in bondage under an even more intolerable yoke, torn away from his
beloved Ukraine and condemned to live as a soldier in the most remote
area of eastern Russia on the borders of Asia. At first his service
was none too rigorous, for sympathetic commanders attached him to two
expeditions to explore the Sea of Aral and allowed him to make sketches
for the records of the expedition. When this came to the attention of
the authorities in Petersburg, the privileges were speedily revoked and
the tsar’s instructions were carried out literally. Finally Shevchenko
was sent to the fortress of Novo-Petrovsk.
After the death of Nicholas I, the new tsar Alexander II pardoned him
in 1857. Influential friends in the capital interceded for him and he
heard in May that he was to be liberated but the official formalities
were slow and it was the end of July before he was finally released,
and he was able to start on his way home. He had reached Nizhny
Novgorod on his way to Petersburg, when he was again detained, for
his amnesty had not given him the right of residence in either of the
capitals. It was March, 1858, before he was able to go further and
even then he had to remain under police supervision. On his way to St.
Petersburg, he stopped at Moscow to visit his friend Shchepkin, the
celebrated actor, and he was kindly entertained by the Aksakov family.
In St. Petersburg, he resumed his studies at the Academy of Art and
he renewed many old friendships, especially with Count and Countess
Feodor Petrovich Tolstoy, who had been instrumental in securing his
release. At their home he met such literary men as Count Aleksyey
Konstantinovich Tolstoy, and in fact all of the conservative and
liberal group of cultured writers, who appreciated the real value of
art, literature, and freedom.
In 1859 he secured permission to pay another visit to Ukraine for the
first time in twelve years and he spent the summer dreaming of marriage
and of securing a little home for himself on the banks of the Dnieper.
It was all in vain. On his return to St. Petersburg, he did succeed in
securing the liberation from serfdom of his family but that was all.
His health began to fail and he died the day after his birthday on
February 26, 1861, just on the eve of the liberation of the serfs.
It was a sad life that Shevchenko had led. Out of his forty-seven
years, he had been a serf for 24, in the army 10, and under police
supervision for three and a half, so that there were only nine years
under which he could feel himself a free man to come and go as he
would. There is hardly any other writer of the same prominence to whom
fate was so uniformly unkind. Yet despite it all and despite all the
obstacles which he had to face he had succeeded in placing Ukrainian
literature on its feet as a recognized literature and it is highly
significant that whatever may have been his radical ideas, he retained
to the end the friendship and confidence of the Russian aristocratic
writers far more than he did that of the liberals. Even Turgenev did
not fail to look at him with some hesitation and the liberal critics
utterly failed to understand his feelings of love and sympathy for
Ukraine. On the other hand Apollon Grigoryev, one of the Slavophile
critics, ranked him as a poet above both Pushkin and Mickiewicz.
From his earliest writings Shevchenko was the bard of Ukraine. The fate
of the Kozaks and the misfortunes of his unhappy people were constantly
in his thoughts and in his early works, in accordance with the Romantic
currents of the day, he idealized the life which they had lived, the
stern and bitter conflicts which they had waged for independence and
he glorified the _kobzars_, the folk bards, who alone preserved for
posterity the memory of the heroic deeds of the Ukrainian past.
That is the message of _Perebenda_, the poor old bard who wanders
around homeless and neglected, singing of the great heroes of former
days, singing wherever he can receive a few coins to eke out his
miserable existence, and yet ever returning to the graves of the
departed warriors to mourn over the fate of Ukraine. There was much in
the old bard that can remind us of Shevchenko himself and of the role
that he imagined for himself from his first steps in the art of writing.
There have been many attempts to trace the literary origin of this
type of the old peasant bard which was so widespread and common in
Ukraine and the other Slavonic lands. Some have tried to find the
model in Mickiewicz, in the poems of Pushkin, but perhaps after all,
we can imagine without too much fancy that Shevchenko had heard from
his teacher Bryulov, the friend of Sir Walter Scott, of the _Lay of the
Last Minstrel_. Those words at the beginning of the English poem,
The way was long, the wind was cold,
The minstrel was infirm and old.
