district, of the conspiracy. The latter at once suspended Shevchenko from his position with the Archaeological Commission on the technicality that he had gone to Kiev without permission. Still there was no real suspicion on the part of the group. Shevchenko appeared at Kostomariv’s wedding. In the meanwhile Yuzifovich had forwarded the complaint to Bibikov who was then in St. Petersburg and on March 17, the latter had referred the matter to Count Orlov, the chief of the gendarmes.

The police acted speedily, when we consider the difficulties of transportation and the transmission of news. On April 5, 1847, the thoroughly unsuspecting Shevchenko together with his friends was [Pg 22]arrested and sent to St. Petersburg. He arrived there on April 17 and the trial took place almost immediately.

At an inquiry made at the Academy of Arts, Count Lakhtenberg, the President, replied after giving Shevchenko’s record at the Academy, “It is necessary to add that Shevchenko has a gift for poetry and in the Little Russian language has written several poems, respected by people who are familiar with the Little Russian language and the former life of this region; he was always considered as a moral man, perhaps something of a dreamer and an honorer of the Little Russian past, but nothing prejudicial came to the knowledge of the Academy.”

In his examination, Shevchenko denied membership in the Ukrainian-Slavonic Society but admitted that he had written some insolent and satirical works, “forgetting his conscience and the fear of God.” He had nothing to say about his associates in the Society.

In the summing up of the evidence Count Orlov placed the case of Shevchenko almost entirely upon his verses. “Shevchenko instead of feeling eternal gratitude to the persons of the Most August Family, which had deigned to free him from serfdom, composed verses in the Little Russian language of the most revolting character. In them he expressed lamentation for the so-called enslavement and misery of Ukraine, proclaimed the glory of the old Hetman rule and the former freedom of the Cossacks, and with incredible boldness poured out slanders and bile on the persons of the Imperial House, forgetting that they were his personal benefactors. Besides the fact that all that was prohibited attracted persons of weak character, Shevchenko acquired among his friends the fame of a celebrated Little Russian writer, and so his poems became doubly harmful and dangerous. With his poems which were beloved in Little Russia there could be sowed and consequently take root thoughts of the so-called happiness of the times of the Hetmanate, the happiness of bringing back those times and of the possibility of Ukraine existing as a separate country. Judging by the extraordinary respect which all the Ukraine-Slavonians felt personally for Shevchenko and for his poems, it at first seemed that he might be, if not the active head among them, yet the tool which they wished to use in their designs; but on the one hand these designs were not so important as they appeared at first sight, and on the other, Shevchenko had begun to write his revolting poems already in 1837, when Slavonic ideas had not interested the Kiev scholars; similarly the whole case shows that Shevchenko did [Pg 23]not belong to the Ukrainian-Slavonic Society but acted separately, attracted by his own corruption. Nevertheless by his revolting spirit and boldness which passes all bounds, he must be acknowledged one of the chief culprits.”

The sentence came on May 26 with the verdict, “The artist Shevchenko, for his writing of revolting and in the highest degree impudent poetry, as a person of a healthy constitution, is to be sent as a private to the Orenburg Separate Corps, with the right of freedom through honorable service and instructions are to be sent to the command to have the strictest supervision that from him, under no pretext, can there come any revolting and satirical works.” The Tsar with his own hand added to this “Under the strictest supervision with a prohibition of writing and sketching.”

The sentence was carried out at once and by June 11, Shevchenko was already in Orenburg and duly outfitted as a soldier. He was attached to the 5th battalion of the Corps which was stationed at the Fortress of Orsk, 267 versts (about 150 miles) east of Orenburg in the heart of the barren steppes. It was an uninviting place amid uninviting surroundings.

Shevchenko had no desire to become a soldier and he loathed army life and discipline. It seemed to him a worse slavery than that which he had known as a serf. Every detail awoke his disgust. It was in vain that the commanders endeavored to teach him to drill and to march. He was shocked at the filth and the language of the privates who surrounded him and with whom he had to associate. They were the exact opposite of the cultured and intellectual people with whom he had associated at St. Petersburg and in Ukraine. They were a tough and foul-mouthed gang of ruffians, and this is not to be wondered at for many of them had been sent there as a punishment. Yet much of his reaction must be attributed to the dissatisfaction of a sensitive intellectual with the dreary life of the barracks in peace times.

Besides that, the prohibition of writing and painting took away from Shevchenko the inspiration which he might have drawn from the unusual surroundings in which he was. He could only dream of Ukraine, think of its sufferings, bemoan his fate, and hope and pray for something better. He wrote letters to Princess Repnina and to others of his friends, lamenting especially the prohibition against painting. The Princess interceded for him with Count Orlov and in reply merely received a warning against corresponding with such an [Pg 24]evil character. One of his friends sent him some paints. If he tried to write verses, he was compelled to do so secretly and to hide them in his boot.

Apparently the officers were not too hard upon him, and the intercession of friends as Princess Repnina and Count Aleksyey K. Tolstoy, the celebrated Russian writer, had some effect, for on January 30, 1848, Count Orlov had sent to Orsk to inquire about the conduct of Shevchenko and the possibility of removing the ban on his painting. It is possible that some favorable reply was given for early in May, he was attached as a sketcher to an expedition which was setting out to explore the east coast of the Sea of Aral. However Shevchenko looked upon this unofficial modification of the original sentence, the work was difficult and attended with many hardships. His mission lasted for a year and half and he returned to Orenburg in November, 1849.

The little expeditionary force of infantry, engineers, Kirghiz and camels had set out from Orsk, gone to the Sea of Aral, built a fleet of ships and then sailing along the coast to Raim, had landed, built a fort at Kos-Aral and had passed the winter there. During this time Shevchenko made many sketches of the scenery under government orders, despite the official prohibition, and during the winter he was able to work on several poems. Yet it was a disagreeable journey. The Sea of Aral was a salt sea. Its banks were monotonous and bare, quite unlike the blooming fields of Ukraine. In addition to that, he was definitely cut off from the world. For a year and a half no mail reached him or the expedition and he imagined that he was entirely forgotten, while his friends at home thought that he had forgotten them.

When he returned to Orenburg at the end of 1849, he again presented a petition to be allowed to paint and in it he stated—what was perhaps not the exact truth—that never in his painting had he ventured to commit any impropriety. His officers, knowing his services on the expedition, seconded his request.

In the meanwhile they allowed him to live in the city of Orenburg, to wear civilian clothes instead of the hated uniform, and to paint as many portraits as he desired. The city was filled with Polish and Ukrainian exiles and in their company the time passed much more pleasantly and fruitfully than during the fatiguing and difficult days in the fortress and on the expedition.

It was too good to last. In the spring a certain ensign (it is not sure [Pg 25]whether his name was Isayev or Illashenko) presented a complaint that contrary to the Imperial edict Shevchenko was both writing and painting. Lieutenant Obruchev, who knew very well that Shevchenko had been acting under official authority, was yet afraid that the matter might reach the Third Section and make trouble. As a result he searched the quarters of Shevchenko and found what he had long known were there—civilian clothes, paintings, and writings. The poet was immediately rearrested on April 27 and sent back to the Fortress of Orsk where his battalion was still stationed. There he was placed in the guardhouse and his trial lasted from June 28 to July 5 before General-Adjutant Ignatyev.

The ground covered was already known to every one. Shevchenko denied any deliberate wrongdoing and stated that he had supposed that the prohibition against writing had applied only to imaginative works and had not been intended to cover private correspondence, which the authorities forwarded and which had not violated any law of propriety but had been merely personal greetings and requests for assistance. There was no defence possible on the charge of having civilian clothes, but this was a matter that might become far more serious for his superiors who had allowed him to remain at Orenburg than for the unfortunate victim. It was to be expected that the Tsar would take a more serious view of a private wearing civilian clothes than of the other accusations, for that directly touched his personal views of discipline. On August 26, the order came to release Shevchenko from the guardhouse and to send him to the First Battalion at Novopetrovsk under the strictest supervision. His former commanding officers were also punished and the results had disagreeable consequences for many of the friends with whom he had corresponded.

He arrived on September 13 at his new post. Novopetrovsk was in a still more forbidding region on the east coast of the Caspian Sea and had been built four years before to protect the region from depredation by Kirghiz raiders. It was on a barren peninsula reaching into the Caspian Sea from the treeless steppe. His reputation had preceded him and also the knowledge that the Tsar himself had ordered him not to write and paint. As a result, the commanding officer, Colonel Mayevsky, did not feel able to mitigate the Imperial order. The company officers, Captain Potapov and Lieutenant Obryadin, were men of slight culture and of the most limited military outlook. They were willing to enforce the orders to the limit [Pg 26]and were only interested in compelling the poet to become an efficient soldier, to drill and march accurately and to go through the necessary motions in the proper way.

This was doubly depressing for the poor poet. He was a remarkably bad soldier. Whether this was because of his stubborn determination not to be a good one but to maintain his theories to the end or whether he was temperamentally unmilitary, it is hard to say. It is to be noted in this connection that even in his youth he had failed in any technical occupation at the Engelhardt estate, while he made progress so soon as he was allowed to study art and to write poetry.

For two years the unequal struggle continued. Shevchenko was watched minutely and hourly. He was not allowed a scrap of paper and during his service at Novopetrovsk there was no opportunity for him to write even the shortest poems. He was able to get out only a very few letters to Princess Repnina and to some of his closest friends. Yet his spirit never wavered. He maintained the same unwavering attitude in his feelings, treating himself as a sufferer for the cause of Ukraine.

About two years later Major Irakly Uskov was sent to command the garrison. He was a more determined and broad-minded man and he decided to do what he could to make the fate of Shevchenko a little more tolerable. He invited him frequently to his house, acquainted him with his family, and asked him to paint their pictures. The favor shown to the prisoner was so marked that gossip arose about his wife Agatha and Shevchenko and made it very difficult for the old relationship to continue. Yet Uskov did not on that account turn against the poet. When Shevchenko conceived the idea of painting the altar picture in the post chapel, Uskov warmly approved the idea but again the authorities in Orenburg sternly forbade it on the basis of the Tsar’s orders, and this new hope of enjoyable activity was abandoned.

Nicholas I died February 17, 1855 and a new era seemed to dawn for Russia. The new Tsar, Alexander II, was the pupil of that Zhukovsky who had had so much to do with the liberation of Shevchenko from serfdom. The new reign was opening with an appearance of liberality and with a general amnesty and Shevchenko could hope for his release. Yet he was not included in the general list of pardons. His attack on the Dowager Empress in the Dream had been so bitter that she was believed to have influenced her son against the act.

Shevchenko was nearly in despair but his friends at St. Petersburg [Pg 27]did not lose heart. Count Feodor Petrovich Tolstoy of the Academy of Arts, and his wife continued to work through all possible social channels to secure the release of the poet. It was a hard and thankless task but by the spring of 1857 his friend Mikhaylo Lazarevsky could write that a pardon had been secured and that the days of Shevchenko’s exile were numbered.

Then came one of the hardest parts of his confinement—the tedious waiting until the order could travel through official channels to Orenburg or Astrakhan and then be forwarded to the isolated post. Mail arrived rarely. Shevchenko began a journal and in it he noted down with despair the numbers of mails that arrived without bringing the desired letter. He was continually passing from the heights of hope to the depths of despair as week followed week without the desired news. Finally it came on July 21 and as often with such delayed greetings, Shevchenko was not on hand to receive it. He was living in the city and in the morning he went to the fortress for a shave “and from the non-commissioned officer Kulikh I first learned that at nine o’clock in the morning a mail boat had arrived. Having shaved, and with sinking heart, I returned to the city and, leaving the fort, I met Bazhanov who was in charge of the post hospital. And he first greeted me with Liberty: July 21, 1857, at eleven o’clock in the morning.”

Shevchenko was now free but he was miles from any vestige of civilization and eager to return to his friends in the capital. There were two ways of leaving. The official route was via the corps headquarters at Orenburg but this meant a journey of 1000 versts across the desolate steppe before he could reach Astrakhan on the lower Volga. The simpler way was to board a boat and go directly to Astrakhan. His definitive orders for departure had not arrived and Uskov had no power to approve the direct route. He finally did so and on August 2, Shevchenko boarded a fishing boat for Astrakhan.

He arrived on the 4th in the late afternoon. For the first time in ten years he was free of military service. For the first time in ten years he was able to move around without fear of punishment. He greedily looked around Astrakhan and made many friends. The Ukrainians there welcomed him as a great poet and it relieved him to find that he had not been forgotten during his long exile.

Finally on August 22 he started with some friends on a river steamship along the Volga for Nizhni Novgorod. It was a revelation to him and he endeavored to make sketches of the scenery along the river but [Pg 28]it was all so new and startling in its beauty after ten years of the steppe that he did not complete any of his drawings. He stopped at Saratov for a short visit with the mother of his old friend Kostomariv. Finally on September 20, the boat reached Nizhni and he was able to go ashore.

