Chapter III: Introduction (2)

The traditions of the Decembrists of 1825 were still alive among a large part of the younger Russian thinkers, even though the centre of activity had passed away from the aristocratic officers who had risked their lives and careers in that abortive movement. They dreamed of a liberated Russia and they apparently like most of the Russian conservatives and radicals did not conceive of any dismemberment of their country. On the other hand in 1824 the Czechoslovak writer Jan Kollár had published the _Daughter of Slava_, a series of sonnets appealing for Slavonic liberty and stressing the brotherhood of all the Slavonic races. Kollár’s work gradually spread throughout the Slavonic world and produced marked reactions everywhere. Some of the Russians played with the idea. It found strong repercussions in the Balkans. In Kiev it affected this group of young thinkers and its influence was aided by the studies of Slavonic antiquities and general Slavonic literature by Pavel Šafařík, another Czech scholar.

The immediate result was the organization of the Society of Saints Cyril and Methodius in January, 1846. The young enthusiasts of the Society dreamed of a great Slav republic which was to embrace all the Slavonic nations with the various groups organized as states. Perhaps there was much of the Masonic organization in this but there is the strong likelihood that the example of the American Constitution played a considerable role in the final method of government that was proposed. For an internal policy the Society urged the development of education to fit the people for their new responsibilities.

There was nothing particularly dangerous about this Society. It contained the same kind of potential explosiveness as such modern organizations as Union Now and similar plans for world organization. The members seem to have believed in the possibility of peaceful change and the very unmilitary character of the leaders could easily have shown the Tsar that they were little more than idealists who might have been used to further the interests of the Russian Empire. Yet to Nicholas I, anything which savored of free institutions was actually and not only potentially dangerous. Russia was rushing on to the debacle of the Crimean War and the Tsar was engaged in a futile effort to stop all discussion and the appearance of western ideals. It was evident that danger threatened the entire group and they were compelled to act as a secret organization. They adopted their own flag, their own seal, and ritual.

During the summer of 1846, the members of this Society scattered on their own business. Shevchenko passed the time on various estates and dreamed of going abroad to Italy to continue his studies in painting. He had received an offer of assistance and he did not realize that Anna Bilozerska, who was marrying Panteleimon Kulish, was planning to sell her jewels to secure for him the necessary funds which were to be given anonymously. At the same time he was building high hopes on the possibility of receiving a definite position as teacher of painting at the University of Kiev, and this was definitely given him in February, 1847.

Everything seemed to be favorable for a happy future, when the blow suddenly fell. Shevchenko had returned to Kiev for the wedding of Mykola Kostomariv and several of the friends assembled at the same time, while Kulish who had been called to St. Petersburg and then given a fellowship to travel abroad was on his way to the border. Unknown to them, Oleksy Petrov, a student who had lived in a room near that of Bulak, another member of the group, had listened to the lively discussions that had gone on at various times when some of the scattered members had come to Kiev during the preceding months, and had become convinced that there was some conspiracy afoot. Perhaps he had even made friends with Shevchenko with the idea of discovering something about the society.

At all events on February 28, he suddenly informed M. V. Yuzifovich, the supervisor of education in the district, of the conspiracy. The latter at once suspended Shevchenko from his position with the Archaeological Commission on the technicality that he had gone to Kiev without permission. Still there was no real suspicion on the part of the group. Shevchenko appeared at Kostomariv’s wedding. In the meanwhile Yuzifovich had forwarded the complaint to Bibikov who was then in St. Petersburg and on March 17, the latter had referred the matter to Count Orlov, the chief of the gendarmes.

The police acted speedily, when we consider the difficulties of transportation and the transmission of news. On April 5, 1847, the thoroughly unsuspecting Shevchenko together with his friends was arrested and sent to St. Petersburg. He arrived there on April 17 and the trial took place almost immediately.

At an inquiry made at the Academy of Arts, Count Lakhtenberg, the President, replied after giving Shevchenko’s record at the Academy, “It is necessary to add that Shevchenko has a gift for poetry and in the Little Russian language has written several poems, respected by people who are familiar with the Little Russian language and the former life of this region; he was always considered as a moral man, perhaps something of a dreamer and an honorer of the Little Russian past, but nothing prejudicial came to the knowledge of the Academy.”

In his examination, Shevchenko denied membership in the Ukrainian-Slavonic Society but admitted that he had written some insolent and satirical works, “forgetting his conscience and the fear of God.” He had nothing to say about his associates in the Society.