His withered cheek and tresses gray
Seemed to have known a better day.
The last of all the bards was he
Who sang of border chivalry.
sets the tone of _Perebenda_ far better than do all the mystical and
prophetic bards that have been invoked as models. We have an indirect
support of this in the preface of the second _Kobzar_ of 1847, when
Shevchenko says that the Russians point to the fact that Scott did not
write in his own language, but “he was born in Edinburgh and not in
Scotland.... And Burns was also a great national poet.”
The pathos of the last minstrel, as Scott draws him, is close to the
message of _Perebenda_, but Shevchenko adapts him perfectly to the
Ukrainian scene. There is less of the beautiful romance about the
Ukrainian situation. There is a deeper sadness and a deeper pathos, as
the burden upon the lower classes was heavier and more intolerable.
Scott described a situation of two centuries before and conditions had
changed and mellowed with the passing of time. Shevchenko, the freed
serf, was thinking of the life which he had once personally known and
of the battles in which there had participated men whom he had known in
Ukraine. In the _Kobzar_, he laid his main emphasis on the struggles
between the Kozaks and the Poles. Moscow and the Russians play a
subordinate part, for after all Shevchenko was from the right bank of
the Dnieper where the bloody Kozak wars against the Poles had been
fought in the preceding centuries.
The only poem that describes the relations with the Russians is
_Katerina_, the story of the young girl who has a child by a Russian
officer who has seduced her and then cast her off. When she finally
overtakes him, he is unwilling to recognize her or his child. This
social theme was to grow in importance as Shevchenko matured, but it
rests upon his observation of the present rather than his regard for
the past.
The _Kobzar_ marked an epoch in modern Ukrainian literature. For the
first time a poet had arisen to pour out his heart in his native tongue
and to express the sufferings of his people and their past. Shevchenko
was not like the earlier authors who had developed Ukrainian but who
had also worked extensively in Russian. He did very little in the
Russian language and even that little belongs to the most unimportant
part of his work. He was a Ukrainian first, last, and always and he
never was attracted by any of the compromises that were so convenient
and popular.
The next year saw the publication of the _Haydamaki_, the greatest
poem of Shevchenko and the masterpiece of Ukrainian epic poetry. It
goes back to the last struggles in Western Ukraine in the eighteenth
century, to the last uprising of the peasants and the Kozaks in
a futile attempt to secure relief from their Polish masters. His
grandfather had told him stories of this struggle, the Koliivshchina,
which spread fire and sword through part of Ukraine in 1768, and in
the poem Shevchenko reworked these legends on the basis of eye-witness
accounts. As he says:
My grandsir was there and my father who’s dead,
It happened one Sunday on closing the book
And drinking a cup with a neighbor of ours,
My father asked grandsir to tell us a tale
Of Koliivshchina, how there they had fought,
How Zaliznyak, Gonta had punished the Poles.
His aged old eyes flamed afresh as the stars,
His words came out fluently, youthful, and strong;
How they finished the Poles, and how Smila was burned.
The neighbors in fear and in sorrow were dumb
And I in my youth more than once set to weeping
In grief for the sexton.
But no one did notice
How wept the young child in the still of the cabin.
Thanks, grandsir, for all that you kept in your head,
The glory that once was the pride of the Kozaks,
Now I to my grandchildren tell the same tale. (I. 2421ff)
In the preface the poet speaks in the same mood, bewailing the
invariable tendency of the day to treat Ukrainian themes as a source of
gaiety and merriment while “Ukraina’s weeping.” To him a country and a
culture that had produced such warriors as the bards had sung of was
not something to be mocked and treated as of small esteem. The hetmans
and the atamans of the past were worthy of a better fate and a better
regard among following generations.
