Chapter II: Introduction (1)

Taras Shevchenko is the poet of Ukraine. There is hardly a Ukrainian home from the humblest to the richest that does not contain a portrait of the poet who during his short life touched every chord of the Ukrainian heart. He shared the fortunes of his people and during his unhappy life he suffered all the hardships of serfdom, of exile, of police supervision that was the fate of the greater part of his compatriots. Seldom has a poet lived and suffered to the full as did Shevchenko and rarely has a man so fully incorporated all the aspirations of his people.

That is not all. As an artist and a thinker Shevchenko deserves the sympathetic knowledge and understanding of the entire civilized and democratic world. He deserves it as the representative of his people, a nation of forty millions who have so far failed to receive that independence for which they have long struggled. He deserves it also for himself, for his own writings, since it can be truly said that he is one of those men who have a message for all humanity, for the suffering and the downtrodden, the victims of injustice and oppression everywhere.

It is the object of this book to make available in English translation some of the masterpieces of this poet whose works have lived for a century with an ever widening influence and an ever increasing appreciation of his genius both at home and abroad. It has been a strange fate that has confined knowledge of his works to some scanty references in books on literature, while lesser men in other languages have received fantastic praises. Such was fate. In his lifetime many of the most penetrating critics in Russia saw fit to place him above Pushkin and Mickiewicz for his mastery of language and for the depth and sincerity of his ideas. Yet they were in the minority, for the vast multitudes were only inclined to see in him a young serf writing in his native language and they passed him by with a shrug of the shoulders.

He formed part of that great flowering of poetry which commenced with the period of Romanticism in Europe and he was one of those men who passed by a natural evolution to the great period of realism and of sensitiveness to the social problems of the day. Now in the twentieth century we are learning as never before to judge him for himself, as a flowering of the Ukrainian character and as a man who has a message not only for his own times and country but for the entire world. He has stood the test of time and he deserves due recognition in these days when the entire world is sunk in war and desolation.

There can be no doubt to-day that Taras Shevchenko is one of the great Slavonic poets. He is one of the great poets of the nineteenth century without regard to nationality or language and his fearless appeal to right and truth and justice speaks as eloquently in the New World as it did in the Old or in the little village where he was born, the city to which he was taken or the treeless steppes to which he was exiled.

_CHAPTER ONE_

THE LITERARY SCENE

The half century before Taras Shevchenko began to write saw the beginning of those tendencies which were to develop to their full power at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. It was a period of transition in which the principles and ideas which had dominated Europe for centuries were being steadily shaken and losing all authority over the minds of men. They were questioned logically by the leading thinkers of the day but they were with equal vigor attacked by the uneducated masses who were vaguely hoping for better conditions of living. At the same time these new ideas with a few exceptions had not been translated into effective political and economic action and the resulting situation was the despair of both the reformers and the conservatives. There was an uneasy stalemate which differed from land to land and even from district to district.

On the positive side the successful revolt of the American colonies and the establishment of the Republic of the United States left a deeper imprint upon European thought, even in the east of Europe, than we usually think. There is no need to exaggerate this but for good or ill the ideas of federation, as shown by the new country in the West, penetrated into distant lands and was hailed as a substitute for the centralizing policies of the autocratic monarchs who were working to destroy on paper as well as in practice the local liberties and traditions which had existed for centuries.

This had been followed by the French Revolution and then the Napoleonic Wars. The confusion and hostilities had aided the ambitious plans of such rulers as Catherine II of Russia who had used the preoccupation of Europe with the West to finish the dismemberment of Poland and the annihilation of the last Ukrainian organizations. It comes as something of a shock to realize that the Zaporozhian Sich, long reduced to only a shadow of its past greatness, was not destroyed until 1775, and the last vestiges of the Hetmanate, which had been practically turned into an aristocratic regime, were wiped out in 1783 and the territory was divided into governments and ruled on the Russian pattern. Thus so far as Ukraine was concerned, the final extinction of the old liberties came precisely at the period of the American Revolution. In 1792, with the division of Poland, Russia took over the region of Kiev, the area where Shevchenko was later to be born, incorporated that into its grandiose structure, and reduced the population to the status of Russian serfs.

The final end of local liberties was thus hardly carried into practice when Russia was compelled to face the Napoleonic Wars. The officers of the aristocratic and Europeanized classes were brought face to face with the new ideas which they met definitely in Paris and in the contact with their allies during the campaigns and they began to dream of introducing into their native country some of the modern practices which they had seen in the West.

These men were however too weak and too scattered to combine their influence for an effective movement and when they attempted it in the short-lived Decembrist revolt of 1825, they were decisively checked, and their leaders were executed or exiled to Siberia. The Polish revolt of 1831 fared little better and by the time that Nicholas I was securely established on the throne, he could in his own imagination breathe easily and forget that there had been such turmoils in the governmental organization.