In the summing up of the evidence Count Orlov placed the case of Shevchenko almost entirely upon his verses. “Shevchenko instead of feeling eternal gratitude to the persons of the Most August Family, which had deigned to free him from serfdom, composed verses in the Little Russian language of the most revolting character. In them he expressed lamentation for the so-called enslavement and misery of Ukraine, proclaimed the glory of the old Hetman rule and the former freedom of the Cossacks, and with incredible boldness poured out slanders and bile on the persons of the Imperial House, forgetting that they were his personal benefactors. Besides the fact that all that was prohibited attracted persons of weak character, Shevchenko acquired among his friends the fame of a celebrated Little Russian writer, and so his poems became doubly harmful and dangerous. With his poems which were beloved in Little Russia there could be sowed and consequently take root thoughts of the so-called happiness of the times of the Hetmanate, the happiness of bringing back those times and of the possibility of Ukraine existing as a separate country. Judging by the extraordinary respect which all the Ukraine-Slavonians felt personally for Shevchenko and for his poems, it at first seemed that he might be, if not the active head among them, yet the tool which they wished to use in their designs; but on the one hand these designs were not so important as they appeared at first sight, and on the other, Shevchenko had begun to write his revolting poems already in 1837, when Slavonic ideas had not interested the Kiev scholars; similarly the whole case shows that Shevchenko did not belong to the Ukrainian-Slavonic Society but acted separately, attracted by his own corruption. Nevertheless by his revolting spirit and boldness which passes all bounds, he must be acknowledged one of the chief culprits.”

The sentence came on May 26 with the verdict, “The artist Shevchenko, for his writing of revolting and in the highest degree impudent poetry, as a person of a healthy constitution, is to be sent as a private to the Orenburg Separate Corps, with the right of freedom through honorable service and instructions are to be sent to the command to have the strictest supervision that from him, under no pretext, can there come any revolting and satirical works.” The Tsar with his own hand added to this “Under the strictest supervision with a prohibition of writing and sketching.”

The sentence was carried out at once and by June 11, Shevchenko was already in Orenburg and duly outfitted as a soldier. He was attached to the 5th battalion of the Corps which was stationed at the Fortress of Orsk, 267 versts (about 150 miles) east of Orenburg in the heart of the barren steppes. It was an uninviting place amid uninviting surroundings.

Shevchenko had no desire to become a soldier and he loathed army life and discipline. It seemed to him a worse slavery than that which he had known as a serf. Every detail awoke his disgust. It was in vain that the commanders endeavored to teach him to drill and to march. He was shocked at the filth and the language of the privates who surrounded him and with whom he had to associate. They were the exact opposite of the cultured and intellectual people with whom he had associated at St. Petersburg and in Ukraine. They were a tough and foul-mouthed gang of ruffians, and this is not to be wondered at for many of them had been sent there as a punishment. Yet much of his reaction must be attributed to the dissatisfaction of a sensitive intellectual with the dreary life of the barracks in peace times.

Besides that, the prohibition of writing and painting took away from Shevchenko the inspiration which he might have drawn from the unusual surroundings in which he was. He could only dream of Ukraine, think of its sufferings, bemoan his fate, and hope and pray for something better. He wrote letters to Princess Repnina and to others of his friends, lamenting especially the prohibition against painting. The Princess interceded for him with Count Orlov and in reply merely received a warning against corresponding with such an evil character. One of his friends sent him some paints. If he tried to write verses, he was compelled to do so secretly and to hide them in his boot.

Apparently the officers were not too hard upon him, and the intercession of friends as Princess Repnina and Count Aleksyey K. Tolstoy, the celebrated Russian writer, had some effect, for on January 30, 1848, Count Orlov had sent to Orsk to inquire about the conduct of Shevchenko and the possibility of removing the ban on his painting. It is possible that some favorable reply was given for early in May, he was attached as a sketcher to an expedition which was setting out to explore the east coast of the Sea of Aral. However Shevchenko looked upon this unofficial modification of the original sentence, the work was difficult and attended with many hardships. His mission lasted for a year and half and he returned to Orenburg in November, 1849.