There is nothing mild about the poem. The convulsion of the
Koliivshchina had been too terrible for that. It was a tale of savage
massacres, one of those wild outbursts which was a war to the bitter
end and where the oppressed, once they had taken up arms, could look
only for victory or death. Yet the best passages in the poem are not
the battle scenes--in one sense Shevchenko slurs over them--nor are
they the pictures of devastation and of slaughter, but rather the
preludes to the action, the gathering of the clans, the blessing of
the weapons, scenes of the country which was so soon to be overwhelmed
with bloodshed, and apostrophes to those leaders who had carved out for
themselves a place in legend and in folklore and whose most patriotic
efforts had met only with failure and disaster.
The prologue and the epilogue show us the enthusiasm of the poet and
his spirit. Shevchenko was not bloodthirsty. He was not a military
man. Yet as he looked out at the world, he could not fail to see the
difference between the past centuries, when the Kozak hetmans moved in
the most aristocratic circles of Poland and matched wits and swords
with the Polish magnates and the present time when the poor serfs were
denied the least human rights.
The visit to Ukraine in 1843 seems to have made a great difference in
his ideas. The first ideal of Shevchenko was the free Kozak state, the
Sich where the men made and unmade their officers, and he emphasized
in his early poems the great struggle of these lovers of freedom
against the Polish nobles. Later in the Hetman state, the rights and
privileges of the ordinary Kozaks had been largely curtailed and a new
form of aristocracy had grown up among the Ukrainian people. It was
this new race of aristocrats that had made the treaty of Pereyaslavl
with Moscow and had fashioned the Russian yoke upon the Kozaks. Much
as he admired Bohdan Khmelnitsky, he could not help feeling that this
act was the cause of all the troubles of Ukraine. He was not enough of
a student of history to appreciate the complications of the situation
in which Bohdan found himself and he did not see the difference between
the great Hetman and his lesser followers who allowed themselves to be
deluded and deceived by the Muscovite ambassadors in the seventeenth
century. Perhaps there was more than a grain of truth in the artistic
insight of the poet but he differed sharply with the scholars of his
day, including his friend Kostomariv, and went on his own way. He was
more fascinated by the figure of Mazepa who joined with Charles XII
of Sweden against Peter the Great than he was with Bohdan seeking
Muscovite support against the Poles. From 1843 on, Moscow and the
Russians were for him the chief enemy of Ukraine. He was still free
and had not yet met the personal disillusionment with the Russian
regime. Still his return to Ukraine and the startling effect that the
sufferings of the serfs made upon him seem to have swung his sympathies
into a social channel and away from the romantic pictures of life in
the Sich.
This is the theme of the _Great Grave_ (_Veliky Lyokh_), a curious
but effective mystical poem, in which under various forms Shevchenko
pictures the past, the present, and the future of Ukraine. The lost
souls come from three crucial periods of Ukrainian history. One had
cooperated with Bohdan in surrendering to Moscow, the second opposed
Mazepa in his attempts at liberation, and the third had aided Catherine
in abolishing the Sich. Then come the three crows, the Ukrainian which
recognizes what has happened to bring the land to its doom, the Polish
which expresses the fate of Poland and the Muscovite which boasts
of its success. There are the poor singers who in their misery are
endeavoring to collect alms for praising Bohdan. Finally there is the
excavation of the graves, the little one where lie the bones of Bohdan
and the great one in which are buried the spirit and the independence
of Ukraine and which will also one day be excavated so that the nation
can rise again. The poem is one of the most famous of Shevchenko’s
and perhaps nowhere does he express more powerfully and bitterly his
disapproval of the oppression of Ukraine by Moscow and the Russians.
In the _Caucasus_ he sympathized with the still continuing struggle of
the mountaineers to maintain their independence from the Russian yoke.
He sees the pathos of the natives and he compares it with the fate of
Ukraine before the Moscow arms.
At the same time Shevchenko commenced to pay more attention to the
suffering that he observed among the poor of his country. He had
alluded to social ills in _Katerina_. Now he repeats and repeats the
same message as in the _Hireling_ where the poor deceived girl never
confesses to her son that she is his mother, until she is on her death
bed. All her life long she has had to treat him as the child of the
kindly couple who have taken her in and given her protection when her
own parents had cast her out. The sufferings of the girl at the hands
of Muscovite lovers and the cruelty of the village toward those who
have transgressed its moral code weighed upon his soul and more than
once he returns to this theme which was to be one of the chief subjects
which he treated in later days.