Here the police were again waiting for him. His amnesty had not granted him permission to live in St. Petersburg and Major Uskov had from ignorance granted him this permission, when he let him go without requiring him to travel via Orenburg. Under any interpretation of the orders for his arrest, he would be required to return there for a formal receipt of future instructions. Yet he found friends at Nizhni and the Chief of Police and the Police physician very willingly allowed him to remain and forwarded to Orenburg a statement that he was too sick to travel. This left him temporarily safe but it postponed his hope of meeting with his friends for it was not until March 1, 1858, that he received the desired permission and then there was the disagreeable clause added that he was to remain under the supervision of the police.

The winter was not an unpleasant one. Everywhere he was received as a distinguished writer. He was invited to the Nizhni Club, was entertained by all the most distinguished social and artistic circles of the provincial city, and painted pictures of most of the outstanding persons, supporting himself largely in this way.

At the same time he wrote to Kulish and also to his old friend, the actor, Mikhail Semenovich Shchepkin, and asked them to visit him. With his usual caution Kulish refused to risk his career by visiting the banished poet but Shchepkin came down from Moscow and spent Christmas with him. He was the first of his old friends whom he had met since his return and it gave the poet great pleasure.

It also helped to precipitate a rather unpleasant episode. Shevchenko had never in his heart given up thoughts of marriage and while he was in Nizhni, he became enamored with an attractive young actress, Katerina Borisivna Piunova. She was apparently of Ukrainian stock for he saw her in Kotlyarevsky’s Moskal-Charivnik. She was dissatisfied with her position in Nizhni and was trying to secure one in Kazan. Shevchenko, fascinated by her and thinking as always of Ukraine, tried to use his influence and that of Shchepkin to get her to Kharkiv. She seemed to like his attentions but it was not long before he discovered that she was merely using them in order to secure a better contract and his devotion resulted only in disillusionment.

[Pg 29]

While he was in Nizhni, he had the opportunity of meeting some of the Decembrists who had been exiled by Nicholas I in 1825 and who were just being released after thirty years of Siberia. He went into ecstasies over their high principles. His comments on this group were more enthusiastic than on most of his friends of his own age.

As a matter of fact Shevchenko had grown more radical in prison or we might perhaps put it better by saying that he had become aware that the Russian government was inflicting upon its own people most of the same hardships that it had upon the Ukrainians. As a result he read constantly the various writings of Herzen and of the other radicals which appeared abroad and from this time on came to have closer kinship with the leaders of the intelligentsia.

In productive work during this winter he wrote the Neophytes, a study of the Christian persecutions under the Roman Emperor Nero. The comparison between him and the Tsar is so obvious that the poem terrified Kulish and he advised Shevchenko to be slow about letting its existence be known. This advice did not satisfy the poet who was utterly fearless and not to be swerved from what he considered right, but there were no ill effects from its production.

On March 8, he went by sleigh to Vladimir and there he met Captain Butakov who had commanded the expedition with which he had gone to the Sea of Aral. Shevchenko’s remark on meeting his old commander is very significant. “My heart grows cold at the very memory of that wilderness, but I think he is ready to settle down there forever.” (Journal, March 10.)

From Vladimir he went to Moscow late on the 10th and was taken sick with some disease of the eyes and for some days he was not allowed to go out on the street. However he disobeyed this order to go and see Princess Repnina. She had been his closest friend in the old days and now when he saw her, he says only in his diary “She has changed for the better; she looks as if she had grown younger, and were rushing into matrimony, a thing which I had not noticed previously. Has she not met in Moscow a good confessor?” (March 17). This seems to have been almost the end of another dream. He saw her again on the 24th but the old correspondence seems to have ended.

The years had treated Shevchenko very unkindly. He was only forty-four but the exile had made him prematurely aged. His health had suffered under the harsh regime and the difficult living conditions of the frontier. Even though his spirit remained unbroken, he was no longer a young and vigorous man. He still cherished his dreams [Pg 30]of a home and children but from this time on he apparently gave up the hope of charming any one who might appeal to his mind and fit into the position to which he could honestly feel that he had risen. With the loss of his unconfessed love for Repnina and the episode with Piunova, Shevchenko turned more and more toward the peasantry from which he had sprung.

Yet it did not affect his dealings with men. He had the opportunity of making the acquaintance of Sergey Timofeyevich Aksakov, one of the grand old men of Russian literature and the author of the most delightful pictures of the good side of the old patriarchal life. Shevchenko had a sincere admiration for the old Slavophile who was then sixty-seven years old and whose early life had been spent in pleasant surroundings on the Bashkir steppes very similar to those where he himself had suffered. Aksakov invited him to his estates for the summer and Shevchenko apparently desired to accept. He also renewed his acquaintance with the family of Stankevich and with M. V. Maksimovich. At this time also he met the younger Aksakovs, Khomyakov and in fact all of the important Slavophile leaders, who accepted him as a great poet. Of course his closest friend was Shchepkin who was with him constantly but who was unfortunately compelled to leave for Yaroslavl.

Shevchenko left the same day for St. Petersburg where he arrived on March 27, just about eleven years from the time when he had been brought there as a prisoner for his trial and sentence. He went at once to his old friend, Mikhaylo Mikhaylevich Lazarevsky, who had helped him so much during his exile and then to see Count Feodor Petrovich Tolstoy, the Vice-President of the Academy of Arts.

It was largely through the Tolstoys that he had finally been pardoned and both the Count and Countess entertained him royally. They gave a dinner in his honor and acquainted him with many of the leaders of the cultivated artistic and literary set in the capital. Among these we may mention Count Aleksyey Konstantinovich Tolstoy, the celebrated dramatist novelist and poet, who with all of his liberal ideas was attracted and repelled by the strange figure of Ivan the Terrible, his cousins, the brothers Zhemchuzhnikov, the poet Lev Aleksandrovich Mey, the mathematician M. V. Ostrogorsky, Admiral Golenishchev, and many others. They all accepted the broken Ukrainian, they admired his poetry and Mey translated several of his poems into Russian.

On the other hand he also became acquainted with the leading [Pg 31]radicals of the day as Nikolay Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky and Nikolay Aleksandrovich Dobrolyubov. Both of these men were connected with the Sovremennik, for which Kostomariv and Kulish also wrote. Chernyshevsky relied heavily upon Shevchenko in pointing out that the evils that befell the Ukrainians were due to the master-class, which was identical whether it was Russian, Polish or Ukrainian. To some extent Shevchenko agreed with him and this is greatly stressed by the Soviet critics as L. P. Nosenko (Velyky Poet-Revolyutioner, Odesa, 1939, pp. 51 ff.). It is very likely that there is some basis for their claims but on the other hand in a few poems which Shevchenko wrote after his return, his references to Khmelnitsky and to Ukraine show well that he had no desire to see his native country in any connection with Moscow and the Russian Empire.

He resumed his studies at the Academy of Arts but this time in etching. He achieved in this great success and his work under Prof. Yordan was so distinguished that in the spring of 1859 he was authorized to submit engravings for a promotion to the grade of Academician. He did this and on October 31, 1860, he was formally made an Academician of the Imperial Academy of Arts.

His life in St. Petersburg was relatively pleasant but he could not forget Ukraine and his unfortunate brothers and sisters who were still in serfdom. He finally secured permission to go there and left St. Petersburg for his last visit early in June, 1859. He planned to visit several friends and to pay a visit to his brothers and sister at Kirilivka. He met his sister Irina. They sat down under a pear tree, he placed his head in her lap, and listened to her sad story of all that she had had to suffer, especially since she became a widow. Shevchenko told her of his troubles also and asked her to find him a wife, for now that he was more or less free, he was determined to marry and have a home in Ukraine before he died.

From Kirilivka, he visited other friends and then new troubles overtook him. He was suddenly arrested at the town of Moshni. The police authorities at St. Petersburg had notified the police of the various sections where he would be of his coming and asked them to keep watch of him. He seems to have expressed himself incautiously to some friends and apparently some Polish landowners reported him to the police. He was arrested in Moshni on July 13, taken to Cherkasy, and then to Kiev. Here his case was brought before the Governor General Ivan Vasilchikov, who studied it with interest and very soon decided that Shevchenko had been unjustly accused. [Pg 32]He advised the poet to return to St. Petersburg, “where the people are wiser and do not worry about trifles, in order to serve well.”

The poet who had been brought to Kiev on July 27, stayed a few days longer at liberty under police supervision and then on August 14, he started back for St. Petersburg. He had been negotiating for a little piece of land near Mezhirich on the bank of the Dniper but this plan had fallen through with his arrest, and there was nothing for him to do but to see a few friends again and make his way back to the capital. He arrived there on September 7, profoundly convinced that nothing had changed in Ukraine with the accession of the more liberal Alexander II.

There was still the problem of his marriage. After his experiences with Piunova and perhaps with Princess Repnina, he had come to the conclusion that he should marry a peasant girl as much for symbolic reasons as for inclination. But where to find one?

By now he had become friendly with Vartolomey Shevchenko whom he addressed as his brother. This was not strictly accurate. Osip, the brother of Taras, had married the sister of Vartolomey, so that Vartolomey was really the brother of the sister-in-law of Taras. He had known him earlier but now the two men became very friendly, for Vartolomey was a practical and business-like man and the manager of the Korsun estate of Prince Lopukhin. He did not agree with the poet in his revolutionary and extreme views but Taras recognized his fundamental honesty and often was willing to follow his advice.

At this moment he met and became devoted to a servant in the family of Vartolomey. She was the sixteen year old Kharyta Dovhopolenkivna, an attractive but illiterate serf on the estate of Prince Lopukhin. She seemed to Taras to represent exactly the type of girl that he wished to marry. It was in vain that his friends advised him against the union, for they realized that Kharyta could not share in any of his higher interests, in his poetry or his painting. It was all in vain. Shevchenko insisted on formally offering her his hand. The girl solved the problem by refusing him because she was unwilling to marry an aged pan and she had no intention of becoming the slave to another nobleman. The fame of the poet was so great that the girl insisted upon looking at him as a person of a higher social stratum and Shevchenko despite his efforts could not disillusion her on this point. Besides she already had her own fiancé whom she had selected herself.

[Pg 33]

It was another blow to the aged man, but he even yet did not lose hope. He spent some time in the composition of his last great poem, Mary, an unconventional retelling of the life of the Blessed Virgin, largely on the basis of the apocryphal legends. His choice of material and the realistic tinge which he gave to the sacred story annoyed many of his friends and his enemies used it to spread a charge of atheism. The work is however fundamentally religious but the poet modified the story to bring it closer to the fate of Ukraine.

He was friendly at that time with a nephew of Aksakov, Karteshevsky. The latter’s wife was a sister of Mykola Makarov, a Ukrainian landowner and literary man, and at their house many of the Ukrainian and Russian writers used to gather for pleasant evenings. It was here for example that Shevchenko met Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev, although the two men never became close friends. At one of these parties, to honor Shevchenko, they dressed in an elegant Ukrainian costume a young serf girl, Lykeria Polusmakivna.

She was a clever, coquettish and scheming little creature who knew both Russian and Ukrainian but for the occasion she pretended to know only Ukrainian. Her charm and beauty completely fascinated the poet and still saddened by the rebuff of Kharyta, he decided to marry her. He had her taught to read and tried to educate her. The girl responded quickly but it was soon clear to all, even to Shevchenko, that she was hoping to marry him only to get to Paris and to move in society. This completely broke the poet’s heart and he began to feel that his chances for a happy married life in Ukraine were doomed never to be realized.

At the same time, however, he was busy with other plans. He was working hard on his etching and was achieving real success. He also reopened negotiations with the censor to bring out another edition of the Kobzar and he secured it in 1860, provided only it did not include poems written after his arrest and exile.

His visit to Ukraine and his new realization of the hardships of his family in serfdom aroused in him the desire to have them liberated. It was certain that a general emancipation would not be long delayed, but the poet would not wait. He opened negotiations with their master, V. E. Fliorkovsky, to emancipate, with a little piece of land, his two brothers, Mykola and Osip, and his sister Irina with their families. Fliorkovsky refused and demanded a considerable sum for the emancipation but refused to give them land, even when the Society for Aid to Russian Writers, with such imposing names as those [Pg 34]of Turgenev, Kavelin, a professor of the University of St. Petersburg, Chernyshevsky and various others appealed to him. Finally on July 10, 1860, Fliorkovsky succeeded in coming to an agreement with his serfs and gave them their liberty in return for 900 silver rubles but without land. The poet was angry at this solution but there was nothing that he could do. He saw his relatives freed but they were compelled to rent their land on disadvantageous terms until 1865 when as a result of the emancipation settlement they were able to receive some.

