The Bard of Ukraine
By Yevhen Kirilyuk, Correspondent Member, Academy of Science of Ukraine;
Written in 1961

Taras Shevchenko
By Ivan Franko;
Published in The Slavonic Review in London, UK in 1924-1925;

Founder of a New Realistic Art
By Petro Hovdya;
Published in Ukraine magazine in Kyiv, Ukraine in 1984;

The Bard of Ukraine

By Yevhen Kirilyuk, Correspondent Member, Academy of Science of Ukraine;
Written in 1961

Taras Shevchenko, the brilliant national poet of Ukraine, is one of the classics of world literature. His all-embracing humanism, deep and genuine folk character, and revolutionary ardour make him comprehensible and close to the hearts of the people of all nations.

Shevchenko lived at time when his homeland was split in two by the Russian and Austro-Hungarian monarchies, and the mass of the Ukrainian people - t he peasantry - was in serf bondage to feudal landowners. The people waged a ceaseless struggle for their social and national emancipation.

Taras Shevchenko (1814 - 1861) was born into a serf family in the village of Moryntsy, in Kyiv Province. He experienced the severity of forced labour from earliest childhood, knew and felt the sad plight of "the poor, unsmiling muhzik", surrounded by the magnificent ever-smiling nature of Ukraine.

He lost his mother before his ninth birthday, his father died two years later. But while the masses of the serfs were illiterate, the orphan waif received an elementary education: in return for heavy task-work the boy did for a sexton, the latter allowed him to attend classes he conducted for boys of more favoured circumstances. Taras early began to display artistic talent. This was not simply the urge to draw, which is common among children, but an overpowering calling. Despite threats and beatings, he drew everything he saw or heard of, using a pencil, charcoal, chalk - whatever he could lay his hands on. Taras dreamed of studying art under a good teacher, but landed in his master's manor instead, first as a kitchen-boy and later as indoor kozachok(servant). When he was forteen years of age Shevchenko was taken away from his native Ukraine by his master, Baron Engelhardt. They lived for some time in Vilnius, where Taras was once cruelly punished for daring to light a candle and draw at a time when his master was away at a ball. Engelhardt later realized that Shevchenko would never make a good servant, and decided to make him his "court" painter.

Shevchenko was seventeen when he arrived in St. Petersburg, then the capital of the Russian Empire. Engelhardt apprenticed him for four years to a painter, Shirayev. In Petersburg he became acquainted with the outstanding artist Karl Bryullov, who was a professor at the Academy of Arts, the noted poet Zhukovsky, the artist Venetsianov, the connoisseur of arts Vyelgorsky, and also his fellow-Ukrainians, the artist Soshenko, the writer Hrebinka and others. They became deeply interested in the gifted serf youth and sought to have him admitted to the Academy of Arts, but he was barred because of his status as a serf. So they bought his release from bondage for a large sum of money, and on April 22, 1838, when he was twenty-four years of age, Taras Shevchenko received his certificate of freedom from serfdom.

In Petersburg, while he diligently applied himself to painting and graduated from the Academy of Arts, he devoted himself with mounting fervour to poetry, which (according to his own testimony) he began to write during the white nights of 1837. And this proved to be his true calling. While he was to be an artist by profession all his life and eventually was awarded the title of Academician in engraving, poetry was always his true passion, in which his artistic brilliance and revolutionary spirit found their clearest expression.

It was in Petersburg that Shevchenko's first Ukrainian verses were born: romantic ballads,lyrical elegies and songs ( The Bewitched, The Wild Wind, The Water Flows Into the Blue Sea and others). In them the poet adopted and developed the chanting style and imagery of the kobzars (folk minstrels). He had often listened to them in his childhiood as they sang dumy, songs of the legendary past of Ukraine, of how the free Cossacks defended their homeland from its enemies, and of the heroic figures of the peasant rebels, the Haidamaki.

As a blind minstrel, plucking at the strings of his kobza, sings of the wide Dnieper River with the pale moon swimming in the sky above it , of the maiden abandoned by her lover, of the spacious steppe dotted with grave mounds under which lie the bones of heroes, of the military campaigns of the Cossacks and of the struggles of the people for freedom and right, so did Taras Shevchenko "talk with the people" in his verses. The struggle of the Ukrainians with their enemies provide one of the main themes in Shevchenko's poetry.

In 1840 a small book of verse appeared in Petersburg, entitled Kobzar. It contained only eight poems, but that book shook all Russia and the whole Slavic world. Some of his early verses were also published in Yevhen Hrebinka's Ukrainian almanac Lastivka (The Swallow). And in 1841 Shevchenko's biggest work, Haidamaki, an epic poem about the armed struggle of the Ukrainian Cossaks and pesants against Polish feudal gentry in the eighteen century, was published as a separate book.

Shevchenko was firmly rooted in the Ukrainian literary tradition. In his youth he had read the poet and philosopher G. Skovoroda, he knew and deeply appreciated the works of Kotlyarevsky, to whom he penned an elegy, Osnovyanenko, to whom he addresses a poetic message, and others. He also studied the rich treasure trove of advanced Russian literature: Pushkin, Lermontov, Koltsov, Gogol, etc. (It is worth nothing that even in his early period he was also writing poetry in the Russian language.) He was conversant with and learned from the gems of world literature. Thus, he could recite many of Mickiewicz's poems in the Polish original, and tried his hand at translating some of them. He knew Byron's works well. In his foreword to the projected new edition of the Kobzar in 1847 Shevchenko mentions Walter Scott and expresses his high esteem for Robert Burns. In his novel The Artist, written in exile when he had no library or reference book at hand, and in other novels written in that period he mentions Shakespeare (The Tempest, Othello, Hamlet), Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Richardson's Clarissa Harlowe in the French translation, Oliver Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield, Ossian, Edward Gibbon, Byron, Scott (Woodstock, Kenilworth, The Fair Maid of Perth, Quentin Durward, The Antiquary), Charles Dickens (David Copperfield, Nicholas Nickleby) and others.