Another result of the dreams of the Society of Saints Cyril and
Methodius is the _Heretic_, dedicated to Safarik and singing the praise
of the great Czech patriot Jan Hus, who was burned at Constance for
his religious and political views. Yet the treatment of Shevchenko is
characteristic for he sees in Hus not so much the national hero or the
great scholar as he does the representative of the common people. This
is the first time when he went outside of Ukraine for a subject but we
can see very clearly how those qualities which he glorified in Hus are
precisely those which he desired for his own people and if we are to
interpret any of his works symbolically we can do it here and feel that
Hus is another lost leader of the Ukrainian people.
A deeper and more tragic note appears in his works as the hour came
for his arrest. There is more of the purely personal lyric, more of
a feeling of pessimism as he realizes that he had attained a certain
freedom for himself but that this only laid upon his shoulders the
heavier burden of securing it for his own people. He could not enjoy
his personal success while he remembered that his people and his family
were still in bondage. More and more he came to draw inspiration from
the Old Testament and the sufferings of Israel.
His arrest threw these new feelings into the foreground and during his
confinement in St. Petersburg, he produced a surprising quantity of
excellent songs which expressed his sorrow and his discouragement. Let
us take the following as an example:
It makes no difference to me,
If I shall live or not in Ukraine
Or whether any one shall think
Of me ’mid foreign snow and rain.
It makes no difference to me.
In slavery I grew ’mid strangers,
Unwept by any kin of mine;
In slavery I now will die
And vanish without any sign.
I shall not leave the slightest trace
Upon our glorious Ukraine,
Our land, but not as ours known.
No father will remind his son
Or say to him, Repeat one prayer,
One prayer for him; for our Ukraine
They tortured him in their foul lair.
It makes no difference to me,
If that son says a prayer or not.
It makes great difference to me
That evil folk and wicked men
Attack our Ukraine, once so free,
And rob and plunder it at will.
That makes great difference to me.
At times as the difficulties and hardships of life descended upon him
in the faraway districts of Orenburg and Aral, he became discouraged
but the vast bulk of his poetry was a lamentation for his absence from
his beloved Ukraine. He dreamed of the beauties of its fertile soil now
that he was in an arid and desolate region and he lamented the sad fate
of his beloved country as well as his own. A surprising number of poems
deal also with the hardships and the troubles of a young girl who has
been left an orphan to make her way in a cruel and unfeeling world.
Perhaps in some of these we may easily imagine that the girl symbolizes
Ukraine, for the two themes of the ruined country and the ruined girl
more than once merge in the thoughts of the sympathetic poet.
As the rigors of imprisonment became still more severe, Shevchenko
tried his hand at prose in various stories which he dated from before
his imprisonment but he seems to have done this in an effort to avoid
the tsar’s prohibition of writing and drawing. These stories, while
they are good, add little to his reputation. Shevchenko was primarily
a poet and the prose which he wrote contains little new, either in
ideas or content. They are largely reworkings of the same themes of
the suffering girl, the tyrannical landlord, the Muscovite seducer and
oppressor that he had dealt with earlier in more concentrated form in
his verse. They have attracted less attention than his poetry and as in
the case of Pushkin form the minor part of his work.
We must mention two poems of this period. One is the _Prophet_ in which
he sets forth the value of the poet as a proclaimer of the divine
ideals but the unappreciative people reject and kill him and choose a
tsar in his place. The other is _To the Poles_, in which he laments the
feud that the Jesuits had stirred up to destroy the harmony that had
once prevailed between the free Poles and the free Kozaks. The poem
is far removed from the glorification of the Kozak wars in the poems
of the _Kobzar_ and the more romantic dreams of a free Ukraine, but
Shevchenko in his life and thinking had passed from the right bank of
the Dnieper to the Hetman state and he realized the many conflicting
elements that had wrecked Ukrainian existence. He saw now that they
were more serious and more complicated than he had once believed and
from this time on he rarely alluded to those old battles and never
with the anger against the Poles that had once been so manifest. It
is however interesting that he never relented in his distrust of and
hostility to the Russians and in his condemnation of the tsars for
their destruction of the rights of the Sich and the free Kozaks.