Thus in the Russian Empire, it seemed as if the powers of the reaction had been definitely established. The ideas of the Holy Alliance and of Prince Metternich seemed as solid as the monolithic structure erected in Moscow by Peter the Great. On the political side the conservative and reactionary factions were in full control and the rulers no longer, as in the days of Catherine, played with new ideas, even if they had no serious intention of practicing them. There were peasant disorders but there were no more such convulsions as that led by Pugachov and his Cossacks which seriously menaced the established order and which demanded the use of large military forces to save the regime.

In the meanwhile every step forward in the Europeanization of the Russian aristocracy meant an increase in the exactions demanded of the serfs. This was a process that had been continuing especially since the reforms of Peter the Great, when there was inserted a steadily deepening wedge between the manorhouse and the peasant. Long hours of forced labor on the nobleman’s lands and the ever diminishing size of the serf allotments because of an increase of population made the life of the poor unfortunates more and more miserable. This was especially marked in those areas where the Russian system had been but recently introduced and where traditions of an older and happier time still lingered on in the minds of the older inhabitants.

Along with this political and economic stagnation and retrogression went a new intellectual and artistic development. This made itself felt throughout the whole of the Empire. It had both its good and its bad sides. On the positive side, there was in Russia the appearance of a new art, a new literature which tried to imitate and then to adapt the French pseudo-classic culture of the eighteenth century. Nobles who had previously known little but the traditional Church Slavonic conceptions, handed down from antiquity, were fascinated by the new innovations. New methods of literary composition were introduced. A new language was devised. New influences from Western Europe came in.

All this could not fail to draw away a large part of the intellectually alert landowners from their original moorings. During the eighteenth century the Ukrainian educated class tended more and more to accept the Europeanized Russian culture. This was the easier, because the Ukrainian centres, as the old Academy of Peter Mohyla in Kiev, had busied themselves entirely with Church Slavonic and theological subjects. The system of education had not included any of the results of Western development, the language used was artificial and differed markedly from the colloquial speech of the villagers, and even such a man as Skovoroda in the eighteenth century had not taken any definite step to assault the entrenched system except by the power of his own personal refusal to bend himself to its demands. Where in the seventeenth century the Kiev schools had sent scholars to reeducate Moscow, now after the absorption by Russia, they contented themselves with a continuation of the old policies. As a result there was a growing exodus of the young men to the dominant center of St. Petersburg and there was a consequent fall in the culture and educational resources of the Ukrainian lands and a rise in Russian influence.

These tendencies were again counterbalanced by a new series of developments in Western Europe which could not fail to create a reaction throughout the whole of the continent. On the one hand, Rousseau in France developed his theories that the natural man had a higher moral virtue than the man of civilization and culture. There started a return to the primitive which could not fail to turn people’s attention to the condition of the serfs, while at the same time the renewed theories of the rights of man attracted attention to their misfortunes.

Side by side with this there were the doctrines of Herder as to the superiority of the folk song as a form of literature and the focussing of the attention of the educated on the speech of the common people and on their poetic productions and artistic practices. Those tendencies which had manifested themselves in Percy’s _Reliques_, a collection of Scotch ballads, which had continued with a desire to collect German folksongs, in which even Goethe took part, and the later interest in the Serb popular ballads naturally spread into Russia and resulted not only in the discovery of the _byliny_ in the far north but in a revaluation of the Ukrainian folk songs which had passed unnoticed outside of the villages or which had been treated with amused disdain by the polished noblemen. A new wave of interest was therefore set into motion and it came so soon after the disintegration of the old order that parts of it could be easily absorbed into the new movement.

It was in this environment that Ivan Kotlyarevsky published in 1798 the _Eneida_, the first work to be written in the Ukrainian vernacular. It is to be noticed that the author in his humorous adaptation of the old Latin story to the Ukrainian scene rested rather on the old classical traditions of the eighteenth century and the practices of the Kiev Academy than on the newer ideas which were beginning to appear on the intellectual horizon. Yet the work appeared at a critical time and it showed to the people still smarting under the newly imposed yoke that it was possible to develop the vernacular and to produce outstanding works of literature in it. This was all to the good and it in a way corresponded to the revival of the Czech language which was being started by the philologically inclined Josef Dobrovský.

Yet before the vernacular literature could take a firm foothold, some other idea was necessary. This was found in the beginnings of Romanticism which swept with startling rapidity throughout Europe. This was a complicated movement and its form varied with the individual countries.

It made its appearance in Russia largely through the influence of Vasily Andreyevich Zhukovsky, who was for nearly half a century the leading critic and adviser of the young aristocratic poets who developed at the Lycée of Tsarskoye Selo at the imperial court of Alexander I. This circle included Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin, the greatest of Russian poets, although in his composition there was always more of the older classical ideas and practices than it was fashionable to admit at the time.

Zhukovsky, who was an excellent translator, acclimatized in Russia the whole apparatus of the weird, the supernatural and the mediaeval that was being developed in Germany. He early translated Bürger’s _Lenore_, the story of the dead lover returning to claim his living bride. He gave his people poems and stories of mediaeval chivalry and he translated many of the ballads of Goethe and Schiller. Very soon he added to this movement the influence of Byron and for some fifteen or twenty years the gilded youth of the Russian capital not only imitated Lord Byron’s poems in their writings but they acted out his ideas in real life and considered themselves to be wanderers persecuted by the world.

