Three or four days of every week the serfs—men and women alike—must
labor in their master’s fields for nought. What was left of the week,
they were granted to earn subsistence for themselves and their
families.
But that was not the worst. More bitter than labor was the fact that
they were not their own, were chattels of their lord, who could sell
them at his pleasure or gamble them away at cards.
He could beat them too, or kill them if he wished, without fear, for
what advocate would take up the case of a penniless serf against the
all-powerful aristocracy.
Hideous, too, was the glaring fact that young daughters of the serfs
were regarded as the legitimate prey of the landlord and, his sons.
In these later days the sins of the fathers have been visited in awful
fashion on the descendants of these landlords. But can we wonder that
in the writings of a poet whose childhood was poisoned by knowledge of
such injustice, we find evidence of the growing avenging fury that
later was to bring about such awe-inspiring convulsions in human
society.
Through all of Shevchenko’s verse there sounds the great theme of that
contrast between the beauty of God’s world, and the horrors of human
cruelty.
“An earthly heaven we had from Thee; Turned it into hell have we.”