But even in his first ballad to come down to us, The Bewitched, Shevchenko was not an apprentice, not an imitator. There was no such period in his work. His early poem Katerina is a peerless work on the life of the people in his own time, just as the poem Haidamaki is an outstanding work on a historical theme. Shevchenko stepped to the forefront of Ukrainian literature from the very start. This was due not only to the young poet's brilliance, but mostly because he was a genuine people's poet. It is characteristic that the title of his first slim booklet of poetry, Kobzar, was later applied to all collections of Taras Shevchenko's poetry and to the poet himself.

Shevchenko was a true people's poet not only because he wrote in the Ukrainian language that was actually spoken by the people, thus laying a solid foundation for the Ukrainian literary language as a whole, and not only by the closeness of the Kobzar to the oral Ukrainian folk poetry (that trait was also common to the Ukrainian romanticists), but mainly because he expressed the thoughts, feelings and aspirations of the broadest sections of the Ukrainian people. At the same time his poetry is imbued with true humanism and internationalism. Let us examine, for example, Haidamaki, in which the struggle of the Ukrainian people against the Polish gentry is graphically described. In order to prevent enemies of the Ukrainian and Polish peoples from exploiting sections of the poem to foment national hatreds, Shevchenko wrote into it a ringing appeal for the unity and friendship of the Ukrainians, the Poles and all the Slavic peoples. That appeal had nothing in common with reactionary Pan-Slavism, which masked the expansionist policy of the Russian autocracy. In that same Haidamaki the young poet spoke in Aesopean language of Tsar Nicholas I, the gendarme of Europe, saying: "the executioner rules". Nicholas's censors passed those lines, but when the Kobzar was being republished in 1860 the "liberal" censors of Alexander II detected "sedition" in them and crossed them out.

When in 1843 Shevchenko returned to Ukraine after fourteen years' absence, he heard his own songs and ballads from the lips of peasants and minstrels. Shevchenko visited his native district and saw his relatives and friends still bearing the heavy yoke of serfdom. He traveled a good deal through Ukraine and was shocked by what he saw there.

On his return to Petersburg in 1844 Taras Shevchenko became acquainted with a number of free-thinking Russians who later formed the secret political circle of M. Butashevich-Petrashevsky. He became a consistent revolutionary democrat, an active fighter against serfdom and autocracy. In the poem The Heretic (about the great Czech patriot and reformer Jan Hus) and other works Shevchenko developed still further the theme of Slavic unity and brotherhood. In the poem The Caucasus he enlarged this theme to call for the joint struggle of all the peoples of the Russian Empire against the autocracy. He openly attacked the whole feudal-autocratic order (A Dream, 1844) and called for a people's revolution (To the Dead, the Living and the Unborn, The Cold Ravine, My Testament). Tsarist censorship ruled out the possibility of having his works published, so the poet neatly wrote them out by hand in an album entitled Three Years (1843-45).

Back in Ukraine Shevchenko joined the secret political Society of Cyril and Methodius, in which he advocated a consistently revolutionary policy. In 1847 the society was exposed and its members were arrested and taken to Petersburg for trial. The cruelest punishment of all was meted out to Shevchenko. He was made a soldier and banished to distant Orenburg, the tsar personally adding to the sentence: "forbidden to write and to paint". From Orenburg Shevchenko was sent to the Orsk battalion.

By banishing him and making him a soldier (the term of army service at that time was twenty-five-years), the tsar strove to kill the poet and artist in Shevchenko. But Shevchenko continued to write his freedom-loving verses both in the dungeon of the Third Department (political police) in Petersburg and in the Orsk fortress. The poet fashioned miniature notebooks, wrote his works in them in the tiniest of handwriting, and kept them concealed in the legs of his boots.

There were humane people even among the officers. Captain-Lieutenant Butakov took Shevchenko along as an artist on an expedition to explore the Aral Sea in 1848, i.e., he disobeyed the tsar's orders. On his return to Orenburg the poet lived in private quarters and wore civilian clothes.

Shevchenko's poetry of the exile period reached a higher stage. In the brown, sun-baked steppe he nostalgically recalled his distant Ukrainian homeland, the wide, free Dnieper and the boundless black earth plains, the people and their sad lot. Again and again he conjured up his homeland's glorious past, its plight during the years of serfdom, and visions of the better days to be. He dreamed of a peasant rising, of final victory over the tsars and feudal gentry. In The Princess, Marina, P.S. (Pavlo Skoropadsky) he described typical feudal masters, in Marina, The Outlaw and If It Should Chance he presented types of the people's avengers. In Kings he openly called for the overthrow of the Russian autocracy. In exile he continued to champion friendship among the nations, he made friends with Polish revolutionaries and addressed his poem To the Poles to them; he devoted many warm, friendly lines to the local Kazakh people, and also painted them.
In 1850 the poet was arrested again on charges laid by an officer, returned to Orsk for trial and then banished still farther away, to Novopetrovsk fortress on the Mangishlak Peninsula on the eastern shore of the Caspian Sea (today Fort Shevchenko). During this second period of his exile Shevchenko wrote a number of novels in Russian, hoping to get them published in periodicals. Some of the novels have the same plots as his poems The Servant Woman, The Outlaw and The Princess, while others - The Musician, The Artist and The Journey - have new plots. They contain much autobiographical material. Not one of the novels by Kobzar Darmohrai (Shevchenko's pseudonym) was published during the author's lifetime.