With it all, the twenties and the thirties were the Golden Age of Russian poetry. Pushkin especially soon outgrew the narrow imitation of Byron. He added to the influences to which he was subjected those of Sir Walter Scott and Shakespeare. He wrote historical poems conceived in a profound admiration for Peter the Great as _Poltava_ but at the same time in _The Captain’s Daughter_ and other works he showed a strong appreciation of the career of that doughty old rebel Pugachov. Yet during the last years of his life he expressed more sympathy as in the _Brazen Horseman_ with the sufferings of the poorer class of the people. The collapse of the Decembrist movement and the silencing of the reforming elements among the aristocracy gave rise to the beginnings of a more critical literature based on an attempted understanding of Western ideas and sharply divided Russian thought between the Slavophiles who were primarily conservative and attempted to find differences between Russian development and that of Western Europe to the advantage of the former and the Westerners, conservative and liberal alike, who sought to emphasize the backwardness of Russia and to demand the remodeling of the country on western lines. By 1840 these men, led by the furious Vissarion Grigoryevich Belinsky, had secured the ear of most of the literary journals and were well on their way toward the formation of a realistic school and the radical intelligentsia.

The Romantic movement therefore had but a short life in Russia. This is not to be wondered at, for the Russian mediaeval history was not of a character that lent itself easily to the glorification of the past and of the feudal period that was so effective in German. Chivalry as an organized movement had not taken root in mediaeval Moscow with its strong Tatar and Asiatic influences and Russian Romanticism always lacked a certain basis which was found in the Western European countries where for centuries the lords and barons had waged petty warfare with many deeds of individual daring.

A special position in this movement was held by Nikolay Vasilyevich Gogol, the son of one of the early writers in Ukrainian. In his _Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka_ and later in _Mirgorod_ and especially in his powerful Cossack tale of _Taras Bulba_, he pictured the romantic side of Ukrainian or Little Russian tradition (to use the name which he gave it himself) and he told tales of the happier side of the life of the region where he had been born. His works really introduced into Russian literature a Russianized Ukrainian school of writing which by its color and charm attracted wide attention.

On the other hand in Poland, even after the division, there was the same outpouring of the Romantic spirit. Adam Mickiewicz who had started his brilliant poetical career in Wilno and Kaunas and had then been exiled to Russia and had finally gone abroad was the leading figure. One of that group of Polish patriots which had gathered around the University of Wilno, he had raised Polish literature to a new level of excellence. He was ably seconded by other writers as Juljusz Slowacki and Zygmunt Krasiński, the two other Romantic poets who were also forced into exile. The writings of this group were more in the conventional Romantic style and exercised an even stronger influence on Poland than did the Russian Romanticists in the narrow sense. Many of the writers of this time as Antoni Malczewski were familiar with the picturesque aspects of Ukrainian life, its rich supply of folksongs and its elaborate peasant rituals. As a result they introduced so-called Ukrainian themes into Polish literature and relying upon their Galician experiences, they made the Ukrainians or Ruthenians as they called them really popular.

In the meanwhile the energetic young group at Wilno were preparing for revolt which finally took place in 1831. Despite initial successes, the Russian Tsar speedily got control of this as he had of the Decembrist uprising among the Russian aristocrats. He suppressed it as brutally and for some decades the Poles were compelled to maintain abroad in France their chief literary activity, which continued to emphasize the principles of Romanticism with a strong feeling for their dismembered country.

Finally we cannot overlook the first halting steps of that movement which was destined to be labelled Pan-Slavism or the Slavonic brotherhood. It was really launched in Bohemia by the Slovak Jan Kollár who in 1824 published a collection of sonnets, the _Daughter of Slava_, in which he pleaded for a brotherhood of all the Slavonic races. His work set the key for much of the later Czech literature and his ideas expanded in more prosaic form by Pavel Šafařík and others slowly permeated all classes of thinking Slavs. To Kollár and his friends this undoubtedly meant a free brotherhood with Russia as the most powerful member and protector against the Germanic world. To the Russians it meant the absorption of the other Slavs by Russia and the Slavophiles easily took many of the current ideas of the German philosophers and crossed them with conceptions of the Russian Orthodox Church to create a theory for their new nationalism.

All of these various impulses combined to influence the newly born Ukrainian literature. There was much that directly appealed to the writers. For example the Ukrainians were conscious of their past, at least those who were conscious of anything. They knew that the exploits of the Kozaks were exactly the sort of thing that had attracted the attention of the Romantic poets of both Russia and Poland. They knew the wealth of their folklore, the number of weird themes that they had at their disposal. They realized the potentialities of the description of their folk customs. Besides, tales of the unhappy peasant, the seduced girl, the serf were common in the Romantic literature and the everyday life around them gave them countless examples to illustrate their writings.

