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
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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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
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_. 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 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 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
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 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_,
Yes, the Moskal loves you lightly,
Lightly he will drop you.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
_CHAPTER FOUR_