Shevchenko was not immediately amnestied, as were other political prisoners, after the death of Nicholas I. He was released from banishment only after long and insistent intercession on the part of his Russian friends. Even then he was long denied entry to the capital and was forced to wait at Nizhny Novgorod.

When he learned that his release had been granted, Taras Shevchenko started his Diary, a wonderful human document which provides us with a living portrait of the implacable revolutionary and the significance of the development of engineering and science, which would inevitably bring an end to the old order.

On his return to Petersburg, Shevchenko drew close to the outstanding public figures of that time, the Russian revolutionary democrats Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov, and the Polish revolutionary democrat Sierakowski.

In his last years Shevchenko's poetry reflected the flames of the peasant revolts, the revolutionary situation in the pre-reform Russia of 1859-61. The poet widely utilized Biblical settings and imagery for his passionate denunciation of the rulers and calls for a revolutionary uprising (The Neophytes, Maria, numerous "imitations" of Isaiah, Jezekiel and others). In the poem I'm not Unwell Shevchenko appeals to the people not to the place their hopes in the reform promised by the tsar, but to win their freedom with the axe. He dreamed of a republican form of government. In The Half-Wit he asks:

When will we greet
Our own George Washington at last
With the new law of righteousness?

For him Washington was a symbol - president of a republic established on the basis of a constitution.
A notable page in Shevchenko's life was his friendship with the prominent British actor Ira Aldridge, an American Negro by origin, who came to Petersburg in 1858 to perform in several Shakespearian plays. Enthralled by his magnificent performance, Shevchenko and his friend greeted Aldridge with such enthusiastic applause that it evoked protests from prudish theatre-goers. Soon the Ukrainian poet-artist and the Negro actor met at the home of F. Tolstoi, the vice-president of the Academy of Arts, and became fast friends. Shevchenko painted a portrait of Aldridge, which bears the latter's autograph. Tolstoi's daughter wrote of this friendship in her memoirs: "These two individuals had more in common than just similar traits of character; in his youth one had been a serf, while the other was a member of a despised race; both experienced much bitterness in life, and both passionately loved their unfortunate peoples."

At this time, too, Shevchenko joined Turgenev, Saltykov-Shchedrin, Dostoevsky, Marko Vovchok and others in an angry public protest against anti-Semitic diatribes in the journal Illustration.

In 1859 Shevchenko was finally permitted to revisit Ukraine, where he again saw his relatives, who were still in serf bondage. He was soon arrested on charges of "blasphemy", however, and ordered to return at once to Petersburg.

Ten years of prison and exile had undermined the poet's health and he died when he was but forty-seven years of age. Shevchenko was buried in Petersburg, but later his remains were disinterred and borne to Ukraine, as he had willed in My Testament, and he was buried on May 22, 1861 on a hill overlooking the Dnieper near the city of Kaniv, where he had dreamed of settling with his family. Mourners carried handfuls of earth in their hands to the grave, building a high funeral mound over it. In 1939 a magnificent monument was erected on this spot. Shevchenko's grave has become a veritable shrine.

The beloved bard of the Ukrainian people is deeply honoured in Ukraine. His works are published in millions of copies in the various languages of the former USSR. There are several Taras Shevchenko museums and many monuments in the country; many cultural institutions and enterprises bear his name, which has also been given to localities, squares and streets in cities. Shevchenko prizes are awarded annually for outstanding contributions to literature and the arts.

Shevchenko is also widely known in other countries. His works were noted abroad already in the 1840s. His poems were translated into Polish (1860), Czech (1860), Bulgarian (1863), Serbian (1868), German (1870) and French (1876). Spanish periodicals wrote about him in the last century. A large number of translations of various works of Shevchenko has appeared in English.

A summary of an article on Shevchenko by E. Durand in the Paris Revue des Deux Mondes for 1876 was published that same year in the New York The Galaxy (Vol.22) and a still more extensive one in the London journal All the Round, which was edited by Charles Dickens (1877, Vol.18, No.440, pages 220-24).

The British Slavist W. R. Morfill (1834-1909) did much to popularize Shevchenko. In 1880 he informed the English-reading public through an article in The Westminister Review (London) of the publication of the Kobzar in two volumes in Prague. Morfill read Shevchenko and works about him in the Russian, Ukrainian and German languages, himself visited both Eastern and Western Ukraine, and wrote an extensive article about him, entitled Cossack Poet in Macmillian's Magazine (1886), including a prose translation of two of Shevchenko's poems. And in 1902, in a review of an anthology of Ukrainian literature, printed in The Athenaeum (London), he dealt at length with the Kobzar, including a poetic translation of sections of My Testament.