During the exciting year when it seemed as if the general emancipation would come almost daily, Kulish and his friends worked energetically on educational plans for the Ukrainians. Sunday schools were established, textbooks prepared in the Ukrainian language, and in general the future seemed rosy. Shevchenko was not behind in his interest and he set to work on a South Russian Primer for the Ukrainian children. It consisted of an alphabet, prayers, and easy selections for reading, with somewhat moralizing texts. It was an unimportant work which the poet had prepared to meet a real national need and it came out early in 1861.

It was about the end. By the fall of 1860, the hardships which he had undergone began to tell upon his health. He complained of pains in his chest but continued to work. In vain doctors and friends tried to persuade him to be careful. At Christmas he insisted upon visiting his friends but it was too much of an exertion. In the middle of January, 1861, he became worse and for some weeks was unable to leave his bed or to go out of his room. A watery swelling came in his chest and it grew constantly worse. Towards the end of February he was in constant pain. On February 25, his birthday, his friend Lazarevsky visited him and the dying poet asked him to write to Vartolomey about his condition. Late that evening he came back with a friend and they found Taras sitting up, breathing heavily but unable to speak. All that night he suffered greatly and could not sleep. In the morning he asked to be taken to his study but he had hardly crossed the threshold into the hall, when he staggered and fell—and never rose again.

The poet had lived to be one day over forty-seven. Out of those years he had been a serf for twenty-four, a free man for nine, a Russian soldier for ten and under police supervision for four. It was a sad life.

Two days later on February 28, there was an enormous funeral in the Academic Church and his friends and admirers gave glowing [Pg 35]eulogies of his life and merits. Among the speakers were Kulish, Bilozersky, and Kostomariv. He was buried in the Smolensky cemetery.

Meanwhile his friends planned to have the body taken back to Ukraine. The necessary permission was secured and on May 8, the body left the capital. It was taken through Moscow, Tula and Orel to Kiev. In every city ever increasing crowds welcomed the funeral procession. Finally on May 18, it reached Kiev but again there was a question whether the body could be taken to the Church of the Nativity. Permission was finally granted by the same Governor Vasilchikov who had freed the poet at his last arrest. At the bank of the Dniper, his friend Mikhaylo Chaly made a last eulogy: “The poetry of Shevchenko has won for us the right of literary citizenship and has spoken aloud in the family of Slavonic nations. In this is the great merit of Taras Shevchenko and his glory, which will never perish.” He told the truth. The Dniper was in full flood but the enthusiastic admirers succeeded in getting the body across and in burying it on the Chernecha Hora, one of the poet’s favorite spots. In 1892 Vartolomey bought this ground and handed it over to the local duma of Kaniv to preserve as a memorial to the poet.

Shevchenko lived a life of tribulation and sorrow. There was little that was joyous about it. His muse is one of sadness but of firm belief in the ultimate triumph of the right and of human brotherhood and he saw the Ukrainian cause as a part of this noble movement. Whatever he did for it politically, from the standpoint of spirit and of literature he placed his native land and literature on a firm basis among the Slavonic nations. He perfected the work of his predecessors and he still remains the greatest example of the Ukrainian genius.

In estimating the greatness of the poetry of Shevchenko, we can never forget that he must be judged in two different spheres and on two different planes. He is first and foremost the poet of Ukraine, and his poems breathe the secret longings of every Ukrainian heart. He is the spokesman of his people and from his lips we hear in all their clarity and intensity the prayers, the hopes, the disappointments of the Ukrainians. No one of the other Ukrainian poets has equalled him in the understanding of his fellow countrymen and his people have accorded him the highest praise and honor that they can bestow upon a man.

At the same time, his sympathy and compassion range far beyond the boundaries of his own people and here he becomes a world poet, able to stand comparison with such writers as Pushkin and Mickiewicz, the great masters of Russian and Polish verse at their periods of greatest excellence. Far more even than they he expressed the sufferings of humanity, the evil of injustice and of wrong, the need and the inevitability of the triumph of right, of kindness, and of brotherly love. His poems in this sphere have a message for all humanity and are an appeal for a better, a truer, a more decent life for all men and women everywhere.

It is one of the mysteries of genius how the poor serf was able to develop into the magnificent poet that he was to become in after years, despite the blows that fate hurled upon him, of poverty, of suffering, of imprisonment and of ill health. Yet there is no royal road to genius and there is no predicting where or when a genius will be born. The world can only note it and give due acclaim to the man who is thus favored or cursed by fortune.

Let us look a little more closely at the work of Shevchenko in the national sphere. For centuries the free Kozaks had been holding up to view the principles of a free life and a free political organization on the steppes of eastern Europe. They had paid for their liberty with their blood. They had fought a losing fight, for disunity and factionalism had destroyed them even at the moments when they seemed the nearest to success and victory. Social classes had made an appearance among them. The Kozak officers had tended to turn themselves [Pg 37]into nobles and to seek from outside powers the ratification of their claims. They paid the price for their ambitions and with them the people who might have stood out as a strong and self-contained band were thrown into serfdom. It was a long, slow process and with unfailing psychological truth Shevchenko put his finger unerringly upon the defects of the Kozak system. He traced the downfall of his country through the ages. He pictured it in its ruin and he never lost hope that someway, somehow it would rise again. He was not a soldier at heart. He was not a conspirator. He was not interested in the secret passwords, the underground existence, the spiritual isolation and discipline that must become the dominating features of the life of every revolutionist. In childhood he had learned why the Koliishchina had failed. As a kindly, loving soul, he could not excuse the ferocity of that movement which he painted so vividly. He had seen the failure of the Decembrist movement in Russia and of the Polish revolt in 1831 and he understood the lessons. Yet he did not waver in his belief. He did not express himself as to the manner in which Ukraine would become free. He was not a political theorist and did not speculate on the form of government which would then come. He was too cultured, too modern to believe that the old Kozak system could return, that the Hetmans could be reestablished and recover their power. But never for a moment did he give up his feeling of loyalty to his mother-country. Never for an instant did he mitigate or reduce her claims to independence. Full friendship and trust in the Moskals could only come when Moscow was ready to greet Ukraine as a brother with all the rights and obligations that that meant.

At the same time that he avoided political revolution, Shevchenko was a bold and defiant revolutionist in the ideal sense of the word. He was not satisfied with a revolution which would remove the tsars whom he hated and put other men in power with the same privileges. To him the goal of human life was freedom, brotherhood, democracy. He wanted a society which would not injure the unfortunate and the downtrodden, which would not be composed of hypocritical Pharisees and snobbish and ambitious and conceited rulers and wealthy roués, no matter what terms they applied to themselves.

It is here that Shevchenko far transcended Ukraine and her problems. Wherever there was a suffering soul, an oppressed woman or child, an enslaved man, the message of Shevchenko demanded unflinchingly that evil must be wiped out, that need and want and fear [Pg 38]must be eliminated from the earth, and that greed and lust must be annihilated. In holding up these goals which are independent of and above national existence, which are in the realm of religion and of ethics, Shevchenko has a message for the entire world. His works are far more modern in their direct and simple speech than are those of most of his contemporaries. They cannot grow old or fade until those great ideals which we to-day call by the name of democracy and for which the world is fighting, are fully brought to reality. They are the dominant factors in man’s struggle to achieve civilization and on man’s success in obtaining them depends the future of peace and prosperity.

Yet we would be very wrong to think that Shevchenko acquired his point of view only from his own meditations and ideas. The picture that is often drawn of him as a mere serf who somehow or other appeared in literature is far from the mark. Of course he had no formal education—but that was true of many of the scholars and gentlemen of the early nineteenth century. We often say of them that they acquired their knowledge and outlook on life through constant association with the outstanding men of a previous generation. This is obviously untrue of Shevchenko who was born a serf and passed his childhood under the harsh conditions of life in a poor Ukraine village, where he could only secure an education from the ignorant and inefficient clerks and chanters of the various village churches and they were hardly the proper instructors for a young and ambitious man. Yet somehow or other Taras Shevchenko acquired a real education which enabled him to meet on an equality many of the most distinguished men of his time, he won a real insight into the psychology of his people, and he mastered their language as no one else has ever done. There is needed far more study than has hitherto been undertaken as to the way in which he acquired knowledge and trained himself for his great work.

We can only dimly trace in broad outlines the process of his development. From his earliest boyhood he had ambitions to become an artist and his first teachers were the local ikon painters. From them he seems to have learned little except to read and sing the psalms, but he was so expert in this that his first master used to send him out to officiate at peasant funerals, when the master was too drunk to attend them himself. Of painting he could learn only how to draw and color the general types of saints that were to be found in the local ikonostases and the sketchy outlines of the details of hagiography [Pg 39]and printing that were included in the cheap handbooks that served the rural workmen as patterns—and we must remember that at this period the art of ikon painting as an art was sadly on the decline. He also absorbed from his grandfather the latter’s memories of the Koliishchina and from the village a knowledge of the folksongs and of the dances and other traditional elements of the village culture. He had certainly read Skovoroda, Kotlyarevsky, and the other early masters of Ukrainian literature.

All this represented the full range of his possibilities until he appeared at the Engelhardt manorhouse and was taken with the young master to Wilno and Warsaw. He had not only picked up by this time a knowledge of the Church Slavonic but he had also a general acquaintance with both Russian and Polish and he probably used every opportunity to read what books were in the manorhouse exactly as he feasted his eyes upon the works of art that were there. Yet we must not lay too much stress upon this possibility, for in those days books were often more neglected than cherished and there were many great nobles whose libraries contained fewer books than windows.

Shevchenko’s opposition to serfdom and his irritation at being dragged from his homeland may have colored his own reminiscences as to the opportunities that he had for acquiring a knowledge of the cultures of the oppressors of his country. At the time he was far more interested in painting than he was in writing, and we are better able to trace the influences exerted upon his art than those upon his poetry. Yet his stay in Wilno was undoubtedly an important factor in his development.

At this time Wilno was the cultural centre of the movement for the liberation of Poland. Around the restored university there had gathered a group of talented young men who were ardent Polish patriots. Among them was Adam Mickiewicz who had been arrested and removed to Russia in 1824, just six years before the young serf arrived in the city. It was possible for him to be affected by the growing preparations for the Polish revolt of 1831 and his friendship with Dunia Haszowska undoubtedly did much to increase his already strong Ukrainian feelings. At the same time from her and from his teacher, Franciszek Lampa, he could hardly fail to become acquainted with the newer works of Polish literature and with the beginnings of the Romantic movement which was basing itself upon the newer German and English developments. He was probably already aware of the ideas of Schiller and Byron, before he went to St. Petersburg [Pg 40]and there he was again subjected to the same type of influences in their Russian form.

During his work with Shirayev, he probably had little time to continue this self-education, although it is always hard to say exactly what he was reading or what opportunities the poor serf had to study. At all events with his meeting with Bryulov and his subsequent emancipation, he was brought definitely into contact with men who were familiar with Europe and who had known personally most of the great writers of the day in all the European literatures. Many of their works had appeared in poor and often anonymous Russian translations. Even translations of the stories of Washington Irving were appearing and an ambitious and intellectually eager young man, even with his limited opportunities, was able to assimilate a great deal of literary knowledge. Up to the present time there are no exhaustive studies of this type of Russian publications, for we can hardly call some of these translations by the proud name of literature. Many of the students of Shevchenko have sought to confine the influences upon him to Polish and Russian. In a sense this is true, for Shevchenko gives no sign of learning more than a few words in any non-Slavonic language, but it is equally false to neglect the possibility that the young man got to know the masterpieces of the world through such defective sources. Besides this, he was in touch with Zhukovsky, who was the outstanding student of European literature in Russia at the day and the foremost translator. The poet was a friend of Bryulov and it is not fantastic to suggest that the years of his stay in St. Petersburg both before and after his emancipation were used to good advantage to give him a knowledge of literature as well as of painting.

At all events we do not know what occasion set Shevchenko to writing. We do not have any of his first attempts and the earliest poem which we know is the Prychynna, (the Mad Woman) which is very definitely based upon the weird, supernatural type of ballad which was so popular at the time and which had been acclimatized in Russian by Zhukovsky and in Polish by Mickiewicz on the basis of Bürger’s Lenore.

It is interesting in this poem that Shevchenko has completely Ukrainianized the scene. The lover is a Kozak who has fallen in battle. There is a sympathetic description of the Ukrainian landscape and unlike the vast number of ballads of this period, the stanza form has been completely neglected and can be marked only [Pg 41]by the rhyming sequence which already has taken the form which is characteristic of most of the mature poems of our author. There is the same variation in metre which we are to find in his later poems and it is with good reason that critics regard this as one of his most successful works. Wonder grows when we reflect that this is the work of a twenty-three year old poet who was still a serf at the time when he composed it.

