How many English-speaking people have heard of Taras Shevchenko?
What “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” did for the negroes of the United States of
America the poems of Shevchenko did for the serfs of Russia. They
aroused the conscience of the Russian people, and the persecutions
suffered by the poet at the hands of the autocracy awakened their
sympathy.
It was two days after the death of Shevchenko that the czar’s ukase
appeared granting freedom to the serfs. Possibly the dying poet knew it
was coming and died the happier on that account.
But in still another way does this man’s figure stand out. In the
country called the Ukraine is a nation of between thirty and forty
millions of people, having a language of their own—the language in
which these poems were composed.
This has been, as it were, a nation lost, buried alive one might say,
beneath the power of surrounding empires.
They have a terrible history of oppression, alternating with desperate
revolts against Polish and Muscovite tyranny.
In these poems speaks the struggling soul of a downtrodden people. To
our western folk, reared in happier surroundings there is a bitter tang
about some of them, somewhat like the taste of olives, to which one
must grow accustomed. The Slavonic temperament, too, is given to
melancholy and seems to dwell congenially in an atmosphere misty with
tears. But he gravely misreads their literature who fails to perceive
the grim resolve beneath the sorrow.
In the struggle of the Ukrainians for freedom the spirit of this poet,
who was born a serf, remains ever their guiding star.