The little expeditionary force of infantry, engineers, Kirghiz and camels had set out from Orsk, gone to the Sea of Aral, built a fleet of ships and then sailing along the coast to Raim, had landed, built a fort at Kos-Aral and had passed the winter there. During this time Shevchenko made many sketches of the scenery under government orders, despite the official prohibition, and during the winter he was able to work on several poems. Yet it was a disagreeable journey. The Sea of Aral was a salt sea. Its banks were monotonous and bare, quite unlike the blooming fields of Ukraine. In addition to that, he was definitely cut off from the world. For a year and a half no mail reached him or the expedition and he imagined that he was entirely forgotten, while his friends at home thought that he had forgotten them.

When he returned to Orenburg at the end of 1849, he again presented a petition to be allowed to paint and in it he stated--what was perhaps not the exact truth--that never in his painting had he ventured to commit any impropriety. His officers, knowing his services on the expedition, seconded his request.

In the meanwhile they allowed him to live in the city of Orenburg, to wear civilian clothes instead of the hated uniform, and to paint as many portraits as he desired. The city was filled with Polish and Ukrainian exiles and in their company the time passed much more pleasantly and fruitfully than during the fatiguing and difficult days in the fortress and on the expedition.

It was too good to last. In the spring a certain ensign (it is not sure whether his name was Isayev or Illashenko) presented a complaint that contrary to the Imperial edict Shevchenko was both writing and painting. Lieutenant Obruchev, who knew very well that Shevchenko had been acting under official authority, was yet afraid that the matter might reach the Third Section and make trouble. As a result he searched the quarters of Shevchenko and found what he had long known were there--civilian clothes, paintings, and writings. The poet was immediately rearrested on April 27 and sent back to the Fortress of Orsk where his battalion was still stationed. There he was placed in the guardhouse and his trial lasted from June 28 to July 5 before General-Adjutant Ignatyev.

The ground covered was already known to every one. Shevchenko denied any deliberate wrongdoing and stated that he had supposed that the prohibition against writing had applied only to imaginative works and had not been intended to cover private correspondence, which the authorities forwarded and which had not violated any law of propriety but had been merely personal greetings and requests for assistance. There was no defence possible on the charge of having civilian clothes, but this was a matter that might become far more serious for his superiors who had allowed him to remain at Orenburg than for the unfortunate victim. It was to be expected that the Tsar would take a more serious view of a private wearing civilian clothes than of the other accusations, for that directly touched his personal views of discipline. On August 26, the order came to release Shevchenko from the guardhouse and to send him to the First Battalion at Novopetrovsk under the strictest supervision. His former commanding officers were also punished and the results had disagreeable consequences for many of the friends with whom he had corresponded.

He arrived on September 13 at his new post. Novopetrovsk was in a still more forbidding region on the east coast of the Caspian Sea and had been built four years before to protect the region from depredation by Kirghiz raiders. It was on a barren peninsula reaching into the Caspian Sea from the treeless steppe. His reputation had preceded him and also the knowledge that the Tsar himself had ordered him not to write and paint. As a result, the commanding officer, Colonel Mayevsky, did not feel able to mitigate the Imperial order. The company officers, Captain Potapov and Lieutenant Obryadin, were men of slight culture and of the most limited military outlook. They were willing to enforce the orders to the limit and were only interested in compelling the poet to become an efficient soldier, to drill and march accurately and to go through the necessary motions in the proper way.

This was doubly depressing for the poor poet. He was a remarkably bad soldier. Whether this was because of his stubborn determination not to be a good one but to maintain his theories to the end or whether he was temperamentally unmilitary, it is hard to say. It is to be noted in this connection that even in his youth he had failed in any technical occupation at the Engelhardt estate, while he made progress so soon as he was allowed to study art and to write poetry.

For two years the unequal struggle continued. Shevchenko was watched minutely and hourly. He was not allowed a scrap of paper and during his service at Novopetrovsk there was no opportunity for him to write even the shortest poems. He was able to get out only a very few letters to Princess Repnina and to some of his closest friends. Yet his spirit never wavered. He maintained the same unwavering attitude in his feelings, treating himself as a sufferer for the cause of Ukraine.

About two years later Major Irakly Uskov was sent to command the garrison. He was a more determined and broad-minded man and he decided to do what he could to make the fate of Shevchenko a little more tolerable. He invited him frequently to his house, acquainted him with his family, and asked him to paint their pictures. The favor shown to the prisoner was so marked that gossip arose about his wife Agatha and Shevchenko and made it very difficult for the old relationship to continue. Yet Uskov did not on that account turn against the poet. When Shevchenko conceived the idea of painting the altar picture in the post chapel, Uskov warmly approved the idea but again the authorities in Orenburg sternly forbade it on the basis of the Tsar’s orders, and this new hope of enjoyable activity was abandoned.