The same characteristics can be found in the other ballads which were included in the original Kobzar and in those which he wrote before his arrest. They are ostensibly based upon the Ukrainian folklore; they handle the traditional themes in a highly original way, but at the same time they fall well within the limitations of the form as it was worked out by the general Romantic movement. The same question comes up again and again in Gogol’s Ukrainian stories, Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka, when there can be no decision how far the author is using exclusively peasant material and how far he has been influenced by literary models.

A careful examination of these ballads will show that Shevchenko was by no means the guileless and unthinking poet of nature that he appeared to Russian critics as Belinsky. When the Kobzar appeared, Belinsky with all of his critical sense was so hostile to the use of the Ukrainian or Little Russian language for literary purposes, that he emphasized with malice aforethought the use of the vernacular and of peasant words, and regarded the poems as unimportant and unliterary. The Russian radicals and progressives certainly interpreted the brotherhood of man and the superiority of Russian to the other Slavonic languages as organs for their attempts to unify all inhabitants of the Russian Empire and their opposition to the Tsar and the system of Nicholas I did not lead them to have a shred of sympathy for any one who sought for himself the same privileges which they were so proudly acclaiming. From the beginning to the end of Shevchenko’s career he did not find among the Russian radicals any who appreciated what he was really endeavoring to do. They might sympathize with his attacks on tyranny and slavery but they all looked askance at his use of the native speech of Ukraine as much as did the tsarist officials.

In the historical ballads as Ivan Pidkova and the Night of Taras, we have likewise the use of Ukrainian subjects and the adaptation of the ballad form for historical episodes, such as we find in Schiller and Byron. They are filled with the wild ferocity, the careless love of [Pg 42]freedom that were the traditional features of the Zaporozhtsy throughout their history.

When we turn to Katerina, we are on different ground, for here we are dealing with the story of the peasant girl abandoned by her noble lover that was familiar in the Romantic period and which had been introduced into Russian literature as early as Karamzin’s Poor Liza. It is typical also of Shevchenko that he dedicated this poem to Zhukovsky who had been so instrumental in securing his freedom. A lesser and less outspoken person might have hesitated to do this, for Zhukovsky was himself the illegitimate son of a Russian nobleman and a Turkish slave girl. Yet apparently there had been a happy outcome to this situation, for the girl and Mme. Bunina, the wife, remained friendly and Zhukovsky was not faced with the hardships that confronted Ivas.

Through all these poems runs the fervent belief in Ukraine and her tragedy. Perhaps in Perebendya, Shevchenko modelled his old bard on the Lay of the Last Minstrel in the poem of Sir Walter Scott, who was himself an apologist for the long overthrown Stuart dynasty in England. The minstrel had been compelled to suffer by the changes of politics and Shevchenko could easily parallel him to the blind bards wandering around Ukraine and singing of the past glories of the Kozaks and the Ukrainian people. The Romantic glorification of the past fitted in well with his point of view and in the Kobzar almost every poem breathes the poet’s sadness over the loss of his country’s liberty and the present hardships of the people. They emphasize his dislike for Poland and his aversion to the indifference of the Moskals to the people of Ukraine.

Thus the Kobzar is far more than a mere imitation of peasant songs. It goes far beyond the talented reworking of peasant themes and it shows us Shevchenko as already a person well familiar with the literatures of Europe as reflected through Russian and Polish, with the Russian influence predominating. This was only natural for he was living at the time in the Russian capital, and his associates were drawn from the Russian cultural circles. The Kobzar appealed to the Ukrainian people. It set forth their case and their sufferings as well as their past glory, and it naturally won for the poet their love and esteem.

The next year he produced the Haydamaki, the longest of all his works. It is a long epic poem describing the revolt of the Koliishchina, the last outbreak of Western Ukraine against the Polish domination. The movement had been convulsive and brutal and the poet has endeavored [Pg 43]to catch that fierce spirit of revolt that animated the unfortunate peasants. He studied the materials available for the history of the movement but he was also influenced by the stories which he had heard from his grandfather and his associates in childhood and like epic poets in general he did not content himself with a mere versified history. He followed the better artistic method of creating a relatively minor figure as hero, in this case Halayda and here again Shevchenko followed the favorite device of Scott, which had also been adopted by Pushkin in his novel, The Captain’s Daughter, a study of the revolt of Pugachov, the last great outbreak of the Russian peasants against the new order in Russia at almost the same time as the Koliishchina.

There are passages in this poem, which seem to the modern reader unnecessarily brutal but on the whole Shevchenko was not a military poet. The parts of the Haydamaki which will live forever are not so much the scenes of battle and of bloodshed, as the descriptions of Ukrainian nature, the oppression of the peasants by their overlords, the blessing of the arms, and the introduction and epilogue which give the motif of the poem, “Ukraina’s weeping.”

The work met with the same reception as the Kobzar. The Ukrainians in St. Petersburg and at home welcomed the work. It was appreciated by many of the foremost Russian poets, but the leaders of liberal thought like Belinsky attacked it savagely. The great liberal and lover of freedom remarked of it (Vol. VII, p. 214 ff.) “Works of such a character are published only for the pleasure and edification of the authors themselves.” They rest “on an abundance of vulgar and commonplace words and expressions, lacking simplicity of conception and story, filled with pretensions and mannerisms natural to all bad poets—often not at all popular, although they are supported by reliance upon history of song and tradition.” Belinsky had nothing better to say than to urge the poet if he desired to help his people “to talk to the people in a simple, intelligible language about various useful subjects of civil and family life, as Osnovyanenko commenced (but unfortunately did not continue) in his pamphlet, Thoughts for my dear countrymen.” Incidentally this pamphlet had aroused amusement and irritation, because Kvitka-Osnovyanenko as a provincial nobleman was giving vent to views on the divine rights of the Tsar which had long been unpopular even with the most reactionary circles in the capital. Such comments on the Haydamaki can be explained only by the ardent desire of Belinsky and his friends to bar [Pg 44]the development of literature in the Ukrainian or Little Russian language as they insisted upon calling it.

Belinsky did not change his opinions and about the time of Shevchenko’s arrest, the great liberal critic wrote to Count Annenkov in December 1846 that “common sense must see in Shevchenko an ass, a fool and a scoundrel, and above all a bitter drunkard, a lover of spirits because of Khokhol patriotism.”

Perhaps it was as a result of these attacks, that Shevchenko came to feel himself even more isolated in the Russian capital. He wrote very little during the next year and what he wrote breathes with every syllable the feeling that he was a stranger in a strange land and that the glory of Ukraine had definitely departed. He gradually ceased to glorify the past and to hope that it might return and he came to bewail the past.

It was in this state of mind that he returned to Ukraine for a visit in 1843 and was overwhelmed with the tragedy, the poverty, and the unhappiness which he found in his own country and his own family. His naturally radical propensities were reinforced and he felt on his return that his stay in St. Petersburg was rather taking him away from the field of action and of practical life. The pleasant associations which he had with Bryulov and his friends, his occupations with painting and writing, all seemed to him insignificant in comparison with the festering sore which he had seen at home. In Three Years he deplored the passing of his youth in unimportant occupations and he yearned to be able to do something more positive, more immediate for his fellow men. In this he was probably stirred by the general note of sentimentalism that swept over Russian literature in the forties and the beginnings of definite sympathy with the people and a call for the liberation of the serfs.

A striking result of this visit was a mitigation of his hostility for the Poles. In the more romantic dreams of his youth, he had harked back to the Kozak exploits against the Polish state. Now he definitely turned upon Bohdan who had been the first to sign a formal treaty with Moscow. It is idle to argue that Shevchenko was thinking only of the Russian tsar and the Russian landowners. The whole trend of his works, his denunciation of the German bureaucracy, his attitude toward individuals all indicate that he sharply differentiated the Russians and the Ukrainians and was willing to risk his life in order to create again an independent Ukraine.

The poems of the years between his first visit to Ukraine and his [Pg 45]arrest are perhaps his greatest consistent mass of writing and in them he allows his imagination to play over the whole field of life. Working in the Archaeological Commission, he resented the Russian excavation of the Ukrainian funeral mounds and the removal of the contents, where they were of artistic character, to the capital. He resented the glorification of Peter the Great and Catherine, the two rulers who had wiped out the Ukrainian self-government. He resented the praise of Bohdan for his subservience to Moscow and the condemnation of Mazepa for his joining with Charles XII against Peter. He resented the Russian advance in the Caucasus and the attempts of Russia to strengthen her power without solving her internal difficulties. He resented the willingness of many of the Ukrainian landowners to climb upon the band wagon of Moscow and to avoid their own culture. He hated the injustice of the people themselves towards the unfortunate girl who had been seduced, especially by a Russian stranger. His moral indignation urged him to speak out against every form of oppression.

He therefore willingly accepted the ideas of Kollár, a Slovak, when he wrote the Heretic and glorified Jan Hus as a Slav hero, but it is to be noted that in the introduction which was dedicated to Šafařík, he definitely criticized Pushkin’s views on the necessity of Slavonic union under Russia and demanded a real Slavonic brotherhood in which all the Slavs would appear as brothers.

Naturally the Society of Sts. Cyril and Methodius and the association of the United Slavs made a strong appeal to him. Here was a group of young idealists who seriously believed, following Kollár, that all the Slavs should be brothers, that the German influence should be eradicated, and that a great Slav republic should be set up. Like the Decembrists a quarter century before, these young leaders had very little idea as to the ultimate consequences of their acts and the methods by which they would realize their ideals. Shevchenko saw in them a standard which would help humanity and he turned to it.

Naturally it was impossible for any author to express these thoughts openly under the iron rule of Nicholas I. To the administration, the problem of Ukraine had been settled when the country had been divided into governments and the full Russian administrative system introduced. It was therefore necessary for the poet to indicate rather than to state definitely the goals for which he was striving and hence it is that we have such poems as the Dream and the Great Grave. [Pg 46]There is much that is unclear about them. The Great Grave is a masterpiece of allusion and of vague indirection but the reader is able from it to grasp a full sense of the indignation which Shevchenko felt over the ruin of his country and his guarded expressions of hope that it will rise again free of Russian domination. The old nostalgic note of sorrow for the failures of the past still continues but the pressing needs of the present and the realization that there is much internal reform, much increase of brotherhood, much hard and unromantic work to be done, before the glorious days of the past can return, now take precedence over the old laments for a golden age. Shevchenko had come to realize that it was internal disunion as well as foreign pressure that had brought the country to its present state and he believed that this had to be fought at home as well as on the field of battle.

Just as before Ukraine is pictured as a poor widow, an orphan, abandoned by all in a cold world, and he poured out his heart over it. At the same time he expressed his bitter condemnation of the court and in the Dream he produced an unforgivable and unforgettable satire on the slavish manners of the court itself. He must have been aware that he was risking his own personal liberty and fortune on such attacks. At times they were hardly tactful or in good taste but the bitterness which rankled in Shevchenko’s soul made him oblivious to this.

It is perhaps idle to wonder what change would have taken place in him, had he received a fellowship to study abroad. He had already come a long way culturally from the little village where he was born and he was familiar with the accomplishments of the world outside. He lacked that personal knowledge that even a short trip to the West would have given him. We cannot tell how he would have reacted to a freer and a better life. He might have become a potent factor as an emigré in the life of his country as Drahomaniv was in after years. He might have, but it is hardly likely, been swept from his feet by the allurements of the outside world. Almost certainly his active mind would have drawn some lesson for his people, would have gained some experience, had he had the opportunity to make friends and to observe.

It was not to be and perhaps we are not going too far when we ascribe to the introduction of the second Kobzar which never appeared a fairly good summary of Shevchenko’s views on the very eve of the catastrophe. He had planned to publish some of his poems and [Pg 47]they were already in the hands of the censor when he was arrested. In the introduction which he submitted with the text and which was only discovered in the files of the police in 1906, he bewailed the fact that all the Slavonic races were able to print freely, Poles, Czechs, Serbs, Bulgars, Montenegrans, Moskals but not his own people, and he complains even more bitterly that a large part of the Ukrainian educated class are ashamed of their own mother tongue and try to read and write Russian. “Do not pay attention to the Moskals; let them write in their fashion, and let us write in ours. They have a people and language—and we have a people and language, and let people decide which is the more beautiful. They rely upon Gogol, because he wrote not in his own language, but in Muscovite, as on Walter Scott, because he did not write in his language. Gogol grew up in Nizhen and not in Little Russia, and does not know his own language; and W(alter) S(cott) in Edinburgh and not in Scotland—and perhaps there was some reason why they gave it up.... I do not know. But Burns was also a great folk poet, and Skovoroda would have been, had he not been beaten from his course by Latin and then by Muscovite.” “Why were not V. S. Karadjić, Šafařík and others not turned into Germans (it would have been easier for them) and why did they remain Slavs, sincere sons of their mothers, and acquire good fame?” This and other passages disposes of the widespread idea that Shevchenko was only opposed to the Russian autocratic rule. The whole trend of his thinking and development shows that he regarded Ukraine and the Ukrainians as entirely different from the Russians and on a par with the other Slavonic races. His comparison with Scott and Burns shows his general feelings and also his acquaintance with what European literature had to offer. He had worked through many of his original difficulties, and if he was of a radical term of mind, he still viewed his radicalism only through the eyes of his own people. It naturally made it harder for him in the capital and it alienated him from many of his more easy-going countrymen and more than that it prepared the way for the great catastrophe that was to overtake him.