A very valuable contribution was made by Ethel Lillian Voynich in her book Six Lyrics From the Ruthenian of Taras Shevchenko, published in London in 1911 as one of the Vigo Cabinet Series. The author of The Gadfly was particularly successful in translating the intimate-lyrical poems and her excerpt from The Princess is a model of profound penetration into the meaning of Shevchenko's imagery, creating correspondingly distinctive and poetical images in the English language. She also wrote a foreword, in which she presented a detailed biography of the poet, enlivened with quotations from his diary and the novel The Artist, which she interpreted to be wholly autobiographical, and expressed high esteem and appreciation of Shevchenko, whom she likened to the bard of Scotland, Robert Burns, as a national poet. Ethel Voynich's translations of Shevchenko were reprinted many times in the English-speaking countries.

Percy Paul Selver presented some new translations from Taras Shevchenko in the journal The Ukraine (1914) and in the Anthology of Modern Slavonic Literature (1919), including the poet's autobiography. Selver strove to transmit Shevchenko's wording accurately, but failed to do it in terms of imagery that is specific to the English language.

In 1924 The Slavonic Review published in article on Shevchenko, written in 1914 by the Ukrainian writer and savant Ivan Franko (1856-1916) at the request of R. W. Seton-Watson.

Among contemporary British writers who have translated Shevchenko special mention must be made of Jack Lindsay, whose work was published in the magazine International Literature (Moscow, 1939, November 3).

In the United States of America the first free translation in prose of some lines from The Caucasus appeared in 1868 in The Alaska Herald, a journal of the Russian revolutionary émigrés, published by A. Honcharenko, who wrote Shevchenko's obituary for Herzen's Kolokol (The Bell) in London. In 1916 in New York the Canadian poetess Florence R. Livesay published a book, Songs of Ukraina with Ruthenian Poems, which included a free rewrite of several poems by Shevchenko. The American poetess Edna Underwood also published similar interpretations of three Shevchenko's poems. Percival C. Cundy and Ukrainians living in North America - Zahariychuk, Semenin, Ewach - also rendered some of Shevchenko's works into English, but they did not always adequately or accurately transmit the social content of those poems. The same shortcoming (together with difficulty in preserving the rhythm of Shevchenko's poetry) is noted in translations by the Rev. A. J. Hunter, whose book The Kobzar of the Ukraine was printed in Winnipeg (Canada) in 1922.

At the present time Shevchenko is being translated in Britain by Herbert Marshall, well-known author and translator of Mayakovsky's poetry, and in Canada by John Weir, whose collections entitled Bard of Ukraine (1951) and Taras Shevchenko: Selections (1961) were published in Toronto, and Mary Skrypnyk, whose translation of Katerina appeared as a booklet in Toronto in 1961. Herbert Marshall, John Weir and Mary Skrypnyk took part in the Shevchenko Jubilee Conference at Kanev and Kiev in 1961.

Deep appreciation of the great Kobzar's work was expressed in the article by the British publicist and literary critic Pauline Bentley in the UNESCO Courier (1961, No.7-8) which appeared in the English, French, Spanish and Arabic languages.

Shevchenko's fame is also spreading in the Orient. The secretary of the Vietnamese Writers' Association, Nguyen Hoang Khoan, writes that Shevchenko is well known and highly esteemed in Viet Nam. The Japanese poet Teisuku Shibuiya dedicated his collection of verses Songs in the Field to Shevchenko in 1924. The Kobzar was published in Japanese translation - without rhymes, but with the rhythm of the original, according to the poetical instrumentality of the Japanese language - in 1950, being Volume 12 of the series Masterpieces of World Poetry. A Shevchenko memorial meeting in Tokyo in April 1961 was addressed by Japanese writers and public figures and by Oles Honchar, president of the Union of Writers of Ukraine. Shevchenko is also known in India and China.

As we have already noted, Shevchenko is fairly widely known in the Western Hemisphere. There are two monuments to him and a Shevchenko Museum in Canada. At a Shevchenko memorial meeting in New York in 1961 the American artist Rockwell Kent spoke of his profound admiration of the Ukrainian poet and pride in his works.

"Why is it that something a poet of one language became a poet of all languages, although it is very difficult to translate poetry from one language to another, and the native language is one-half of the poetry?" wrote the Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet. "It is because the other half of the poetry of such a poet as Shevchenko is so national and yet so international and humanistic, so distinctive and yet so universal, that half of the apple of Shevchenko's poetry is to the taste of all peoples."

That is why Taras Shevchenko's fame extends to all parts of the globe. That is why he ranks with the greatest figures in world literature.

Taras Shevchenko
By Ivan Franko;
Published in The Slavonic Review in London, UK in 1924-1925;

He was a peasant's son and has become a prince in the
realm of spirits.
He was a serf, and has become a Great Power in the common-
wealth of human culture.
He was an unschooled layman, and has shown to professors
and scholars newer and freer paths.
He sighed for ten years under the Russian soldiery, and has
done more for the freedom of Russia than ten victorious armies.
Fate pursued him cruelly throughout life, yet could not turn
the pure gold of his soul to rust, his love of humanity to hatred,
or his trust in God to despair.
Fate spared him no suffering, but did not stint with pleasures,
which welled up from a healthy spring of life.
And it withheld till after death its best and costliest prize—
undying fame and the ever new delight which his works call
forth in millions of human hearts.
IVAN FRANKO, 12 May, 1914