It required the work of a master to put the new modern Ukrainian literature on its feet. Kotlyarevsky had made a start in fashioning the language in which they could work. Kvitka-Osnovyanenko had carried on the work with his prose tales but there was needed an outstanding author who was sincerely devoted to the Ukrainian cause and was at the same time a master of the language, to weld together the various elements and to produce in Ukrainian works which would be on a par with those of the two conquering cultures which were then at their highest stage of poetic development. With the loss of most of their educated classes and with the hard conditions and the scanty opportunities offered to the peasants and the serfs, it might seem as if the man could not be found and as if the Ukrainian start was from the beginning foredoomed to failure. To the surprise of even the most optimistic, a great poet suddenly appeared, Taras Shevchenko.

_CHAPTER TWO_

THE LIFE OF SHEVCHENKO

Taras Shevchenko was born in Ukraine in the village of Morintsy in the district of Zvenihorod, Government of Kiev on the right bank of the Dniper River. The situation of this community was of great importance in the formation of the character of the poet. It was in this general vicinity that the bloody outbreak of the Koliischchina had taken place in 1768, when the infuriated Orthodox population of the province had risen against their Polish masters and had burned the city of Uman. This war was to be the theme of Shevchenko’s great poem, _Haydamaki_. The revolt was bloodily suppressed, especially after Catherine the Great had listened to the pleadings of King Stanislas Poniatowski of Poland and had sent her troops to aid in the defeat of the rebels who had erroneously believed that they were acting in accordance with the will of the Russian Empress.

The only result of the war was the still deeper subjugation of the Ukrainian population and the hardening of the rule of the Polish masters. The second division of Poland which brought this right bank of the Dniper under the control of Russia did not aid the unfortunate Ukrainians. They found themselves bound still more strictly to the soil and they soon learned to their discomfiture that Russia would herself back up the claims of the Polish landlords. The demands of the masters were carried to a new high and there was little or no redress for the unfortunate victims. They had only their memories of the past and the traditions and folksongs which they had inherited to remind them that their ancestors and the Kozaks had once been free men and able to control their own destiny.

Among the survivors of this merciless struggle was Ivan Shevchenko, the grandfather of the poet and he lived well into the lifetime of his grandson and was wont to tell him and the other members of the family of the savage events of 1768 and the unfortunate consequences. He was a living contact between the old and the new.

The old man must have been a superior type of peasant for he had seen to it that his son Hrihori Shevchenko had been taught to read and write. The son was a prosperous serf at a time when his prosperity could bring him few advantages, and he constantly sought for a new and better life on the estates of his master, Vasily Vasilyevich Engelhardt. After his marriage to Katerina Boykivna, who seems to have been also a very kind and intelligent woman, the two lived in the village of Kirilivka, where his father lived, as a carriage maker and he owned a cart with a team of bulls. His father-in-law soon bought him a little cabin and some land in Morintsy about a mile away and it was in a typical Ukrainian peasant cabin that the poet was born on February 25-March 9, 1814. Conditions here were unsatisfactory and it was not long before the Shevchenkos returned to Kirilivka where Taras spent his boyhood.

Kirilivka was a typical large Ukrainian village of the right bank. It was in a fertile region with an abundance of orchards and fruit trees and gardens. Picturesquely located, it seemed a real paradise but beneath the charming exterior, the institution and the practice of serfdom made the village for its inhabitants a perfect hell, where all kinds of evil and injustice prevailed and where the hours of forced labor demanded by the master made life almost impossible.

Taras was the third of six children and was always attached to his older sister Katerina who married when he was still very young. His father tried to give him an education but the opportunities were very scanty. Taras always remembered his parents with the greatest kindness but when he was nine years old, his mother died of poverty and of overwork on the lands of the master. This meant the ending of the happy period of his life.

With six small children, the father Hrihori could not maintain his household without a wife and so he soon married a widow, Oksana Tereshchenchikha, from Morintsy. She brought her three children with her to her new home. The marriage was not a happy one. The stepmother was very cruel to the children of her husband, begrudged them the food they ate, and quarreled unceasingly. It was a sore disappointment for the young Taras and to avoid the perpetual beatings which he received, he used to take refuge with his older sister who was married and living in a neighboring village. Finally when he was twelve years old, his father died too and the young Taras was thrown on his own resources, since his uncle who was his guardian paid little attention to him.

As a means of finding some respite from the cruelty that was going on at home, he went to a village clerk Bohorsky in an endeavor to learn something about painting, for he already had been attracted to this and also had developed a fertile imagination. His stay with Bohorsky was none too successful.

The clerk was an incorrigible drunkard and besides nearly starving the poor boy, he tyrannized over him in every way but he did succeed in making him literate and in teaching him to read the Psalter. In fact Taras became so successful in this that the clerk sent him out to read the Psalms at peasant funerals and thus allow himself more time for drinking with his friends. Taras finally had his revenge. One day when he found his teacher drunk, he flogged him as hard as he could and then made off with a volume of art works. This was apparently a book containing some of the stock designs for ikon painting and for lettering.