Up to this time with the single exception of the Heretic he had confined himself entirely to Ukrainian themes. But during these years his understanding had broadened. He was as devoted as before to the cause of Ukraine but in his shift from the Romantic glorification of the past of his country to an eloquent plea for the elimination of the evils which he saw there, he had come to realize that these evils [Pg 48]were universal. The sins of injustice, of cruelty, and of meanness were everywhere and the poor of all nations suffered as did the Ukrainians. This gave to his poetry a far wider human significance than before. From this time on, the suffering and insulted girl who had been conceived as a Ukrainian phenomenon now becomes a universal figure. This type which had figured in world literature and been naturalized in Russian, Polish, and then in Ukrainian, now is seen as a universal phenomenon. The appeals for justice for the mother, for the poor are universal appeals, placed in a Ukrainian setting with a background of Ukrainian nature and reality. They can be read with sympathy throughout the civilized world and not merely as local peculiarities. A sort of national ethnography had served as the basis for many of the early Ukrainian writings and the authors had vied with one another to see how accurately they could describe the minutiae of village life. Shevchenko was not satisfied with this and he laid the weight of emphasis on the individual and the universal rather than on the local background.

It all marked another step in the transformation and broadening of the poet and the process would have continued with beneficent results, had it not been for his unfortunate arrest and exile. During the weeks of confinement, his poetry became more purely lyrical, more definitely personal than before and the little collection In the Fortress, shows a newer and deeper insight into his own psychology and that of his people. He realized that it meant the shattering of his hopes, the possible ending of his career, and the regret that he could not have done more burned him deeply. Yet it is interesting that in this very series, there grew in his mind the comparison between Ukraine and the poor girl driven from her own village. This was to be one of the main themes of his later verses.

Then came the stunning sentence that he was to be exiled and put in the army without permission to write or paint. He at first made attempts to have the ban on painting lifted. We cannot tell whether this was because painting was nearer to his heart or because it was his verses that had brought his condemnation and he believed that since his pencil and brush were less guilty of political opposition, he might be granted more mitigation of his sentence on this score than on the field of poetry in which he had definitely offended the Tsar.

The sentence was carried out spasmodically. Thus at Orsk he was apparently able to write a little. During the winter at Kos-Aral, he had still more liberty and while he was at Orenburg, he was able both [Pg 49]to write and paint. It was only after his second arrest that the ban was ruthlessly and rigorously enforced for some years and apart from some reworking of old themes in Russian, he did not attempt anything.

Life in the army was not kind to the poet. The needlessly harsh and stern discipline hurt his sensitive soul. His companions were largely ignorant peasants; many of them were political exiles and criminals. Their rough and obscene language, their brutal cynicism disgusted him as much as did the ignorance and lack of culture of many of the officers. He never became a good soldier and by his rigid performance of his duties never won some sort of alleviation of the hardships of his life. In addition, even on the expedition to Kos-Aral, there was a surprising lack of the necessaries of life for all, high and low, willing and unwilling. All this coupled with the prohibition of indulging openly in his favorite pastimes wore him down and his health was gravely shattered by scurvy and other diseases. In short by the time of his liberation, he had become a prematurely old man.

Intellectually he was, like Dostoyevsky at almost the same period, cut off from all the currents of literature and confined in his reading to the New Testament. Unlike him, Shevchenko did not grow and expand his range of interest during this period. He did not drink in and transcend his new experiences but he retreated more into himself and maintained his intellectual poise by meditating upon the same themes which had been stirring in his brain before he was arrested. He deepened his meditations and his thoughts and universalized them instead of absorbing the world around him and meditating upon it.

It is highly typical of Shevchenko and indeed of all the Russian intelligentsia of the period that this sudden forcible intrusion into a new and strange life did not produce in his writings any pictures of his experiences. The treeless steppe and the impoverished and nomadic Kirghiz might become the proper subjects for his painting and sketching. They leave on his poetry only his feeling of isolation from Ukraine. The hardships on the expedition do not rouse him to song to describe them nearly as much as do his memories of the green fields of Ukraine and the sufferings of the unfortunate serfs.

More than ever his poetry re-echoes the same motifs that we have already seen—the unwedded mother, a comparison of her with the widowed and desolated Ukraine, his solitude, his dreams of liberty. A Lermontov or a Tolstoy could thrill to the beauty of the Caucasus, the grandeur of the mountains, the sandy desert. Shevchenko [Pg 50]could not but every step, every new event only increased his nostalgia and led him to a deeper and deeper lyricism which contrasts with the narrative themes which he reworked with slight variations. We can explain this in many ways, his feelings of alienation from his surroundings, his dislike of the army, his sufferings from the discipline, but the fact remains that his experiences remained apart from his poetry and his mind dwelt upon the past and the dreams that he had once cherished.

In Orenburg he came to know many of the exiled Poles and Ukrainians. On his release he met some of the Decembrists who were returning after a quarter of a century in Russian prison camps. The period taught him to overlook many of the Polish misdeeds in Ukraine. This was foreshadowed by that memorable passage in the epistle where he told his countrymen that the Kozaks had overthrown Poland but that her fall had ruined them. So in the poem To the Poles he was able to plead for a renewal of brotherly relations.

The Decembrists impressed him but it is highly significant again that not one word of his poetry pleaded for a reconciliation between them and Ukraine. He viewed them as martyrs, he eulogized them, but the fact that Pushchin, the Decembrist, the poet, and the friend of Pushkin, had an illegitimate daughter just like a gay hussar, shocked him to the depths. He must have remembered that passage in Katerina,

But there is a difference in his last period. He returned unbroken in spirit and almost his first experiment in poetry was the Neophytes written while he was detained at Nizhni Novgorod. His friend Kulish who was always cautious and fearful warned him that the poem was dangerous but that made no difference to Shevchenko. Even after his experiences in the army and while he was still in doubt as to whether he might be returned to the cheerless steppe, he wrote a poem which pointedly drew a comparison between the Russian tsar and the Emperor Nero. It is a sharp criticism of the abuse of Christianity by the modern despots. In form it is a retelling of a story that might have been the theme of a painting by Bryulov, the picture of decadent, luxurious, persecuting Rome, and the fate of the early Christian martyrs. In a sense the poem offers a conventional picture. Shevchenko chooses however, and this is in line with his development, the emotions of a [Pg 51]mother of a martyr who is converted by her son’s courageous death to a belief in the Crucified. There are phrases which express the poet’s dissatisfaction with organized Christianity but they reveal nothing more than his belief that truth and right are being mocked by their so-called observers and believers. We can read the story as it stands or we can take the very obvious comparison of the mother and Ukraine, and read the moral that Ukraine can only arise when truth is restored to its supreme position on earth, and men live again as brothers.

Shevchenko’s return to St. Petersburg was almost a triumphal procession. He was entertained everywhere by the Slavophile leaders, as Sergey Timofeyevich Aksakov who had pleasant memories of that remote area among the Bashkirs which was somewhat similar to the land where Shevchenko had suffered. In St. Petersburg he met Count Aleksyey Konstantinovich Tolstoy and his relatives. He also became friends with Chernyshevsky and this friendship is of course exploited by the Communists who have tried to translate Shevchenko into their own language. It is true that the great radical spoke of the 1860 edition of the Kobzar in terms more favorable than did Belinsky but it is equally clear that he persisted in seeing in it only the folk elements and refused to grant it a proper place in the literature of a civilized nation. To him like Belinsky, Ukrainian had no right to exist except as a vehicle for folksongs. He rebuked the language and the writers for borrowing Russian and European words and believed that one East Slavonic language was all that had a right to appear and be counted. He denied to the Ukrainians that right which Russian in the eighteenth century had so generously utilized of modernization. He could quote Shevchenko on the abuses of serfdom with an easy conscience but both he and Turgenev were very sceptical of the validity of the underlying thesis of Shevchenko that Russia had its people and language and so had Ukraine.

Shevchenko had returned broken in body. His fiery will was unbroken but he was weary and the main notes in his later poems were a universal call for action against injustice and a personal lamentation for his bachelor life outside of Ukraine. Only rarely as in the attack on Bohdan did he revert to direct laments for the fall of his country. For the most part his works are adaptations of the Old Testament, breathing the moral indignation and the call to repentance that inflamed the Old Testament prophets. Again and again he emphasizes the need for truth and love and brotherhood, if mankind is to be truly happy.

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To this series may be ascribed Mary. This is a striking study of the Blessed Virgin and Shevchenko deliberately changed the sacred story in order to make Mary typical of the lot of the average peasant woman. He also used apocryphal tales that were current among the peasants. Yet despite the surface variations in the story which take away much of the scriptural character, the story cannot fairly be called irreverent. It is not even unmiraculous in character, for the Star of Bethlehem, here called a comet, certainly plays a distinct role.

In writing this poem Shevchenko prefaces it with a glorious invocation of the Blessed Virgin, but exactly as he did in the Neophytes, the emphasis is laid upon the devoted woman, that truly human figure who carries on the work of her Son in the great cause of human freedom and human brotherhood after his untimely death at the hands of evil men. There is none of that spirit of deliberate blasphemy which appears so markedly in Pushkin’s Gavriliada or in most of the attempts to humanize the sacred story. It brought down upon the unfortunate head of the poet a great deal of criticism but here as elsewhere a more careful reader will see the fundamentally religious nature of the poet, even when he at first sight seems to turn his back upon the adherents of conventional religion.

The other note of his last days is the more personal one of grieving over his own unfortunate fate. His one ambition in life was to have a wife and a little home on the banks of the Dniper and his last years were a pathetic search for the girl who was to share it with him. His last poem written only a few days before his death is a real swansong and a definite assurance that it will be in the next world that he can satisfy these innocent desires.

Taras Shevchenko finished his sad and thwarted career at the age of forty-seven. For only nine years was he free to write as he would and even during that period publication was denied his works. He could be known officially only by the Kobzar and the Haydamaki. A second edition of the Kobzar was stopped by his arrest. Another edition which did appear in 1860 could contain only those early poems which had appeared before his arrest. All his other works were known either by manuscript copies which were in the hands of devoted friends and were circulated at the risk of arrest and imprisonment or were buried in his own notebooks or in the more inaccessible files of the Imperial police. All this makes it more remarkable that he was so widely known and highly valued during his own lifetime.

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There is a deceptive simplicity about his works. He seems to be the mere imitator of the folksongs and the traditions of his people but he is far more than that. He possessed a command of language and a degree of metrical skill which overshadows that of many of his famous Slavonic contemporaries. Pushkin was content to ring changes upon the iambic metre. Shevchenko uses with equal skill iambics, trochees (perhaps his favorite) and anapaests. He was a master in the art. He could employ the simple measures of the folksong and give them a real dignity and he was equally at home with the formal rhythms but always he was the master of his medium and the freedom which he uses in his system of rhyming and of accentuation show a skill in technique that is not rivalled by any poet of his own or later times. The very simplicity and artlessness which he reveals conceal the master artist and are the more amazing when we realize that he has left us no hints as to the way in which he attained his skill, for the earliest poems which we possess from his pen are as perfect in their own way as are his greatest masterpieces.

Shevchenko commenced his work at the height of the Romantic period, when the poets of eastern and western Europe were heavily under the spell of the supernatural and the historical and from there with the ripening of his talent, he passed by evolutionary stages into the age of realism and of social reform. Through it all there is a majestic dignity that is characteristic of the finer passages of the Old Testament together with a tender and sympathetic understanding of all the sufferings and sorrows of humanity. It is this characteristic that has made him a timeless poet of the human heart and has given to his works not only national but permanent and universal value.