TOWARDS the year 1840 there appeared in European literature an important and characteristic phenomenon. The simple peasant of the village made his entry into literature. Till then poets and novelists had scarcely seen him, or, if they treated of him in their works, he served them merely as a decoration, as a lay figure, as a colourless grey mass, or at best as something hardly in touch with deeper human feelings. I only need to mention those sentimental and justly ridiculed peasant figures which may be found in the French and German idyllic poets of the 18th century; or, again, the peasant figures of Shakespeare, so true to life and treated with such powerful naturalism, and yet mere episodes, or those of the German 17th-century novelist Grimmelshausen; or, later still, Goethe's Gotz von Berlichingen; and, finally, the tales of Ruthene peasant life which occur in the Polish poet Klonowicz's Latin poem Roxolania (1584)—beautiful, but also mere episodes—and the decorative treatment of peasant figures in such Polish poems as Goszczynski's Zamek Kaniowski and Mickiewicz's Pan Tadeusz. It is only about the year 1840 that works begin to appear in all the various literatures of Europe, in which the peasant figures as the hero and his life is the main theme of interest. In France this new tendency is identified with one of the most brilliant of women writers, George Sand, whose stories, La Mare au Diable, Francois Ie Champi and others, are drawn from French peasant life. In Germany, Berthold Auerbach opens in 1839 the series of his Black Forest Tales (Schwarzwdlder Dorfgeschichten), which have doubtless won more praise than they deserve. At the same time there appeared in Polish such tales as Kraszewski's Ulana and Jermola: while in Russian similar stories appear towards the close of the Forties—notably Turgenev's Zapiski Okhotnika Grigorovich's Antony Goremyka, and Dostoevsky's Poor People. Finally, in Ukrainian literature, then still weak and obscurely buried far from the great world, there appeared as early as 1829 short stories by Gregory Kvitka Osnovyalenko, drawn exclusively from peasant life; and then, in 1840, a figure for which there is no parallel in world literature, with the possible exception of Robert Burns in Scotland—a peasant's son who has spent more than twenty years of his life under the yoke of serfdom. And he does not come forward as the hero of some romance or poem but as a living creator, working and struggling for the downtrodden human rights of an enslaved peasantry and of the long-neglected Ukrainian people, but also as the champion of all the oppressed. Most interesting of all, no sooner had his poems first been printed than this young peasant, so recently a serf, is greeted by the general opinion of his fellow-countrymen as a spiritual leader and the chief ornament of Ukrainian literature. He who only a few years before had to tremble before the angry looks of his master, and was only saved by accident from the knout of the land agent Prachtel, and who was sold after hard bargaining like a pedigree horse for 2,500 roubles, now becomes the leader of a whole people. Such was Taras Shevchenko, the greatest poet whom the Ukrainians have hitherto produced, and in his own way really unique.

Taras was born on March 7, 1814, as the younger son of the serf Gregory Shevchenko, in the village of Moryntsi, the property of the Russified German, Engelhardt. He lost his mother early. He learnt to write from the Church cantor, and at the age of eight started wandering to the neighbouring villages and markets, in search of a master who could teach him to paint. But as he could find none, he returned to his native village and hoped to get the post of herdsman to the commune. Then the old Engelhardt dies, and his son, who had been brought up in a more Polish spirit, gave instructions that a new staff of servants should be collected for him. Thus Taras came into his service, first as kitchen boy, and then as his master's personal valet, and in this capacity travelled everywhere with Engelhardt; then, when his master noticed his eagerness to learn to paint, he was sent to study under the painter Lampi, in Warsaw. But lie had hardly been there a year when, in November, 1830, the Polish Revolution broke out and interrupted his studies. The whole of Engelhardt's retinue was sent to St. Petersburg, and here Taras was left for fully eight years in the studio of the painter Shirayev. But Shirayev was really not so much of an artist as a house decorator, and could not teach Shevchenko anything. Of the work that he did as Shirayev's apprentice it may be worth mentioning the al fresco decorations in the great Petersburg theatre. No wonder that such work and such miserable dependance should have been thoroughly irksome to him. Often he would go secretly into the park in the evenings to draw the wretched mythological statues which he found there. On one such occasion, as he was sketching the group Laokoon, he was found by his countryman Soshenko, and introduced by him to the talented writer Hrebinka, known as the author of Ukrainian fables. Through him Shevchenko's cruel fate came to the knowledge of the famous Russian poet, Zhukovsky, then tutor to the Heir Apparent, the future Alexander II. Soshenko also spoke of his young countryman to Bryulov a professor in the Academy of Fine Arts, to the Court painter, Venetsianov, and others. This group of highly cultured artists and humanitarians tried to improve the lot of the young Ukrainian, who at the first contact with this new and brighter world was overcome by such emotion and melancholy that he thought of suicide, and then fell into so high a fever that he had to be taken to hospital. Meanwhile his patron succeeded in interesting the Imperial family in Shevchenko's fate, and on the initiative of the Empress a raffle was started for Bryulov's portrait of Zhukovsky, all the tickets being disposed of at Court. Venetsianov negotiated with Shevchenko's master, and for the price of the portrait, 2,500 roubles, he was bought out of serfdom. Now at last he could be received in the Academy, which was not open to serfs: and he soon became one of Bryulov's favourite pupils and lived in his house.