Disgusted with the worthless and brutal teacher from whom he had imbibed only a feeling that violence was wrong, he made his way to the village of Lisanka to study under another clerk. This likewise was unsuccessful. For four days the teacher employed him only in preparing paints and in bringing water from the river Tykych. At the end of that day Taras again disappeared and turned up at Tarasivka, where there was a still more locally famous painter of Saint Nicholas and of Ivan the Soldier, but here again he met only a rebuff. Finally he had exhausted all the clerks in the neighborhood who had any reputation for painting, and there was nothing for him to do but to return to his native village and there as an orphan secure a scanty living by acting as a herdsman for the village cattle and by doing any odd jobs that might appear in the community.

It was apparently at this moment when he was about thirteen years of age that Shevchenko had his first taste of love. While he was pasturing the village sheep, he suddenly started to shed bitter tears and a young girl who was gathering hemp near by came over to console him and kissed him. Her name was Oksana Kovalenkivna and her memory remained with him for many years as a type of sympathetic friend and love. That was all. It was only a moment in the drab life of the poor boy but it gave him an ideal of sympathy and affection that he had not had since the death of his mother and the image of Oksana appeared in many of his later verses.

From this idle existence Shevchenko was suddenly torn away by the overseer of the estate. He had shown little promise in his efforts to master the old fashioned and then decadent art of ikon painting. His physical stature did not promise that he would develop into a valuable laborer in the fields and yet the overseer had no intention of allowing him to live in idleness. So the boy suddenly found himself sent into the kitchen of the manor house to work as an assistant baker. Again Shevchenko failed to acquire the necessary skill and he was again in disgrace. Another task was sought for him and this time he was appointed a Kozak servant for the young master Pavel Vasilyevich Engelhardt.

His work here was boring and insignificant. He had only to remain dressed in a Kozak uniform in the anteroom of the master and to serve his slightest whims and needs. It meant long hours of doing nothing, the hardest kind of useless labor. He had to hand the young master his pipe, when he so desired, for it was beneath the dignity of Pavel Engelhardt to pick up his own pipe, even if it were beside him. All his other tasks were of the same non-essential character and the boy accustomed to his freedom was absolutely disgusted with his fate.

There was however one consolation. The master could not prevent the young serf from admiring the objects of art that were scattered around the house. The mansions of the day were very different from the rough houses of the peasantry. The latter were impoverished representatives of the past. The mansions were filled with the newest productions of western Europe and these gave to the sensitive boy a very different conception of art from that which he had received from the rude ikonostases of the village churches. He feasted his eyes upon them and apparently endeavored in stolen moments to make copies of them.

He also had the opportunity to travel. Pavel Engelhardt was perpetually going somewhere and he had to travel with an entire retinue of servants. This meant that the young Shevchenko was torn away from his native village and his native surroundings. In 1829 Engelhardt who was a Guards officer took him to Wilno and for fourteen years Shevchenko did not see again his beloved Ukraine.

It was at Wilno that an accident happened which determined his fate. On December 6 Engelhardt and his wife went out to an entertainment and the young Shevchenko was obliged to stay on watch until they returned. To wile away the time he set himself to copying a print of the Kozak Platon which he had acquired on the way to Wilno. He became so absorbed in this that he did not notice the return of the master who accordingly found him copying by candle light. Engelhardt became enraged at the actions of the boy and scolded him violently because he might have set fire not only to the house but to the whole city. The next day he gave orders to have him soundly flogged. The episode might have ended here but Engelhardt noticed that Shevchenko was making an excellent copy of the work. This led him to inquire further and he saw some of his other sketches. So, having roundly punished the young culprit, he sent him to the Art Academy of Wilno, where he perhaps studied under Jan Rustem. Still later he transferred him to Warsaw to take lessons from the celebrated Franciszek Lampa.

It was a critical moment in the life of the young man. Now at least part of his ambitions could be gratified but he still remained a serf in his master’s service with no hope of any amelioration of his lot, for the nobles of the day were only too happy to have under their control artists, actors, and learned persons of every description. It was a discouraging situation, for there was little hope of fame or of satisfaction for a man who was compelled under penalty of flogging or banishment to physical labor to draw sketches whenever it suited his master’s whim.

While at Wilno Shevchenko had again fallen mildly in love with a Polish seamstress, Dunia Haszowska, a free woman who spoke to him about the coming Polish uprising. She was an ardent Polish nationalist and apparently her influence, intended to win Taras to the Polish cause, only drove him further in his devotion to the cause of Ukraine.

As the hour of revolt came nearer, Engelhardt suddenly left Warsaw and went to St. Petersburg. It was a safer place in case of trouble and it also gave him more opportunity for his social inclinations. Naturally Shevchenko was taken along with him and here Engelhardt apprenticed him for four years to the painter Shirayev in 1832.

