Corresponding Member, Ukrainian Academy of Arts

THE GREAT UKRAINIAN POET and revolutionary democrat Taras Gregorievich Shevchenko died on March 10, 1861, after a lifetime of creative work dedicated to the struggle of his people for a better and happier life.

He was born in 1814 to a family of serfs. His landlord-owner brought him to Wilno (Vilnius) as a servant, and it was there the young Shevchenko revealed his gift for painting. Subsequently he went to St. Petersburg, the capital of the Russian Empire, where Yevgeni Grebenka, a fellow Ukrainian; the Russian artists Karl Bryullov and Alexei Venetsianov; and the poet Vasili Zhukovsky helped to free him from serfdom. With their aid he was able to acquire an education at the Academy of Arts.

That he was an artist of great talent, a master of the brush, pencil and chisel, is evident from his strikingly original paintings, drawings and sculptured figures on permanent display at the Shevchenko Museum in Kiev. But his interest turned to poetry when he was 23.

This was in 1837, the year when the czarist autocracy maneuvered the death of the poet Alexander Pushkin, whose pen was so trenchant a weapon in the struggle for the emancipation of the serfs and freedom for Russia's people. With the death of Pushkin, killed in a duel provoked with that design, czarism hoped to throttle all progressive thought. But the very year of Pushkin's tragic death brought to public notice the creative efforts of two other great democratic poets—Mikhail Lermontov in Russia and Taras Shevchenko in the Ukraine.

Shevchenko's first books, *Kobzar* and *Gaidamaki*, proved him not only a writer of the first rank but a passionate advocate of equal rights for the people of the Ukraine. His poetry did much to heighten the national and social awareness of his countrymen.

He lived at a time when the Ukrainians, like the other peoples of Russia, suffered profoundly from czarist oppression. They had been stripped of everything—liberty, statehood, culture and even name. But there was another side to the picture. This was a period when the national liberation movement in the Slavonic countries was growing apace as capitalist production developed intensively.

One of the resulting effects was a renaissance of the national cultures. There had been many other Ukrainian writers before Shevchenko who used the native language. The poetry of freedom they wrote prepared the way for Shevchenko's *Kobzar*. But these writers saw no future for Ukrainian culture. Mellinsky wrote bitterly, "Our language is already dying."

Shevchenko held a different opinion and wrote it into his poetry. All his life and work is a lyric affirmation of belief that the people would continue their march along the path that his poetry pointed out, that in the end they would win to freedom. It was Shevchenko's social consciousness and revolutionary outlook that gave him that certainty.

His view of the world's future and the inevitable direction of its movement developed gradually. It was shaped by many influences. Shevchenko came from the very heart of the people. As a child he had listened to songs and legends of the struggle of the Ukrainian peasants against their landlords and of the movement for national liberation. He studied art in his youth with the noted Russian painter Karl Bryullov, who had spent many years abroad and who told him about the revolutions in the European countries.

When he lived in St. Petersburg, Shevchenko was close to the poet Vasili Zhukovsky, a friend of the Decembrists, the group of revolutionary-minded Russian officers who had risen against the autocracy in December 1825. Their ideas permeated the whole intellectual atmosphere of St. Petersburg. In *Journal*, his diary, Shevchenko suggested that a medal be struck in memory of the Decembrists inscribed to the "The First Russian Heralds of Freedom" and in many of his poems, notably in "*A Dream*" (1844), he drew sympathetic portraits of the officers who participated in the uprising.

In St. Petersburg the poet met many of the progressives who later formed the Butashevich-Petrashevsky political group to spread socialist ideas in Russia. A diary kept by N. Mombelli, one of the members, makes references to the hopes the group placed in Shevchenko as ideologist of an uprising in the Ukraine. In the files of the czarist secret political police that relate to the Butashevich-Petrashevsky case, his name appears frequently.

The most decisive factor to shape the poet's revolutionary democratic consciousness was the liberation movement of the Ukraine's peasant masses. The poems he wrote in the Ukraine are infused with so much revolutionary passion that the flame of the peasant uprisings seems still to be burning in them.

In a number of his poems—"The Opened Grave," "Chigrin, Chigrin," and "The Great Cave," he laid bare the national oppression his people were suffering with the sharp, bold strokes of his caustic pen. There was no one before him and no one for a long time after him who so resolutely struggled for the national equality of the Ukrainians.

The clear meaning of his poems have been distorted by Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists to make Shevchenko out to be an "enemy of Russia" rather than of Russian autocracy. The poet drew a clear separation between the two Russias—one reactionary, the other progressive and revolutionary. He never joined the nationalists, thoroughly cognizant of the fact that the Ukrainian people could win national liberation only with the overthrow of the autocracy, and for this the union of all of Russia's progressive forces was necessary.

Nothing could shake Shevchenko's conviction that there had to be a revolutionary uprooting of czarism, that there could be no real national liberation without social liberation. He fought the Ukrainian feudal

Besides his great poetic gifts, Shevchenko was an extraordinarily fine artist. He often illustrated his own poems. Shown (left to right) are an etching he did for "Chigrin, Chigrin" (1844), an illustration for "The Blind" (1842) and "Among Friends in Exile" (1856) in sepia. The linoleum cut of the poet on the left-hand page is by the Soviet artist V. Kasiyan.

landlords without compromise, lashed out at them in such poems as "The Great Cave" and "The Living and the Dead." In the "Cold Steep Bank" (1845) he demands to know:

... By what just and

Sacred law do you sell

Unfortunate people

And the land

Given to all? ...