At the same time the muse of poetry bestowed her favours upon the poor apprentice. His first efforts date from the period of serfdom, but it was only as a student of the Academy that he laid brush and palette aside and committed to paper the melodious songs which flowed from his soul. In 1840 the young Ukrainian squire, Martos, made Shevchenko's acquaintance during a visit to St. Petersburg, and had his first poems published in a little volume entitled Kobzar of Taras Shevchenko. Kobzar —which may be roughly translated The Guitar Player—had an immense effect upon all educated Ukrainians, and such great personages as Count Tarnowski assured the poet of their friendship and corresponded with him. It is true that in the Russian literature of that period, which was mainly interested in Hegel's philosophy, in Goethe and in art for art's sake, Shevchenko was not favourably received, and his big poem, The Robbers, which appeared in the following year, was severely criticised not only in St. Petersburg, but abroad.

But in the Ukraine the poet's fame grew rapidly, and he, for his part, was filled with longing for the Ukraine, which he had not seen for over 12 years. In 1843 he went home during the holidays. It was an almost triumphal return of one who had left his native village in the corduroy of a page boy. The winter of 1843-4 Shevchenko spent in Petersburg and then, after completing his studies at the Academy and winning a gold medal and the title of a free artist, he returned once more to the Ukraine in the summer of 1844.

This period was the high-water mark of his career, and the happiest time of his life. In the Ukraine he wandered freely from one country-house to another, greeted everywhere with great cordiality. In Kiev he obtained a post at the Archaeological Commission. Here he found himself surrounded by the younger generation, which had already, certainly partly under the influence of his poetry, formed a secret society under the name of the "Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius", with the clearly expressed aim of educating the people and abolishing serfdom. But early in 1847, on the basis of a denunciation by the student Petrov, the society was discovered, and all its members arrested and transferred to Petersburg. Shevchenko himself was also arrested, since his poems A Dream and Caucasus were found in MSS. with one of his acquaintances. These poems Tsar Nicholas regarded as an insult to himself and his consort, and condemned their author to military service for life, without promotion, and with the express prohibition of all writing and drawing!

After three months in prison in the fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul, Taras was placed in a "kibitka" and sent by forced marches to Orenburg, where he was finally transferred to a remote outpost in the Kirgiz country. In Orenburg and Petrovsk his life was by no means intolerable. In the former place he found a number of intelligent Poles, who received him with sympathy, and he also met with much kindness from his superiors and his fellows in political exile. His fate improved still further when the Commandant of Orenburg, General Perovsky, attached him as sailor to the scientific expedition of the learned Academician, von Baer, who was to explore the coasts of the Sea of Aral, and the uninhabited steppes of Raim. He spent over 18 months in voyages on the Sea of Aral, officially as a common sailor, but in practice entrusted with sketching the various landscapes, and treated virtually as tlie equal of the members of the expedition. When, however, he returned to Orenburg and laid before the Commandant his album of drawings, the latter, with the object of securing an amelioration of his lot, sent a report to Petersburg, and in due course received a sharp reprimand. The album was returned to Shevchenko, and his punishment increased. He was sent to one of the worst penal settlements, Orskaya, on Lake Aral, and here spent six terrible years, in great spiritual oppression and cruel sufferings.

Then Tsar Nicholas died, and under the rule of Alexander II there began a lively literary and social movement. Friends and protectors of Shevchenko, and in particular the President of the Academy of Fine Arts, Count Tolstoy and his wife, secured the poet's liberation from the Kirgiz steppes. After an exile of ten years Shevchenko at last returned to Petersburg, broken in health but unbroken in spirit. Even in these terrible years his muse had not been silent. He wrote a number of prose tales in Russian, of which some have perished, but most were printed long after his death and fill a large volume. He also wrote in this period a number of poems, fresh and clear as pearls, many of them treating of their author's cruel experiences, and certainly belonging to the most exquisite lyric poetry of all time.

In St. Petersburg Shevchenko wrote, in addition to his lyrics, a number of epic poems, the best of which is probably Maria, treating in simple, popular fashion and in a highly impressive and original form the life of the Mother of the Saviour. But his health was broken. He was still dreaming of a peaceful family life on the banks of the Dnieper near the town of Kanev, where a piece of land was being purchased for him when death overtook him in St. Petersburg on 8 February, 1861. Thus Kanev, instead of greeting him among its citizens, could only prepare his grave on a little hill beside the Dnieper.

Shevchenko's poetical work may be divided into four periods, which are fairly distinct from one another. The first is from 1838 till 1843, or from his escape from serfdom till his first return to the Ukraine. In this period we see the poet still under romantic influence. He writes ballads and sentimental reflections, and composes historical tales of varying length, which culminate in the epic Haidamaki, begun in 1838 and published in 1841. From this time also date the beautiful poem Katerina, and another poem which has still not been published in its complete form, called The Nun Mariana. In the second period, which lasts till his arrest in the spring of 1847, we find such political poems as Chihirin, Subotiv, Irshavets, and others. The poet now passes from the national Ukrainian outlook to the social sphere, and raises his powerful voice in defence of the serfs (As a serf she cut the wheat, To my Sister, Marina, A Dream, Letter to my Countrymen, Living, Dead and Unborn). Thus he becomes the prophet of his people, tearing pitilessly aside the veil of political and social despotism. Sudden misfortune brought this activity to a close, and even hid a large number of his poems from public knowledge for many decades.

The third period sees the poet reduced a second time to slavery, and is limited to small lyric poems, partly of a personal character, though resting on a broad political and social foundation, and partly containing highly original and characteristic paraphrases of Ukrainian folk-songs. The fourth period reaches from 1858 till the poet's death. His lyrics, begun under military service, are still continued, but grow stronger and broader, until they swell to the rich harmony of the Hymn, To the Light, which may be called an apotheosis of light, progress and freedom. But the most characteristic feature of this period is the turn which his genius takes towards religious themes (The Neophytes, Kings, Maria, Hymn of the Nuns, etc.)