There is something strange in this contract. It probably marked a change in the plans of Engelhardt for his unusual serf. At Wilno and Warsaw he had had him taught by painters in the best sense of the word and had apparently not spared money for lessons. Now in St. Petersburg he did not send Shevchenko to a portrait or landscape painter but to a professional decorator who was already known for his work in several St. Petersburg theatres. There was a plebeian and unidealistic side to this work in the making of designs and transferring them automatically to the walls and ceilings of buildings that displeased Shevchenko. He missed all the artistic inspiration that had apparently inspired him previously and felt that he was becoming a mechanical drudge.

The contract between Shirayev and Engelhardt must have ended by law in 1836 but Engelhardt left him to work further as a laborer in the atelier of Shirayev who was a determined exploiter of his subordinates. Shevchenko had but two methods of relaxation--to make sketches of a fellow serf, Ivan Nechuporenko, and to copy statues in the Winter Garden.

In 1837 he suddenly made the acquaintance of another Ukrainian artist, Ivan Maksimovich Soshenko, who was then living in St. Petersburg. There are two versions of this meeting. The more romantic is that Soshenko saw him first during one of the white nights of St. Petersburg sketching a statue of Saturn in the Winter Gardens. The other, that of Soshenko himself, is that he heard from a relative of Shirayev’s of this wonderful young Ukrainian artist and decided to make his acquaintance.

In either case Soshenko became enthusiastic over the artistic abilities of Shevchenko and over his possibilities for independent work. He soon took the opportunity to introduce his young friend to the leading men in the Imperial Academy of Arts and desired to have him enrolled there as a student. This was impossible for no serf was allowed to study in this institution. Yet the Secretary of the Academy, Vasily Ivanovich Grigorovich, and the celebrated professor, Karl Pavlovich Bryulov, both desired to have him enrolled as a student. There was only one solution for the difficulty. It was necessary to obtain freedom for Shevchenko. Engelhardt was not sympathetic. He had expended considerable money on the education of the young man and he was not going to be deprived of his services now that he was becoming recognized as an artist. He promptly demanded the payment of 2500 silver rubles. This was an enormous sum and was apparently intended to be prohibitive.

The group of artists interested in Shevchenko was not to be discouraged by this demand. They interested in the case Vasily Andreyevich Zhukovsky, who naturally had great influence in Russian governmental cultural circles. He was the tutor of the Tsarevich, later Alexander II; he had been the Russian teacher of the Empress Charlotte of Prussia, the wife of Tsar Nicholas I. He was the recognized authority on European literature in Russia. With his court connections, it was clear that if he would, he could secure the necessary funds. He therefore arranged with Bryulov to paint his picture to be disposed of by a private lottery. A portrait of Zhukovsky by Bryulov was an event for the rich circles of Russia. The money was raised and paid over to Engelhardt and on April 22, 1838, Taras Shevchenko became a free man for the first time in his life.

Shevchenko was almost overcome by his new happiness. From that moment he was free. Like any other citizen of Russia, he was able to apply for a passport, to choose his own abode, to do what he liked without any fear of the changeable moods of an autocratic master. The world seemed rosy to him and he could hardly concentrate on anything. He at once procured new clothes, filed the act of liberation in the official bureau, and the next day registered at the Academy as a student of Bryulov.

Karl Pavlovich Bryulov was then at the height of his fame. Originally of French Huguenot descent, he had been allowed to take a Russian name when he won a prize in the Academy of Arts and went to Rome. There he had become acquainted with the leading artists and literary men who had thronged to that city during the twenties. His painting, _The Last Days of Pompeii_, had taken Italy and then France and finally Russia by storm and when he commenced to teach at the Academy of Arts, he raised its popularity and became the very center of everything artistic and cultural in the Russian capital.

The effect of all this upon Shevchenko can hardly be overestimated. Almost over night he had passed from a nobody, a mere serf eternally at the beck and call of his master, to an independent student of the Art Academy and a favorite pupil of the great Bryulov. His sensitive nature could not fail to react to this overwhelming difference.

He worked hard every day in the Academy and made a very creditable success. At the end of the first year he won a silver medal for drawing from nature. Apparently his earlier instruction here came in handy. In 1840 he won a silver medal of the second class for his attempt in painting with oils and in 1841 he received the same award for a painting on a historical subject and for portraiture. He had made good use of his opportunities and had not allowed himself to be distracted by the gay amusements of many of the young artists, although he apparently had his share of entertainments and dinners.

More important than this for the young man were the opportunities which came to him for general culture. His early education was extremely defective. He had not had even the most irregular schooling outside of the elementary instruction in reading and writing offered by the local clerks under whom he had gone through the motions of studying. Now he was able to read at his leisure and he applied himself ardently to making up the defects in his training. He read abundantly in Ukrainian history and he probably was already fairly well acquainted with what there was in the modern Ukrainian literature. Yet he needed more than that and his relations with his fellow students and still more with Bryulov opened his eyes to the classical and Western European cultures.

While he had been in Rome, Bryulov had been the friend of Sir Walter Scott, Bulwer-Lytton, and the various writers of France and Germany who made Rome their headquarters. His great paintings had been on classical themes and we can well ascribe to his influence Shevchenko’s interest in classical antiquity, for the younger Russian poets were already turning away from the classical tradition that had dominated Russian literature through the period of Pushkin.

