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 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.
_CHAPTER ONE_