If the poetry of Shevchenko is to be reduced to a formula, I would describe it as poetry of the yearning for life. A free life, unhindered development of the individual and of all society, such is the ideal to which Shevchenko was true throughout. The sufferings of humanity and injustice towards humanity always moved him with equal force, whether it was the peasant woman driven to the corvee and forced to leave her child under the corn stocks, or the prince's daughter insulted by her own father, or the maiden sold by her mother to a General, or the little Jewess who took vengeance on her own father for the murder of her student-lover. I know of no poet in the literature of the world who made himself so consistently, so hotly, so consciously the defender of the right of woman to a full and human life. The sacrifice of one's own individuality for works of mercy, the surmounting of one's own sorrows and the dedication of all one's strength to the noble dream of the welfare of humanity—this ideal of woman has been left to us by Shevchenko as his dearest legacy. No wonder then that he saw above all in the work of Mary, the Mother of Jesus, the highest moral achievement of mankind, that great idea of human love which is the foundation of Christianity.

Founder of a New Realistic Art
By Petro Hovdya;
Published in Ukraine magazine in Kyiv, Ukraine in 1984;

The fact that Taras Shevchenko happened to get to St. Petersburg and meet highly educated people there who helped free him from serfdom and who, in his formative years, pointed out to him the road to true art, can be put down only to lucky coincidence. Otherwise, Shevchenko would have shared the destiny of thousands upon thousands of talented serf artists who either died in their dreadful slavery without ever being able to develop their artistic gifts or became the private artists of their petty tyrants, the landowners.

In those days Ukraine had not a single art school (one state-run and two private art schools appeared only in the mid-1870s). For this reason, among others, there were very few artists in Ukraine, and most of them were merely teachers of drawing at one educational establishment or another.

Such a deplorable situation with respect to the development of Ukrainian art can be explained first and foremost by the nationalities policy of tsarism which did everything it could to nip any signs of developing national culture in the bud. The majority of artists were self-taught painters (in most cases icon painters) or folk craftsmen who passed down their ancient artistic traditions from generation to generation. All this found its reflection in a considerable broadening of the traditional themes of folk pictures dedicated to Cossack Mamai and Marusya Bohuslavka, in which echos of the national liberation movement of the Ukrainian people could be discerned, as well as in the development of unique Ukrainian folk painting, sculpture, woodcarving, decoration of clothes and the like.

However, the development of folk art traditions with strongly pronounced national features could not compensate for the absence of highly developed professional art, literature, music, and theater which reflect the heights of a people's genius and the best achievements of their culture. This harmonious merging of Ukrainian folk and professional art, its all-round and large-scale development and advance became possible only much later.

A great role in the formation and development of Shevchenko as an artist was played by the St. Petersburg Academy of Art and, in particular, by one of its outstanding representatives, Shevchenko's teacher Karl Brullov.

Briillov's system of teaching was based on the idea that the best instructor an artist can have are life, nature, and reality. Judging from Shevchenko's creative activities, one can see how deeply imprinted on the young artist's mind was this new truth - previously unheard of at the Academy of Art - the truth which undermined the foundations of the entire structure of academic esthetics.
"The great Brullov never allowed himself to draw a single line without a model, while for him, a person full of creative power, this might have seemed to be permissible," Shevchenko would later write in his diary.

"To paint from life" means, naturally, not just copying reality or man, nor a studio limited in space, but a whole system of views aimed at creating a generalized artistic image of reality, which is again based on concrete material from real life. Shevchenko learned this truth better than any other pupil of Bryulov and followed it throughout his creative career.

Shevchenko joined the campaign for a new, realistic art with his painting Katerina (1842), the first work to expose so openly one of the dark sides of the reality of serfdom and to interpret an important problem of human relationships on a clearly expressed social plane. Until then, Russian art - the more so Ukrainian art - did not have a single painting which so vividly showed the human tragedy resulting from social inequality and the existing social system.

Without any reservations, Katerina can also be considered as the first notable work of the new Ukrainian national art, the foundations of which Shevchenko began to lay in the mid-1830s, when he addressed himself to Ukrainian themes and subjects. His first composition dedicated to a historical theme was the drawing The Death of Bohdan Khmelnitsky (1836-1837) done before he had been freed from serfdom and entered the Academy of Art. By that lime, thanks to his friend Ivan Soshenko, Shevchenko was already familiar with the Academy's requirements and had made several drawings on themes from antique history in quite an academic manner, as is evident from the conventional compositional structure with elements of theatricality and intentional pathos.

Though the images of Cossack officers and men who are carrying the Hetman's staffs, kettledrums and military standards into the chamber of their dying leader, as well as the images of other characters lack individual traits, the drawing nonetheless has a certain psychological mood. The latter is revealed through the gamut of feelings of different men - from an overdramatized depiction of the Cossacks' sorrow (one of them is bending over the table crying; another is kneeling before the Hetman; still another has pressed himself against Khmelnitsky's legs) to the calm concentration of the Archimandrite and the mournful grandeur of the Hetman.