He dined frequently at Bryulov’s home and Bryulov came to dinner in his poor quarters. The master warned him against marrying on the ground that geniuses should not marry and then introduced him to the fascinating actress whom he himself intended to marry and from whom he was soon separated.

At the same time Shevchenko was very slow in seeking the society of ladies whom he might consider above his own station in life. He never forgot his origin and his chief romance in this period was with a young girl, the daughter of a neighbor whom he tried to teach to read but whom he found an unserious pupil. At times he enjoyed the society of a higher class but there was something in him which urged him to confine his closest women friends to those of his own class.

At some time during his stay in St. Petersburg, Shevchenko began to write verse. It must have been before his emancipation, for the oldest known poem is the ballad _Prychynna_ (The Mad Girl) which is reminiscent of Bürger, Zhukovsky, and Mickiewicz with a strong admixture of Ukrainian folklore. This was exactly the same type of poem that was practiced throughout the Slavonic world with the coming of Romanticism. It can be dated in 1837 but it is almost too perfect to be the first attempt of the young artist and it must have been preceded by many experiments. The modesty of Shevchenko and his devotion to his painting made him at first very hesitant in regard to his poetic performances and it was more or less by accident that they were brought to the attention of the public. A few of his friends were aware of his activity. Thus in 1838 Hrebinka wrote to Kvitka that there was in St. Petersburg a young Ukrainian named Shevchenko writing verses and excellent ones. Yet the poems attracted little or no comment until at the end of 1839 a Ukrainian landowner, Petro Martos, met Shevchenko and arranged for him to paint his portrait. As he was sitting in the artist’s apartment, he happened to notice some poetry on various sheets of paper. He succeeded in borrowing them and on reading them became so thrilled that he resolved to publish them at his own expense.

The work appeared in 1840 under the title of the _Kobzar_ and it marked a new era in Ukrainian literature. Kotlyarevsky had died in 1838 and his passing made a gap which had seemed irreparable. Now the appearance of the _Kobzar_, small as it was, showed to everyone, both friend and foe, that his place had been taken by a still greater author. In vain the Russian critics, including Belinsky and the Westerners, attacked it as insignificant and peasantlike. The Ukrainians throughout the entire area of Ukraine welcomed it and saw in it the answer to their confused hopes for a worthy literature of their own.

The next year there appeared the _Haydamaki_, the longest of the epics of Shevchenko. There was the same criticism of his work by the Russian and Polish critics and the same enthusiastic reception of it by the Ukrainians. The edition was soon sold out and Shevchenko received a considerable amount of money for it. More than that, he was sought out by all the Ukrainians who had occasion to come to St. Petersburg and many of his later friends he came to know in this period. He had in a very real sense become a national figure and was more sure of himself in his relations with society and with all those whom he had to meet.

Yet despite the apparent success of all that he undertook, things were not going too well with him. He had many firm friends in St. Petersburg and his relation with his teacher Bryulov remained as close as before. Yet he seemed to be dissatisfied. He was dissatisfied with the Academy, perhaps because he was not making as much progress in his use of colors as he would have liked. It is to be noted that he won no prize after 1841, that is, after he had become famous from his writings, but there is no evidence that this was due to any antagonism on the part of the authorities to his ardent Ukrainian attitude. It could not be that he had neglected his painting for his writings, for it is remarkable that at this same time he had almost stopped writing and 1842 was one of his least productive years.

Undoubtedly his dislike for St. Petersburg affected him. He had seen his works hostilely reviewed or scorned by the Russian critics, especially those of the liberal camp from whom he might have expected to receive consideration. He was busy with portraits and with his social life, but at the same time he was struck by the contrast between the life that he was leading and the misery of his brothers and sisters in Ukraine. He had not seen them for fourteen years and he was becoming homesick and he wanted at all costs to pay a visit to his native land.

So in the summer of 1843, he succeeded in securing a leave of absence from the Academy and obtained permission of the authorities to go home. His return to Ukraine was a real event. He paid a visit to his family but he was no longer a mere serf. He was the poet of Ukraine and all the landowners and the persons of prominence vied with one another in entertaining him. His trip was one triumphal procession, as he passed from estate to estate. Almost everywhere he was asked to paint one or more of the members of the family and the trip was successful not only from the social but even more from the financial point of view.

Among the families which entertained him, one of the most hospitable was that of Prince Repnin, the former governor general of Kiev and the friend of Kotlyarevsky. He was now living on his estates and was in disfavor with the government, for his wife was a granddaughter of Kyrylo Rozumovsky, the last of the Hetmans, and his enemies had charged that he was endeavoring to recover the title, even at the cost of separation from Russia. Repnin was a good type of the Russianized Ukrainian landlord who had not lost his interest in the people under him and who was sincerely opposed to serfdom.