On his release from captivity, Shevchenko dashed off in a few days one
of his great poems, the _Neophytes_, a tale of ancient Rome and the
persecution of the early Christians, dedicated to his friend Shchepkin.
We can hardly fail to see in this as in the other poems of the ancient
world the influence of his old master Bryulov, who had laid the basis
for his fame by his scenes from classical antiquity. Yet the story
of the young Christian whose heroic martyrdom for the faith finally
converted his mother to Christianity and faith in the Crucified was
perhaps a symbol of the spreading power of Ukrainian self-confidence.
The comparison between the tyrannical Nero and the Russian tsar was
so evident that it terrified some of the poet’s friends as Kulish who
feared that new misfortunes would come upon the poet. None did but it
is a tribute to the courage and unbending loyalty of Shevchenko to his
ideals that he never wavered in them even at the most critical times.
His message of freedom and of kindness he would not dilute or hide, no
matter what it might cost him personally or how more timid men might
take to cover.
Nevertheless Shevchenko had returned a broken man. He produced one more
long poem, _Maria_, a story of the Blessed Virgin which differs in some
ways from the ecclesiastical tradition. For this he was denounced as
irreligious. Yet that is hardly the word to be used, for there is a
deep religious feeling in the work and if he has violated the sacred
story to make more poignant the character of the Blessed Virgin and to
equate her life history with that of the suffering Ukraine, the poem
does not deserve the severe abuse that has been directed against it by
the more literal minded. He aimed to show the apparent overwhelming of
the right and the temporary triumph of evil but he never had in his own
mind any doubt as to the final outcome, whether the time of waiting and
of suffering were long or short.
The vast majority of his poems after his return, however, are either
adaptations and imitations of the Psalms and the Old Testament or they
are pathetic expressions of his hope for a little home on the banks of
the Dnieper and for at least a few years of happy family life. He was
weary of the struggle that he had waged for his people for his entire
life. He had succeeded in freeing his own family from serfdom and the
broken and exhausted man felt that he could now hope for something for
himself. It was not to be and an untimely death struck him down just a
few days before the tsar had definitely abolished that serfdom against
which he had fought so violently.
The importance of Shevchenko cannot be overemphasized. He was the
greatest of the Ukrainian poets and he was more than that. He was the
first writer who was purely and thoroughly Ukrainian, who dared to
dream of a Ukrainian language and literature that would be completely
separate from Russian and would have an independent place in the world.
He had started his career with the romantic dream of perpetuating
the memory of the conflicts between the Kozaks and the Poles and of
reviving the old days when the free Kozaks were able to carve out a
precarious liberty for themselves and their people. Experience and
observation taught him that that was impossible. He always valued
the positive ideals of the old days, he realized the courage and the
heroism of the leaders and still more of the ordinary man of the time.
But he soon saw that that was not enough and that those days would not
return. It was necessary to build for the future and he considered
all that had passed since that fateful treaty of Pereyaslavl the
unfortunate consequences of a mistake.
That led him to differences of opinion with many of his most intimate
friends, for some of them were hoping against hope that there could be
some settlement on the lines proposed by the great Bohdan. Shevchenko
did not believe it possible and he dared to express his beliefs. To
him a free Ukraine meant exactly what it said, a Ukraine that would be
completely independent in every sense of the word, that would not be
subject to interference by any foreign ruler, especially the Russian
tsar. That was a more immediate danger than the old feuds with the
Poles for after the division of that country and the failure of the
revolt of 1831, Shevchenko saw that the Ukrainians, particularly those
on the right bank and in the Hetman state had nothing to fear from the
ruined Poland.