The fact that Shevchenko turned to the image of Bohdan Khmelnitsky under whose leadership the Ukrainian people were reunited forever with the Russian people testifies to the artist's deep understanding of the tremendous historic role played by Khmelnitsky. Shevchenko's The Death of Bohdan Khmelnitsky - unpretentious and immature though it is - proves that he entered Brtillov's studio with the outlook of a patriotic artist who had already seen his calling in the accurate depiction of his people's life and history. The great merit of Briillov as Shevchenko's teacher lies in the fact that he fostered and encouraged his pupil's passion for genre painting and Ukrainian historical themes in every possible way.

In the early 1840s, several main trends could easily be discerned in Shevchenko's artistic pursuits - historical, everyday-life and portrait painting. In 1843-44, he again made sketches for the composition The Death of Bohdan Khmelnitsky. In the last years of his life, Shevchenko returned once more to the image of Khmelnitsky, drawing several sketches for the picture Bohdan Khmelnitsky before the Crimean Khan. In 1845-47, while in Ukraine working with the archeographic commission for the study of ancient monuments, Shevchenko made a large number of drawings from life associated with historical places (The Bohdan Khmelnitsky Chirch View of Chihirin from Subotiv Road, and others). Finally, in 1844, he created one of his finest works - the etching Gifts at Chihirin in 1649.

After Kateryna, the genre trend in Shevchenko's works was further developed in the canvas A Peasant Family and In the Apiary (1843), in the etchings to the album Pictorial Ukraine, as well as in a large number of drawings and sketches he did between 1845 and 1847 and during his exile, and in his illustrations. Shevchenko was also a recognized master of portraiture.

Thus, it can be seen that the pictures depicting the history, the genres of the past and present of his people were inseparably connected and complemented one another in his career as an artist. Shevchenko wanted to popularize the most important events in the history of the Ukrainian people, to show their mode of life, prominent personalities, and the natural beauty of his homeland. Neither before nor after Shevchenko was there a Ukrainian artist who set himself such an all-embracing task.

Unfortunately, the artist managed to realize only a small part of his plans: he created six etchings which made up the first series titled Pictorial Ukraine.

According to Shevchenko's concept, Pictorial Ukraine was to be a series accessible and comprehensible to the masses of ordinary people, first of all peasants. Proceeding from this concept, he chose the technique of etching which allowed him to make a large number of prints.

Shevchenko was carried away with the romance of remote times, the liberties of Cossakdom, and the epic struggle of his people for their freedom. Burial mounds in the steppe and ruins of ancient buildings called forth in his imaginative mind pictures full of life and expression. Frequently his drawings and watercolours have mute but eloquent witnesses of the past: graves, ruins, ancient churches-monuments of Ukrainian architecture. However, when drawing or painting ancient monuments, Shevchenko did not depict the past in isolation from the present. As a true realist, he saw the past through the prism of the present.

Typical of all Shevchenko's sepia drawings is that, without any embellishment or falsity he depicts everyday life in the Ukrainian countryside extremely accurately. The "Little-Russian exotica" so popular with many artists of those days who painted an imaginary countryside was alien to Shevchenko.

Like no one else, Shevchenko loved Ukraine and perceived her natural beauty and the strength and courage of her people, but he never tried, for the sake of the tangible beauty alone, to depict this exotica, nor did he ever turn a blind eye to the deplorable life of the peasants "in that paradise." That is why the first objects to catch his eye was the squalid dwelling of a poor widow (A Widow's Cottage in Ukraine) and the serfs' rickety, ramshackle huts with small windows.

His kindred with the people, the patriotic pride he took in their great deeds of the past, present and future, as well as his profound love of Mother Nature occasioned, to a great extent, the uniquely national flavor of Shevchenko's art, helping him to be a realist (earlier than any of his contemporaries) and influencing his individual artistic style. When the czarist government dealt brutally with the great poet and exiled him to the distant steppes of Kazakhstan, forbidding him to write and paint, Shevchenko, under extremely difficult conditions, did not lose a bit of his realistic skill, nor did he change his outlook on the world. On the contrary, Shevchenko's realism developed further, while his aspirations found their expression both in poetry and the fine arts (The Parable of the Prodigal Son series).

Shevchenko had all reasons to write after his return from his ten-year exile: "All this inscrutable grief, all sorts of humiliation and profanation have passed by as if not touching me at all. They left not a single trace on me... It seems to me I am the same as ten years ago. Not a single feature of my inner self has changed." He remained true to his principles in his Kazakh series. Here again, he exposed the same social injustice he saw in Russia and Ukraine. The colonialist policy of the czarist government evoked strong protest in Shevchenko.

No less vividly, the artist exposes the dark sides of life in czarist Russia and the people's lack of rights in his series The Parable of the Prodigal Son. His drawing Running the Gauntlet, which he once witnessed, is an indictment of the czarist regime. It is with great love, empathy and humaneness that Shevchenko treated the Kazakh people. Kazakh Riding a Horse, Song of a Young Kazakh, The Kazakh Girl Katya, In a Yurta, Kazakhs by a Fire, Baigushi, A Kazakh Boy Playing with a Cat -all these works without exception are permeated with a humanistic spirit asserting the friendship of two fraternal peoples - Ukrainian and Kazakh.

In developing as an artist, Shevchenko traveled a rather difficult road. Persistently overcoming barriers - both in life (which prevented him from showing his full talent) and in his creative work (first of all, the influence of academic traditions), he embarked on the road of realism right from the beginning of his artistic career and never left this road. In taking a democratic, realistic stand and depicting life exactly as he saw it, Taras Shevchenko was creating a national art of the people and, as such, was the founder of a new progressive art.