It is now nearly a century since the promising career of Taras Shevchenko was blighted by arrest and exile. The Russian authorities hoped that they had silenced him and with him the cause for which he stood and the uncomfortable and dangerous ideas which he was expressing. They failed miserably. They isolated him for ten years and warped his spirit; they broke his health but he never wavered in his ideas and to the end of his life he proclaimed the selfsame undying truths. Year by year his poems have been recovered, they have been studied, edited and reedited. Year by year his fame has increased and to-day it is abundantly evident that he was not a petty revolutionist and plotter, a poet who repeated in more or less agreeable form the old village folksongs, the last remains of a passing phase of life in one small period of human history, but that he was a man who [Pg 54]against tremendous obstacles developed his heaven-given gift of song by long and serious study, who assimilated the best that the civilization of his time had to offer, and who was a flaming guide to the hearts of men and a prophet of a new and better world in which all that stains and ruins and tortures the human spirit will disappear. The poet of Ukraine, he is also a poet of humanity. His works have more than a purely local significance. To-day we realize as never before that freedom and truth and justice and mercy and brotherhood must be worldwide in scope and universal and eternal, if man is to be free and happy and peaceful. There are poets who express some of these ideals. There is none who speaks out more clearly, more artistically, and more touchingly to men everywhere than Taras Shevchenko. Those qualities which are local and temporal disappear. The underlying merits come to the surface and shine more brightly. Efforts to deride him or to bend him to the uses of aggressors and tyrants must fail and Taras Shevchenko appears to-day as some of the more keensighted and understanding of his contemporaries both at home and abroad realized, a poet of the first rank who deserves the ear and the study of every civilized man.

What was Shevchenko’s attitude toward religion? The best critics of the poet, whether they are Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Greek Catholic, or Protestant, have come to the conclusion that he was fundamentally a religious man but that at times he employed certain phrases which have allowed the advocates of militant atheism to claim him for their party. Yet to prove their point, this latter group is compelled to believe that he distinctly concealed his own thoughts to satisfy the dictates of the censorship in a way that he did on no other subject and their comments are so biassed that it is difficult to take them too seriously.

There can be little doubt that, especially after his visit to Ukraine in 1843, Shevchenko was carried away by his bitterness over the lot of the Ukrainian people. This is expressed again and again in his attack on the official representatives of the Orthodox religion, which had been definitely bureaucratized by Peter the Great, destroyer of Ukrainian freedom, and Shevchenko could not resist the temptation to attack the Church on all counts. Thus in both the Dream and the Caucasus there are lines that reflect his distaste for the established Church of Russia. In the Heretic he employs his choicest invectives against the condemnation of Hus. Later while he was in exile, he expressed himself very sharply about the role of the Jesuits in Poland. After his return he inserted certain phrases in Mary that vary from the traditional thought of the Church.

All this might be interpreted as an extreme form of that type of anti-clericalism that is not uncommon in nineteenth century authors, except for the fact that at times when his sense of social injustice gets the better of him and he is writing with a burning zeal against the social order, he seems at times to include God Himself in his condemnations. It must be admitted by the best friends of the poet that on occasion he indulged in decidedly intemperate language.

On the other hand there are remarkable examples of Shevchenko’s deep interest in the religion of the people. We must remember that the Russian occupation of Ukraine had led to a transfer of the clergy from the supervision of Constantinople (where it had been during the great days of Kiev) to Moscow and that the change bore as hardly upon the religious life of the villages as it did upon the political and [Pg 56]cultural. The Russian tsars were trying to standardize and organize everything under their own supervision and upon their own system and while they did not change in any important degree the native rites and practices, they tried to fit them into a different framework.

Nowhere in the whole of the poet’s writings does he cast any shadow of contempt or brand as superstitious the peasant practices of making the sign of the cross or of lighting candles or praying. The normal religious life of the village where it concerns the peasants and God he treats with the greatest respect. He recognized very clearly that there was in it a something that answered the religious needs of the people, that brought them into contact with a superior Power that alone could make life tolerable, and he never deliberately cast any aspersions upon it. It was part of the poet’s endeavor to build his future Ukraine on all sound principles in the national life.

Similarly he makes absolutely no attacks upon the teachings of Christ, on His pleas for brotherly love, on the Crucifixion and the Resurrection. The birth of Christ and the redemption of humanity form the central point in the entire history of mankind. He acknowledges and glorifies His teachings, even if at moments of vexation he complains that God is waiting too long, is allowing too much innocent blood to be shed, too many abuses to continue on this planet.

So too with the Blessed Virgin. In the introduction to the poem Mary he pays a glowing tribute to her, as sinless, the sacred power of all saints, and he implores Her to give to the suffering poor the power of Her martyr Son. In the introduction to the Neophytes, he again appeals to Her as “Blessed among women, the holy, righteous Mother of Her holy Son on earth.” All these references fit in strangely with the arguments that the poet was in any way hostile to religion.

Besides this, there is abundant evidence that Shevchenko knew the Bible thoroughly. In his letters from exile, he writes to Princess Repnina that he read the Gospel constantly and he asked her to send him also a copy of Saint Thomas à Kempis. He declares that only a Christian philosophy could encourage a person in his hopeless position. We certainly do not need to assume that in these passages he was writing only with an eye to the effect that it would produce upon the Princess, his friends in the capital and the censors.

More than that, Shevchenko drew heavily upon the Bible for themes for his poems, especially in his later years. A favorite device might almost be called a meditation upon the Old Testament, particularly upon passages where the ancient prophets condemned severely [Pg 57]the abuses and the faults of their own day. Then in a direct manner he used the present situation in Ukraine to illustrate the great truths of the past. It is certainly interesting that it is not in these poems that he resorts to expressions which are really in bad taste, for the great majority of these occur in the poems written after his first return to Ukraine, when he was deeply shocked by the conditions which he saw there. Again on his last visit he apparently made remarks that irritated some of the Polish landowners and involved him in trouble with the police and the authorities.

The religious development of the poet thus seems to move along with the general development of his thought. In the poems of the early period through the Haydamaki and Hamaliya, when he was interested in picturing the romantic tales of the Kozaks, he accepts without a murmur the popular rites and devotions. There is a deep sincerity in the picture of the priests blessing the army before the uprising of the Haydamaki. It is a scene of deep piety and also one that a cynic could easily have turned into an attack on religion. The same is true of the prayers of the Kozaks in prison in Hamaliya. Even in Katerina, while he recognizes the harsh treatment of the poor mother, he goes little further than to ask God why such things are allowed to exist on earth.

It was after his visit to Ukraine in 1843 that the horrible position of his people burst upon him with all of its terror, cruelty, and injustice. To him the violation of the Christian law of love and charity was the overwhelming fact in life. He became openly rebellious against every institution—whether religious or civil—which seemed even remotely to imply toleration for a social order that could be so near a hell on earth. Yet even in his attacks on these institutions, we can always feel the underlying belief of the poet that religion and God are being deliberately misrepresented and that all would be well, if we could only break through the iron wall that seems to surround this world and penetrate the mystery beyond. There is much of the spirit of Job in these poems, although the author could not at all times hold fast to his vision of God’s justice and mercy. Here there is undoubtedly a limitation on the thought of Shevchenko but it is a limitation that is liable to confront any forthright thinker who bounds his horizon with this planet and with life on earth. He was not a mystic to indulge in the contemplation of the Divine but a man suffering for the sad fate of his fellowmen, who believed with all his heart in truth and justice and who was willing to sacrifice himself for the good and true.

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His arrest and imprisonment undoubtedly had a definite effect upon him. We know from his letters to Princess Repnina and others that he attended church services during his stay in the fortress. Later he endeavored to secure permission to decorate both a Roman Catholic and an Orthodox chapel and it can hardly be supposed that he did this only to have an opportunity to draw and to paint. It was rather the feeling that he could dedicate some part of his work to God at the moment when it seemed impossible for him to carry on his work for his country.

On his return to St. Petersburg, he was of course thrown into company with the fashionable radicals of the day with their deliberate and unadulterated atheism and we might expect that he would give some definite sign of their influence. He does nothing of the kind. Rather he turned to the Old Testament for its harsh judgments on kings and rich men who robbed and oppressed the poor and the downtrodden. He had long dreamed of analyzing the character of the Blessed Virgin as a typical mother and it is this that he does in Mary. While he might have been influenced by some of the more irreligious of the popular authors, the work emerged on an entirely different plane with an ardent religious introduction and a reverent treatment of the entire theme. So too with all of his writings.

In his last days Shevchenko had to some degree softened in his ideas. Perhaps he had learned by experience. He certainly was not terrorized. The man who had spoken so boldly in the Neophytes that he had frightened the timid Kulish would hardly have added a religious introduction merely to silence opposition. Such an idea conflicts with all that we know of Shevchenko’s character but he came to differentiate more carefully between those elements of evil in the formal religion of the day and religion itself and sharp as are some of his criticisms, it is impossible for any honest scholar to claim that his works are deliberately irreligious.

An additional sign of this is his Primer, which he secured permission to publish only a few months before his death. It was definitely written for the Sunday Schools which were springing up in Ukraine under the new order. Shevchenko introduced a large amount of religious material into it and he shows again in this the same interest in seeing the social ideas of Christianity worked to the fullest possible extent. It would have been so easy for him to have created a purely secular book, had he been so inclined.

Thus at every stage of his life, we can find distinct traces of the religious [Pg 59]interests of Shevchenko. He was no trained theologian, he was not a mystic, he was not a man who sought to evade the troubles of earth by taking refuge in heaven. He felt that here on earth there was a crying need for reform and human brotherhood and he never indicated for a second that there was any other possibility for achieving this than through the pure and applied teachings of the Gospel.

We know that he was familiar with the ideas of Skovoroda and of other writers of a similar character. We know too that in his own time there were various movements aiming for a new social order. He was influenced by the ideas of the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius, and he was led to revolt against the more formal and ritualistic sides of a Christianity which neglected its task of teaching the people and was willing to follow the dictates of a tyrannical government.

Despite all criticisms, the overwhelming impression that the poems, the stories, and the letters of Shevchenko leave upon the careful reader is that he is a man who profoundly appreciates the Crucified and Risen Savior and who is only too ready to support his teachings and suffer for his fellowmen. Some of his outbursts may be extreme but it is very doubtful, if a single intelligent reader has ever found his faith shaken by any poem of Taras Shevchenko. When we subtract from his criticized remarks those that may be influenced by literary models and those that come from blazing indignation, we shall find an amazing residue of serious moral instruction, of deep respect for the worship and practices of his people, of his own deep and abiding belief in the traditional teachings and doctrines of Christianity in their true development and application. His prayers and invocations are no sham, no attempt to curry favor or to escape responsibility. They are a product of a believing mind and a great soul.

The eight poems included in the Kobzar were selected by Shevchenko himself for publication in a single volume of poems and are the only group which appeared during his lifetime and under his editorship as a collected whole. They date from his early residence in St. Petersburg before his visit to Ukraine in 1843 and reflect the thoughts and interests of the poet in his first phase, when he was still under the influence of Romanticism. They consist of ballads, supernatural and historical, written under the influence direct or indirect of the Western Romantic writers. They emphasize Shevchenko’s feelings that he was a stranger in a strange land in St. Petersburg, and that however much he was enjoying his work in the Academy of Arts, his heart was back in Ukraine and he was dreaming of the old free life there, of the heroic deeds of the past as contrasted with the sadness of the present.

The ideas of the later Shevchenko are all here. Ukraine, bereft of her Hetmans and the Sich, is tacitly compared to an orphan girl or a poor widow. The opposition to the Poles is clearly expressed but his dislike of Russian domination is more than hinted and it is certain, as General Dubelt, the Commander of the Gendarmes, thought at the time of the poet’s arrest that there is a connection in thought between the poems which serve to illustrate the various aspects of the sad condition of Ukraine.

The Kobzars were the old bards who travelled through the country, singing tales of the past and of the supernatural. Shevchenko pretends to pitch his poems on the key struck by these wandering singers of the people but only a superficial observer does not see that the poet is far more than a singer of folksongs, that he has a real literary knowledge and skill far transcending the traditional bards and is familiar with modern literature.

The first poem which serves as an introduction really enumerates all the themes that are treated and it is small wonder that the censor in allowing the collection to be published eliminated lines 28-100 which express the poet’s feeling of exile in the north and glorify the past of Ukraine.

The collection well shows the versatility of Shevchenko’s genius and the way in which he succeeds in grouping a number of poems on varied subjects around the central theme, the sufferings of Ukraine. It was received most favorably by his fellow countrymen and made him famous almost at once and respected by all who were interested in Ukrainian rights and liberties.

[Pg 64]

Dedication

Perebendya

Perebendya is a picture of the last of the old Kobzars. To earn a scanty living he is forced to sing to the people all the songs of the peasant village but he does not fail to include in them the story of Ukrainian vengeance on their enemies as Chaly who was killed in 1741 for betraying the Haydamaki and the final story of the downfall of the Sich.

Yet he is more than this and when he retires to the tombs to commune with nature, he is really the voice of Ukraine past, present, and future, the embodiment of the national spirit and the spirit welcomes him for his unbending allegiance to the cause of his nation.

