Now-a-days we have many discussions and searchings of heart over the
question of prisons and the purpose of punishment. I doubt if the
autocracy suffered many qualms of conscience in such matters. It was
simply an affair of silencing a dangerous voice and disciplining an
unruly subject.
They were too humane to put him to death, they merely sought to crush
his spirit. But the Slav spirit is hard to crush. It may brood and
smoulder long, but sometime or other it will burst out in flames.
In the case of Shevchenko another influence may be seen at work. In his
ragged youth, when acting as assistant to a drunken church singer he
gained at least one thing. That was a familiarity with the Psalter and
the Hebrew prophets. The deep religious fire of the Hebrew seems fused
with his own irrepressible native genius to form a spirit that could
not be subdued.
They tried to make a soldier of him but he could not or would not learn
the tricks of the soldier’s trade.
They forbade him to write but he wrote verses secretly and concealed
them.
Occasionally a humane commander would relax the severity of the rules.
One governor allowed him as a hidden favor the reading of the Bible and
Shakespeare.
At another time he was taken with a scientific expedition to the Sea of
Aral, and employed in the congenial task of painting the wild scenery
of that part.
At other times again the severity would be redoubled and pen, ink and
paper would be forbidden. Through it all his love and sorrow for his
native land increased. Only the remembrance of Ukraine kept him alive.
Ten years of Siberia changed the gay young artist of bright eyes and
abundant locks to a gray-bearded, bald-headed old man on whom Death had
set his seal.
But his spirit was still unconquered. At the end of his imprisonment he
wrote the “Goddess of Fame” and the “Hymn of the Nuns” to show it.