Nicholas I died February 17, 1855 and a new era seemed to dawn for Russia. The new Tsar, Alexander II, was the pupil of that Zhukovsky who had had so much to do with the liberation of Shevchenko from serfdom. The new reign was opening with an appearance of liberality and with a general amnesty and Shevchenko could hope for his release. Yet he was not included in the general list of pardons. His attack on the Dowager Empress in the _Dream_ had been so bitter that she was believed to have influenced her son against the act.

Shevchenko was nearly in despair but his friends at St. Petersburg did not lose heart. Count Feodor Petrovich Tolstoy of the Academy of Arts, and his wife continued to work through all possible social channels to secure the release of the poet. It was a hard and thankless task but by the spring of 1857 his friend Mikhaylo Lazarevsky could write that a pardon had been secured and that the days of Shevchenko’s exile were numbered.

Then came one of the hardest parts of his confinement--the tedious waiting until the order could travel through official channels to Orenburg or Astrakhan and then be forwarded to the isolated post. Mail arrived rarely. Shevchenko began a journal and in it he noted down with despair the numbers of mails that arrived without bringing the desired letter. He was continually passing from the heights of hope to the depths of despair as week followed week without the desired news. Finally it came on July 21 and as often with such delayed greetings, Shevchenko was not on hand to receive it. He was living in the city and in the morning he went to the fortress for a shave “and from the non-commissioned officer Kulikh I first learned that at nine o’clock in the morning a mail boat had arrived. Having shaved, and with sinking heart, I returned to the city and, leaving the fort, I met Bazhanov who was in charge of the post hospital. And he first greeted me with Liberty: July 21, 1857, at eleven o’clock in the morning.”

Shevchenko was now free but he was miles from any vestige of civilization and eager to return to his friends in the capital. There were two ways of leaving. The official route was via the corps headquarters at Orenburg but this meant a journey of 1000 versts across the desolate steppe before he could reach Astrakhan on the lower Volga. The simpler way was to board a boat and go directly to Astrakhan. His definitive orders for departure had not arrived and Uskov had no power to approve the direct route. He finally did so and on August 2, Shevchenko boarded a fishing boat for Astrakhan.

He arrived on the 4th in the late afternoon. For the first time in ten years he was free of military service. For the first time in ten years he was able to move around without fear of punishment. He greedily looked around Astrakhan and made many friends. The Ukrainians there welcomed him as a great poet and it relieved him to find that he had not been forgotten during his long exile.

Finally on August 22 he started with some friends on a river steamship along the Volga for Nizhni Novgorod. It was a revelation to him and he endeavored to make sketches of the scenery along the river but it was all so new and startling in its beauty after ten years of the steppe that he did not complete any of his drawings. He stopped at Saratov for a short visit with the mother of his old friend Kostomariv. Finally on September 20, the boat reached Nizhni and he was able to go ashore.

Here the police were again waiting for him. His amnesty had not granted him permission to live in St. Petersburg and Major Uskov had from ignorance granted him this permission, when he let him go without requiring him to travel via Orenburg. Under any interpretation of the orders for his arrest, he would be required to return there for a formal receipt of future instructions. Yet he found friends at Nizhni and the Chief of Police and the Police physician very willingly allowed him to remain and forwarded to Orenburg a statement that he was too sick to travel. This left him temporarily safe but it postponed his hope of meeting with his friends for it was not until March 1, 1858, that he received the desired permission and then there was the disagreeable clause added that he was to remain under the supervision of the police.

The winter was not an unpleasant one. Everywhere he was received as a distinguished writer. He was invited to the Nizhni Club, was entertained by all the most distinguished social and artistic circles of the provincial city, and painted pictures of most of the outstanding persons, supporting himself largely in this way.

At the same time he wrote to Kulish and also to his old friend, the actor, Mikhail Semenovich Shchepkin, and asked them to visit him. With his usual caution Kulish refused to risk his career by visiting the banished poet but Shchepkin came down from Moscow and spent Christmas with him. He was the first of his old friends whom he had met since his return and it gave the poet great pleasure.