It was here at his house that Shevchenko met his daughter, Princess Barbara. She was six years older than the poet but the two were attracted to one another. The Princess was a little nettled that the poet showed more interest in the beginning in a young friend than in her but she was sincerely impressed by his personality and ability and set herself to induce him to do more serious work and to avoid the company of the more frivolous and gay young people to whom he might be attracted. Shevchenko appreciated her interest and called her his guardian angel. For a while it seemed as if they might fall in love but the difference in their social position was a barrier to such a union, and although the two were ardently in love, yet neither betrayed it except through an extreme friendship in which they addressed each other as brother and sister.

By the end of the summer Shevchenko, whose painting had considerably improved, seriously considered not returning to the Academy. He even went so far as to write to the Secretary, Grigorovich, to ask his advice and when he was urged to come back and received a two months extension of his leave, he paid a hurried visit to Moscow and was back in St. Petersburg shortly after the beginning of 1844.

Yet this short trip greatly changed the temper and the work of the poet. He was able to see the evils under which Ukraine was suffering not through the memories of a young serf but through the eyes of an enlightened and progressive and successful man of the world. His old conceptions based upon the tales of his grandfather that these ills were a result of Polish hostility and the suppression of the Koliishchina were proved false. The worst evil was in the present and that was a direct result of the Russian overlordship and the suppression of Ukrainian liberties. The evils which came from the union with Moscow by the so-called Treaty of Pereyaslav were more real than the danger threatening from an already vanquished and broken Poland. Henceforth his poems turned against Russia and he abandoned the romantic scenes of the past that had formed such a large part of the _Kobzar_. At the same time he increased his emphasis upon the injustice of the villagers among themselves. He had touched this in the _Katerina_ but he had learned in his native village of the sad fate of Oksana Kovalenkivna whom he had once loved. She had been seduced by a Russian and had later become insane, after she had been disowned by her parents.

He occupied himself during this year with the bringing out of a series of sketches, _Picturesque Ukraine_, and continued his usual life at the Academy and with his friends. The ferment of opposition to injustice was however working in him and toward the end of the summer he finished the _Dream_, one of his most powerful attacks on the present situation in Ukraine. It was impossible to think of publishing such a poem with its caricature of the Empress and its open condemnation of both Peter the Great and Catherine the Great. It did however begin to circulate in manuscript form among the friends of Shevchenko and the adherents of Ukrainian liberties.

This was no exceptional thing under the regime of Nicholas I. Even such a masterpiece of Russian literature and such a harmless satire on the social life of the day as the comedy _Sorrow out of Intelligence_ by Griboyedov was refused publication by the censor, despite the fact that it was the favorite reading of St. Petersburg society and the work of a distinguished and trusted diplomat. Most of the poems of Pushkin and Lermontov were still unpublished, and it was generally understood that there was in the two capitals a large amount of literature by the leading writers which were known only to the reading public and the police chiefs unofficially. The circulation of a poem as the _Dream_ which might have serious consequences would therefore not be threatening until it might suit the officials to take cognizance of it. Shevchenko probably spent some anxious moments when he first showed it to friends but apparently he gave very little thought to the possibility that he might be denounced to the authorities and he continued during the next years to write his great poems attacking the alien domination of Ukraine.

On March 22, 1845, Taras Shevchenko finished the course at the Academy of Arts and received the right to call himself a free artist of the Academy and later in the same year on December 10 a diploma was formally issued to him confirming this fact, granting him the rights and privileges pertaining thereto and allowing him “with complete freedom and liberty to enter the service into which he as an artist desires to go.”

Without waiting for the arrival of the formal diploma, Shevchenko returned to Ukraine. In fact he went within two days of his formal departure from the Academy. He travelled by way of Moscow where he saw again old friends as Prof. Bodyansky and the celebrated actor Mikhaylo Shchepkin who had taken part in the first performance of Kotlyarevsky’s drama _Natalka Poltavka_. He spent the summer travelling around Ukraine and then in the late autumn he secured a position with the Archaeological Commission which had been formed by the Governor General Bibikov to study the ancient monuments of Ukraine. For this he was recommended to receive the sum of 150 rubles a year. It was a trifling sum even for those days but there was attached a permission to travel and with his fame and the possibility of making portraits, it was possible for him to live without too much hardship.

The year 1845 was one of his most productive years literarily. It was the time when Shevchenko had the opportunity to acquaint himself personally with all of the ancient monuments of his country and to observe for himself the terrible conditions under which the people were living. The year saw the continuation of the tendencies described in the _Dream_ and in such poems as the _Great Grave_, the _Caucasus_, and the _Epistle to my dead, living and unborn countrymen in Ukraine and not Ukraine_, he expressed his bitter indignation at the denial of independence and liberty to his people. He was skating on thin ice in these poems but the blow which was hanging over him was deferred.

At this time in Kiev there was a very active intellectual life. There had gathered around the University a group of young men who were destined to become famous in the Ukrainian movement. Here were Mykola Kostomariv, the historian, Panteleimon Kulish, Vasil I. Bilozersky, and many others. They were all attracted by the ideal of doing something for Ukrainian independence but their patriotic fervor was largely tinged with romantic dreams.