Shevchenko saw and understood that all the people of the empire, the Russians included, were oppressed by czarism and by serfdom. The fate of the Ukrainians was tied inextricably to the fate of all the other peoples. In "Three Crows," a section of his poem "The Great Cave," he portrays in allegory the exploiting classes of three nations—the Ukrainian, the Polish and the Russian—each crow boasting of the crimes it has perpetrated against its own people. He has the Russian crow say:

I strangled six thousand souls

Within the space of one verst.

Shevchenko was referring to the great number of workers who died in the construction of the St. Petersburg-Moscow Railroad.

In another poem, "The Caucasus" (1845), he comments with bitter irony on the desperate lot of all peoples of Russia under the autocracy:

From the Moldavian to the Finn

All are silent in all languages.

Nor did the poet devote only his pen to the struggle against social and national oppression. In 1846 he joined the underground political fraternity Kirill-Mefodiy, whose aims were to end serfdom and unite all Slavonic peoples in one republican federation. But these aims could not be attained without overthrowing czarism. In 1847 czarism smashed the organization by imprisoning all its members, Shevchenko included. When they arrested him, the police seized a notebook into which he had copied those of his revolutionary poems that had been banned by the censor. From this collection, titled "Three Years," he had been accustomed to read aloud so that listening friends could learn and circulate his verses. Shevchenko was sentenced to serve in the army and forbidden to write or to paint.

In 1850, only a year after he regained his freedom, he was arrested again and exiled to the Novopetrovskoye fort (now Fort Shevchenko) in Kazakhstan. While there he asked friends to send him the works of the Russian poets Mikhail Lermontov and Mikhail Koltnov and expressed his thanks for the Lermontov poems in "It Seems to Me I Do Not Know" (1850):

Thank you, my poor friend,

For having sent to me, in prison

The poems of our poet, who opened

For me a door to freedom.

Although Lermontov, Koltnov, Gogol and others of the progressive writers were not of Ukrainian descent, Shevchenko talked of them as ours.

Influential Russian friends of Shevchenko's helped get him released from exile and secured permission for him to go to St. Petersburg.

After his return to St. Petersburg, Shevchenko became the most popular figure in the capital, hailed for his courageous fight for freedom and honored for his preeminent work as poet and artist. The Academy of Arts made him an Academician of Engraving, and in 1860 his Kobzar was published in a translation by the Russian poets Alexei Pleshcheyev, Nikolai Kurochkin, Lev Mei, Nikolai Gerbel, Vsevolod Krestovsky and Nikolai Borg.

While in St. Petersburg he did not temper his attacks on serfdom and autocracy. During the period he wrote several poems of an anti-religious nature—"Oh, People, Blind Simpletons," "In Former Days," "Oh, Quiet World." He worked with the democratic magazine Sovremennik (Our Contemporary), met Ukrainian friends and Polish revolutionaries and visited at the home of Nikolai Chernyshevsky.

Chernyshevsky's articles in Sovremennik clarified certain important political questions for Shevchenko, and the Ukrainian poet's knowledge of the way the masses of people lived and thought helped to enrich young Chernyshevsky's understanding. In his articles the great Russian revolutionary frequently referred to Shevchenko as a generally recognized authority. Another Russian revolutionary democrat, Nikolai Dobrolyubov, wrote a review of Kobzar for Sovremennik in which he called its author "a people's poet, the like of whom we do not have." So did Shevchenko fight shoulder to shoulder with the Russian revolutionary democrats for the liberation of all the peoples of Russia.

Some of his most poignant verses—"Katerina," "The Hired Hand," "Marina," "Maria" and others—are dedicated to women suffering from traditional discrimination and domestic servitude. He wrote tender, lyric poems—"Little Maryana," "The Cherry Orchard Near the House," and "Both Golden and Dear." There are whole generations of Ukrainians who learned Shevchenko's verses by heart. His poems have been set to music. "The Wide Dnieper Groans and Moans," "Such Is Her Destiny," "My Thoughts, My Thoughts," "The Rapids Rush Along," "The Bequest," "The Cherry Orchard," "How Alone Am I, How Alone," and many, many others are songs beloved by millions.

Shevchenko's dream of a free and happy life for the Ukrainian people became a reality only after the October 1917 Revolution, when the Ukrainian people formed their own state.

The Socialist Revolution made Shevchenko's literature and art the property of the millions of Soviet working people, regardless of their national origin. Since 1917 Soviet publishing houses have issued 396 editions of his works in 41 languages in a total of more than 11 million copies.

Translations of Shevchenko, unfortunately, do not begin to do him justice. He was a poet of great and enduring stature whose writings contributed enormously to the development of Ukrainian as one of the literary languages of the world. His influence is so many-sided that the word shevchenkovedeniye has been coined for the study of his work. It engages the attention not only of literary but of social historians, of scholars of art, philologists, philosophers and educators. Streets, libraries and schools in cities and villages bear Shevchenko's name. Statues of the poet are to be found in squares throughout the country.

On the occasion of the commemoration of the centennial of Shevchenko's death, the whole country pays homage to one of its great revolutionary writers.

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