Some scholars have tried to see in him a representation of Shevchenko himself. Others have sought to find literary sources for the conception in the poems of Mickiewicz and in Pushkin’s Prophet. Much scholarship has been expended to little purpose upon the subject. Perebendya remains one of the great poems of Shevchenko and the picture of the old bard, whatever its source, throws light upon the poet’s feelings for his country and its present fate. It forms a poetic introduction to the rest of the work, not so personal as is the first poem in which Shevchenko speaks for himself, but more fully national and in a more spiritual and eternal key.

Perebendya

The Poplar

The Poplar is a good example of Shevchenko’s union of Ukrainian folk motifs and the literary usages of the Romantic poets. The supernatural was dear to Romanticism, the transformation of maidens into trees is a theme that can be traced back to the classical authors and yet it received a new interpretation in the early nineteenth century. Shevchenko gives us a purely Ukrainian scene, he describes the tragedy that often happened in the days of the wandering Kozaks, he feels the horror of the enforced marriage arranged between the parents and the bridegroom without the willing consent of the bride, and he unites all these motifs in a work which is in the highest degree both national and literary.

The Poplar

Dumka

This is a lament of an orphan girl and can be read exactly as it is written. It naturally follows the Poplar as a simple expression of disappointed love. On the other hand, the reader cannot overlook the fact that already the poet has compared Ukraine to a weeping mother and himself to an orphan. To the Gendarme General Dubelt, the poem seemed an introduction to the following poem to Osnovyanenko.

[Pg 77]

Dumka

[Pg 78]

To Osnovyanenko

Hrihori Kvitka-Osnovyanenko (1778-1843) was the leading Ukrainian prose writer between Kotlyarevsky and Shevchenko. He was an aristocrat and a conservative but in his prose tales, he expressed well the Ukrainian village and the difference between the people and the Moskals. He had published a story on Antin Holovaty some time before and Shevchenko now appeals to him to write more of the same type of story.

Antin Holovaty after the destruction of the Sich and the flight of many of the Zaporozhians to Turkey secured permission for the establishment of the Black Sea Army from Catherine the Great. This was really the beginning of the Kuban Kozaks. Shevchenko rightly or wrongly valued Holovaty highly for he saw in this new foundation an attempt to replace the vanished Sich, even if it was not on the same territory.

Later after his return from the army, Kulish persuaded Shevchenko to omit the reference to Holovaty. Growing disagreement between Osnovyanenko and the poet over the conservatism of the former led Shevchenko to dedicate the poem in the edition of 1860 merely to a Ukrainian writer. The poem forms a transition to the definitely historical ballads that follow it. At the same time it very definitely emphasizes the sad present of Ukraine in comparison with its past.

To Osnovyanenko

Ivan Pidkova

In Ivan Pidkova we have the first of the two historical ballads, showing the Zaporozhians at the height of their power and discipline. During the early part of the seventeenth century, they were strong enough to make several raids upon Constantinople and the neighboring region. The real Ivan Pidkova aimed to be ruler of Moldavia and was executed by the Poles at the inspiration of the Turkish Sultan in 1578 but Shevchenko found certain sources that identified Pidkova with one of the Kozak atamans who stormed Constantinople and so developed his theme. His apparent object was to represent the type of discipline that was enforced in a free community during the raids when military order and control were indispensable.

Ivan Pidkova

To V. I. Sternberg

I

II

The Night of Taras

This poem describes the victory of the Kozaks under Taras Tryasilo over the Polish troops of General Koniecpolski at Pereyaslav in 1630. Kozak tradition described this as one of the greatest victories of the Kozak armies and Shevchenko followed the tradition. It is striking that he contrasts more clearly than in Pidkova the present acquiescence of the younger generation in their state of slavery with the valor of their ancestors who were willing to fight even against overwhelming odds. The concluding sections of the poem have been often taken to be an appeal for the renewal of open hostilities but it is hardly likely at this time with the collapse of the Polish revolt less than ten years previously that the poet went as far as this. And even General Dubelt in his attempt to read all possible evil intentions into [Pg 84]the poems did not regard it as a direct incendiary appeal but as a poem written to drive home the evil of the present time and to rouse the people to anti-Russian thoughts, if not actions.

The Night of Taras

Katerina

The theme of the country girl seduced by a nobleman and deserted by him was very popular in all European literature from the time of the sentimental novels of the eighteenth century. It was carried into Russian by Karamzin in Poor Liza and into Ukrainian by Kvitka in such a story as Serdeshna Oksana (The Unfortunate Oksana). Shevchenko followed the tradition in this poem but he added the other idea of making the lover a foreigner. The message of the bard in the beginning specifically warns the Ukrainian girls against the Moskals and there is not a word to imply that the manners of the ordinary Russian soldiers as distinct from the officers would be any different.

The poem completes the original collection of the Kobzar with a tragic story of the present. It is the only poem that definitely pins the stigma of oppression upon the Russians, although this is inherent in the other poems. When we remember the frequent identification of an orphan or a widow with Ukraine, we can see that the poet wants the readers to see in the sad fate of Katerina driven into banishment the fate of Ukraine but at the same time he is pleading the case of the [Pg 89]seduced girls who have been driven out of their homes. The poem fittingly concludes the Kobzar with its comparison of the past and the present and the survival of that past only in songs and legends.

Katerina

To V. A. Zhukovsky
In memory of April 22, 1838

The Haydamaki is the longest of all the poems of Shevchenko and the most striking historical epic in Ukrainian literature. It describes the bloody revolt of the Koliishchina which broke out under the leadership of Maksim Zaliznyak and Gonta in 1768 and culminated in the massacre of the Poles at Uman. It was the last and one of the most terrible convulsions that shook Ukraine in its relations with Poland.

Shevchenko lays great stress upon the murder of the sexton which actually took place in 1766 and throughout the poem there are similar [Pg 109]cases where he has changed the historical course of events for a better artistic effect but this is common to all epic poems.

The story is briefly this: a group of Polish szlachta attack a Jew and to save himself he tells them stories of the wealth of the Orthodox sexton in Vilshany. They go there and torture him and he dies under their ministrations. In the meanwhile his daughter Oksana, who loves the poor orphan Yarema, comes to the aid of her father and is carried off. Yarema, knowing nothing of the fate of his beloved, goes to seek his fortune at the Sich. He joins the forces of Zaliznyak and his fury is redoubled when he learns of the fate of his beloved. The Haydamaki with the aid of the Zaporozhians rise in revolt. For his desperate and ferocious bravery, Yarema receives the name Halayda, “the homeless one.” He succeeds in rescuing his beloved from a tower where the Haydamaki are besieging her captors and finally takes to a convent and returns to marry her. The Haydamaki continue their course and capture Uman, and savagely destroy their foes.

The poem is a true expression of the wild and merciless character of these peasant revolts against the hardships and oppressions inflicted upon them by brutal and careless masters. Shevchenko could feel this popular frenzy and describe it but he was not himself primarily a soldier and the finest parts of the poem are the lyrical descriptions of Ukrainian nature and the pictures of Ukrainian peasant life, even under the utmost hardships. He was too humane and cultured to enter fully into the wild emotions of the revolting people and to revel in the details of the battles. We could not imagine him enjoying the society of the atamans and hetmans of the past whom he consistently tried to applaud.

Rather he was deeply moved by their successes and failures. His heart was in the glorious past and the terrible present but it is of the latter that he sings the most sweetly, as he pleads also for the development of a new and better Ukraine. Yet this does not make him any the less rebellious that his people have been overthrown and are now in poverty and misery. It does not make him any milder to their oppressors. The Haydamaki is his last great outburst of hatred against the Poles and really it completes the cycle of the Kobzar which aims to picture Ukraine in the past and present through the Romantic tradition.

We include here the poet’s preliminary description of himself and of Ukraine.

[Pg 110]

The Haydamaki—Prelude

This is one of the earliest poems of Shevchenko and was apparently written soon after he had learned of the death of Ivan Kotlyarevsky which took place in 1838. Kotlyarevsky with his parody of the Aeneid published in 1798 had commenced the modern Ukrainian literature in the vernacular. He had transformed Aeneas and his companions into typical exiled Ukrainian Kozaks and had used every opportunity to call back memories of the past. It was a frivolous but yet absolutely serious piece of work and it aroused an interest in Ukrainian history and manners that had been long forgotten. Kotlyarevsky followed his poem in after years with the first Ukrainian dramas of peasant life, Natalka Poltavka and Moskal Charyvnyk. These two became popular and the young Shevchenko on receiving the news of the death of the poet poured out his lamentation that the one great Ukrainian poet had passed away. It is a sincere tribute to the founder of the literature from the man who was to be its greatest exponent. There is the same mixture of elements of nature and of history that the poet was to employ so often later and it marks that union of social and historical themes under the influence of which Shevchenko began his work.

To the Eternal Memory of Kotlyarevsky

During the early part of the seventeenth century, the Zaporozhian Kozaks, especially under the ataman Peter Sahaydachny, made many raids into the Black Sea and there was hardly a single city of importance, even including Constantinople itself, which was not the victim of their attacks. They showed to the full the weakness of the shore defences of the Ottoman Empire and the defects of its navy. In their small boats, hastily constructed below the rapids of the Dniper, they dared to put to sea in the middle of the wildest storms that raged on the Black Sea and their courage and seamanship stood them in good stead against the superior arms and inferior morale of their enemies.

This poem seems to be an independent poetical creation of Shevchenko to bring out this period of Kozak history and to picture the naval exploits of the Zaporozhians. It is in a way a continuation and amplification of the poem Ivan Pidkova but it presents a rounded picture in concise form of one of these expeditions. The name of the leader Hamaliya seems to have been created by the poet, and while the sequence of events described is true to history, the poem is not based on any specific historical event.

Hamaliya

This was long supposed to be a complete poem written by Shevchenko in memory of his first love. Only in 1914 was it fully realized that it was the preface to an unfinished poem Maryana Chernetsa (Maryana the Nun) and a considerable part of this poem was then published. Unfortunately Shevchenko did not complete it and efforts to determine the definite form of the poem have been in vain. The text as we have it opens with the love of a peasant girl Maryana for a poor boy Petrus. He leaves to seek his fortune. The girl promises to be true to him, although her mother is determined that she will marry a rich old man. The poem was then another in the series dealing with the poor girl condemned to marry someone whom she did not love, one of the favorite themes of Shevchenko.

To Oksana K ...

(In memory of what was long ago)

After Shevchenko’s return from Ukraine in 1843, he had changed his mind as to the vital needs of his country. Henceforth Poland takes a secondary place among the oppressors and his wrath is concentrated more on Russia and the Russian monarchy. It was difficult and dangerous to express this opinion in St. Petersburg and almost impossible to secure the publication of works which criticized the imperial regime. Yet Shevchenko did not hesitate and in a series of poems, partly mystical, partly ethical, he spoke out against the oppression of his native land.

The Dream which he labels a comedy and to which he prefixes a passage from the Gospels is one of the bitterest of these attacks. He introduces it with a series of criticisms against various types of selfish and unpatriotic people and contrasts himself, shedding his own blood for his native land and weeping day and night, with these self-satisfied and self-righteous egotists. Then he passes to what purports to be a drunken dream for reality is so ghastly that he feels it necessary to be in an unusual state to dare to notice it.

First he visits Ukraine, the poor and helpless widow, who has been abandoned with her population to the mad whims of an autocratic despot and the feudal lords. The misery of the people is overwhelming beneath the exactions of the upper classes.

In his attempts to flee from the world he is carried to Siberia and here he is no more happy for the sound of the fettered prisoners working in the mines brings home to him again man’s inhumanity to man. He probably alludes to Ukrainian exiles but it is possible that he is citing the example of the Decembrists who suffered for their ideals and of the Polish revolutionists of 1831.

The capitals are the next places which he visits in his imagination [Pg 129]and here he is completely disillusioned. He condemns the Muscovite slavery to the Tsar, the power of the Tsar to beat the highest members of his organization and their corresponding right to tyrannize over their subordinates, until the lowest of the people, the common man, is proud and happy to be beaten indirectly by the Tsar. It is another example of Shevchenko’s belief that the Moskals were incapable of appreciating liberty and that this sharply differentiated them from the people of Ukraine, the worthy sons of which were ready to sacrifice themselves for their ideals and for the truth.

Then when he sees the statue of Peter the Great erected by Catherine, the two monarchs who had ruined Ukraine, he turns to the misery and captivity of Polubotok and the Kozaks who were sent to St. Petersburg to build the capital and to perform other severe labor under which they died in great numbers between 1720 and 1725. Polubotok, the acting Hetman, was himself arrested and died in prison in 1724.

He sees the poverty of the people, even the Russians, the girls forced by poverty to enter upon prostitution, and he returns to the palace where he beholds the ridiculous character of the Tsar and the subservient manners even of the Imperial Family, who are unworthy to acquire such power and unable to hold it.

Then he wakes up with the renewed explanation that it was all a dream.

The poem is a violent attack upon the lack of truth and righteousness in the Russian dealings with Ukraine and the injustice which emanates from the throne. The attack upon the Imperial Family and in particular the Empress whom he called a dry mushroom so infuriated Alexander II that the poet was excluded from the general amnesty on his accession to the throne. It is the one of the series which emphasizes specially the political side of the Russian domination and it contains some of the most powerful denunciations of political oppression of all of Shevchenko’s work.

The Dream

A Comedy

The Spirit of truth; whom the world cannot receive, because it seeth him not, neither knoweth him.

—St. John, 14, 17.

This dedication to Šafařík was used as the preface to the poem the Heretic in which Shevchenko glorifies Jan Hus. It expresses, better than any other poem, the spirit with which the poet entered the Society of Saints Cyril and Methodius and his dreams of a union of the Slavs in which all would be truly free. It is interesting that this preface is a direct answer to Pushkin’s poem, To the Slanderers of Russia, in which he expressed his assurance that the future of the Slavs lay in submitting to the domination of Russia.

Pavel J. Šafařík (1795-1861) was one of the brilliant leaders of the movement for a Slav brotherhood following the ideas of Jan Kollár. He had published a History of the Slavic Languages and Literatures and a very valuable work on Slavonic Antiquities, so that his name was well known to the entire group of young men at Kiev.

To Šafařík

In the preceding poems Shevchenko laid stress upon the political corruption and cruelty of Russia in the Dream and on the general ethical conception of Slavonic brotherhood in the Heretic. In the Great Grave he summarizes the leading faults in Ukrainian history and character. He called the poem a mystery and so it is in the traditional sense of the word, for it is a careful and complete exposition by means of symbols of all that had led Ukraine to its deplorable situation. It also incorporates a definite criticism of Bohdan Khmelnitsky, whom the poet was regarding by now as the source of Ukraine’s troubles.

The poem opens with the appearance of three souls who are debarred from heaven and hell. At first sight their crimes seem negligible but they represent three stages in the downfall of the country. The first had crossed the path of Bohdan with a pail full of water (a good omen!), without knowing that he was going to Pereyaslav to submit to Moscow. That act marked the end of the hopes of a strong, united and free Ukraine. The great Hetman had almost won his country’s independence and his reliance on the word of the Tsar caused the division of the country and the loss of everything. This act of the first caused the death of “father, mother, self and brother and the dogs”—in a word, the death of all Ukraine.

The second soul had watered the horse of Peter after the overthrow of Mazepa, who had united Ukraine with Charles XII of Sweden in an effort to recover the liberty of at least part of the land. The soul represents that part of the country that had been loyal to Peter; the slaughtered sister, that part which had fought for liberty. Again the mother represents the entire Hetmanate, and the grandmother who buried the young girl is almost certainly the whole conception of a great and independent country.

The third soul, a mere child at death, smiled at Catherine, when she was on her way to liquidate the Hetmanate. It represents that Ukraine which was willing to accept ignorantly and gladly even the few shreds of liberty left by Catherine and the mother again symbolizes all that was left of Ukraine that was forced to yield.

Thus each soul speaks for a smaller and smaller Ukraine, a lesser and lesser demand upon Russia, but even by yielding there was no salvation. They only succeeded in debarring themselves from the heaven of a free country or at least an honorable death.

[Pg 149]

Then come three crows. The second crow, representing Poland, has seen the end of the country, has driven the nobles to Siberia, and has feasted in Paris with the emigrés after 1831. The third crow represents Russia. It has fostered tyranny but despite that has been sold out to the Germans.

The first crow represents Ukraine. This crow confesses its evils, its treachery, its bloodshed. It acknowledges that during the centuries it has destroyed Ukraine by its civil wars, its treachery, and its evil. Yet it must weep even now for all that it has done and it predicts the coming of twins, one like Gonta, the leader of the Haydamaki, who will fight for freedom and the other like the modern people who care nothing for virtue. It hopes with the aid of its friends to ruin the first and help the second.

Then come the three bards, one blind, one crippled, and one hunchbacked. They are all that is left of Ukraine, for they know the songs, they can glorify the past, but they are perfectly ready to sing of their nation’s glory to please the conquerors, if they can only secure a living and some financial return. The tomb of Bohdan is to be excavated by the enemy. They see nothing of the disgrace of this, nothing of the misery around them. All they ask is a good profit.

They arrive at Subotiv. The people are taking orders from the conqueror who expects by this symbolic act of opening the tomb of the Ukrainian leader to secure a rich profit. There is nothing there—nothing but a few old bones and the disappointed and humiliated Russian official flogs the bards for daring to put in an appearance. Even their servility has brought them no more than servility brought the souls. The mystery ends with the question as to when the Great Grave that contains the liberty of Ukraine will be opened.

The poem is obscure, for no open defiance would have stood any chance of spreading among the people and would have subjected the poet himself to certain punishment. Yet its impression is very powerful. It is a formal declaration of war by Shevchenko on the masters of Ukraine and it is also an expression of his abiding confidence that somehow there will be a better future. It is not based on a political program; there is less of the ethical aspects than we find elsewhere but it is a definite history of the Ukrainian spirit which can never die.

[Pg 150]

The Great Grave

A Mystery

Thou makest us a reproach to our neighbors, a scorn and a derision to them that are round about us.
Thou makest us a byword among the heathen, a shaking of the head among the people.

—Psalms 44, 13-14 (Psalm 43, 14-15)

During the early part of the nineteenth century, Russia was occupied with the conquest of the Mohammedan mountaineers of the Caucasus who defended themselves long and ably especially during the time when Shamyl was in charge of their resistance. Pushkin glorified the Russian victories. Lermontov and Count Leo Tolstoy took a personal part in the conquest in behalf of the civilizing mission of Russia among the wild and untutored mountaineers.

Count Yakov de Balmen, a friend of Shevchenko at this time, had entered the Russian army and had been killed in the fighting in the Caucasus. His death deeply affected Shevchenko and the latter wrote this poem in which he expresses his sympathy with the mountaineers who were struggling for their liberty and caustically comments on the blessings of civilization which they could receive from Russia. The hitherto free peoples would become as Ukraine, they would become ruined serfs, and they would see only a travesty of the Christian religion and not its essence.

The poem expresses again Shevchenko’s friendship with the foes of Russian tyranny and his sincere admiration for all peoples who are struggling for a real liberty. The loss of this, the loss of human dignity, cannot be counterbalanced by the extension of the vices of civilization and the creation of a sterile advanced culture.

[Pg 166]

The Caucasus

Dedicated to my Yakov de Balmen

Oh that my head were tears, and mine eyes a fountain of waters, that I might weep day and night for the slain of the daughter of my People!

—Jeremiah, 9, 1

The Epistle is really Shevchenko’s political and social testament. It summarizes all that he had seen and read and thought as to the fate of his country and it emphasizes the great gap which he saw between Russia in all its forms and Ukraine.

From the days of Peter the Great, there had come a steady flow of Western European (especially German) influence into Russia. Old Moscow had given way to the modern St. Petersburg and the scholars, including the historian Karamzin, had developed the theory of Russian history that the Ukrainians and especially the Kozaks were a mixture of Tatar tribes who had been more or less Russianized. The ambitious youths, the socially aspiring nobles, all were eager to go to the capital and to acquire there that advanced civilization which they could not find at home.

Shevchenko, bewailing in St. Petersburg the fate of his people and then returning to Ukraine to live, wrote this poem as an appeal to his fellow countrymen to avoid this cheap adulteration of their ancient culture. He urged them to be themselves, to strive for a new and human and Christian order at home. Nobles and peasants alike have to repent of their evils, the old order of serfdom needs to be abolished, and men need to realize that they must live as brothers. The poem aims to unite all classes in the country for the good of mother Ukraine who has lost so many of her children and for the mutual good. Those who refuse to obey will be overwhelmed in the judgement of the coming revolution which will be directed against traitors as well as against the foreign foe.

Shevchenko attacks all of those who seek a closer union between Ukraine and Russia than between Ukraine and the other Slavs. As he expressed later in the preface to the edition of the Kobzar prepared in 1847, the Ukrainians have the same rights as the Russians, Czechs, Poles, etc. They equally deserve consideration as a part of the Slavonic world.

In the past they fought for every one but themselves. They ruined Poland but her fall destroyed the Kozaks and Ukraine. They aided Russia and were enslaved. To Shevchenko it is sacrilege to boast of such a history, when there is so much good available for the future, if they will only awake and see it and use it.

[Pg 172]

The poem is a statesmanlike and wise summary of Ukrainian history and the Ukrainian character. There is little of the extreme in it and it can well serve as a masterpiece of advice to a people. As such it ranks with the great specimens of its kind in world literature.

To my Dead and Living and Unborn Countrymen in Ukraine and not in Ukraine

My Friendly Epistle.

If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar.

—I John 4, 20

Shevchenko wrote this poem on December 25, 1845, at Pereyaslav, the city where the Hetman Bohdan Khmelnitsky had made the agreement with Moscow. Kostomariv, in publishing the first eight lines, gave it the title by which it is now generally known. The poem is one of the most famous of Shevchenko’s works and has been accepted as the keynote of the movement for Ukrainian liberation.

The Testament

Shevchenko arrived in St. Petersburg under arrest on April 17, 1847 and was sentenced on May 30. During this period of his confinement and trial, the poet composed some of his most exquisite lyrics. They are short and concise but there is a personal touch about them that was often lacking in his longer works. Thrown back on himself, unable to associate with his friends, and in danger of death, he achieved a concentrated form of verse that has put these poems in a class by themselves.

In the Fortress

During the first years of Shevchenko’s service in the Russian army, when he was in the fortress of Orsk and at Kos-Aral, he was able with difficulty to write. His mind was filled with longings for Ukraine, with dreams of his own past life, and some of the poems of this period are among his finest personal lyrics.

1847

N. N.

N. N.

This poem from the Fortress of Orsk shows again the great impression that his first love Oksana Kovalenkivna made upon him. It is one of the few poems that are definitely autobiographical in character.

After Shevchenko returned from his service in the army, he was a broken man. His health was shattered, and while his spirit was not quenched, there is a note of finality in much that he undertook. He had been forced to realize the limitations on his sphere of activity. [Pg 187]There is a deeper note of austerity in his writings and a different spirit animates most of his verses, a spirit which becomes more strong and poignant as the end neared. The two following poems were written at Nizhni Novgorod on his way back to St. Petersburg.

Fortune

The Muse

The appearance of the Narodni Opovidaniya (Folk Sketches) of Marko Vovchok in 1858 was an event in Ukrainian literature. It was the penname of Maria Markovich (1834-1907) but she wrote in Ukrainian for only a few years. Her stories of the hardships of serfdom, especially on the women, were very powerful and were translated into Russian by Turgenev and others of the leading authors. Shevchenko welcomed her literary advent most warmly, for he saw in her his most talented prose successor.

To Marko Vovchok

(In memory of January 24, 1859)

After his return from imprisonment, Shevchenko planned to write a poem on the Blessed Virgin and equate her lot with the fate of Ukraine and the average Ukrainian peasant woman. To do this, he made certain studies in the apocryphal legends and read some of the more liberal books of the day.

As a result he produced this poem on unorthodox lines. He was bitterly attacked for it but his dominant mood is throughout reverence for his subject, and the preface is thoroughly in line with the traditional faith.

Mary

“Rejoice, for thou hast renewed all creatures.”
(Akafist of the Blessed Virgin, l. 10)

After his return from the army, Shevchenko’s poetry took a more austere note. A large part of his latest works were adaptations of the Old Testament and the warnings of the Prophets were transfigured into lessons for the Ukrainians and on the fate of Ukraine. They deal with the same themes that he had treated earlier—the uselessness of depending upon the Russian autocracy, the weaknesses of the people of the day, especially the intellectuals, and the need for all the people to apply the lessons of brotherhood to all their fellows. Shevchenko’s contact with some of the Russian radicals may have influenced him to some degree but these poems can be read as general denunciations of the vices of men and countries. Never more than in the works of his last period did Shevchenko become a stern, commanding teacher holding up to all men everywhere the proper course of actions for human things to pursue. Now more than ever he became a great ethical teacher not only for his generation and people but for all the nations of the world.

Hosea, Chapter XIV

(Imitation)

The end of Shevchenko’s life was approaching. In the autumn of 1860 he became conscious of the fact that his health would not allow him to carry out his dreams of marrying, having a family, and living in a little home on the bank of the Dniper in Ukraine. He expressed [Pg 215]this feeling in his poem The years of youth are passed away, written on October 19, and soon after he consulted a physician because of his difficulty in breathing. His friends could not realize his condition but he failed rapidly and during January, 1861, he was able to do little work. He finished his last poem, Is it not time for us to stop? on February 25. It was the end for early the next morning, the day after his birthday, his eyes closed forever.

The years of youth are passed away

Is it not time for us to stop?