It also helped to precipitate a rather unpleasant episode. Shevchenko had never in his heart given up thoughts of marriage and while he was in Nizhni, he became enamored with an attractive young actress, Katerina Borisivna Piunova. She was apparently of Ukrainian stock for he saw her in Kotlyarevsky’s _Moskal-Charivnik_. She was dissatisfied with her position in Nizhni and was trying to secure one in Kazan. Shevchenko, fascinated by her and thinking as always of Ukraine, tried to use his influence and that of Shchepkin to get her to Kharkiv. She seemed to like his attentions but it was not long before he discovered that she was merely using them in order to secure a better contract and his devotion resulted only in disillusionment.

While he was in Nizhni, he had the opportunity of meeting some of the Decembrists who had been exiled by Nicholas I in 1825 and who were just being released after thirty years of Siberia. He went into ecstasies over their high principles. His comments on this group were more enthusiastic than on most of his friends of his own age.

As a matter of fact Shevchenko had grown more radical in prison or we might perhaps put it better by saying that he had become aware that the Russian government was inflicting upon its own people most of the same hardships that it had upon the Ukrainians. As a result he read constantly the various writings of Herzen and of the other radicals which appeared abroad and from this time on came to have closer kinship with the leaders of the intelligentsia.

In productive work during this winter he wrote the _Neophytes_, a study of the Christian persecutions under the Roman Emperor Nero. The comparison between him and the Tsar is so obvious that the poem terrified Kulish and he advised Shevchenko to be slow about letting its existence be known. This advice did not satisfy the poet who was utterly fearless and not to be swerved from what he considered right, but there were no ill effects from its production.

On March 8, he went by sleigh to Vladimir and there he met Captain Butakov who had commanded the expedition with which he had gone to the Sea of Aral. Shevchenko’s remark on meeting his old commander is very significant. “My heart grows cold at the very memory of that wilderness, but I think he is ready to settle down there forever.” (Journal, March 10.)

From Vladimir he went to Moscow late on the 10th and was taken sick with some disease of the eyes and for some days he was not allowed to go out on the street. However he disobeyed this order to go and see Princess Repnina. She had been his closest friend in the old days and now when he saw her, he says only in his diary “She has changed for the better; she looks as if she had grown younger, and were rushing into matrimony, a thing which I had not noticed previously. Has she not met in Moscow a good confessor?” (March 17). This seems to have been almost the end of another dream. He saw her again on the 24th but the old correspondence seems to have ended.

The years had treated Shevchenko very unkindly. He was only forty-four but the exile had made him prematurely aged. His health had suffered under the harsh regime and the difficult living conditions of the frontier. Even though his spirit remained unbroken, he was no longer a young and vigorous man. He still cherished his dreams of a home and children but from this time on he apparently gave up the hope of charming any one who might appeal to his mind and fit into the position to which he could honestly feel that he had risen. With the loss of his unconfessed love for Repnina and the episode with Piunova, Shevchenko turned more and more toward the peasantry from which he had sprung.

Yet it did not affect his dealings with men. He had the opportunity of making the acquaintance of Sergey Timofeyevich Aksakov, one of the grand old men of Russian literature and the author of the most delightful pictures of the good side of the old patriarchal life. Shevchenko had a sincere admiration for the old Slavophile who was then sixty-seven years old and whose early life had been spent in pleasant surroundings on the Bashkir steppes very similar to those where he himself had suffered. Aksakov invited him to his estates for the summer and Shevchenko apparently desired to accept. He also renewed his acquaintance with the family of Stankevich and with M. V. Maksimovich. At this time also he met the younger Aksakovs, Khomyakov and in fact all of the important Slavophile leaders, who accepted him as a great poet. Of course his closest friend was Shchepkin who was with him constantly but who was unfortunately compelled to leave for Yaroslavl.

Shevchenko left the same day for St. Petersburg where he arrived on March 27, just about eleven years from the time when he had been brought there as a prisoner for his trial and sentence. He went at once to his old friend, Mikhaylo Mikhaylevich Lazarevsky, who had helped him so much during his exile and then to see Count Feodor Petrovich Tolstoy, the Vice-President of the Academy of Arts.

It was largely through the Tolstoys that he had finally been pardoned and both the Count and Countess entertained him royally. They gave a dinner in his honor and acquainted him with many of the leaders of the cultivated artistic and literary set in the capital. Among these we may mention Count Aleksyey Konstantinovich Tolstoy, the celebrated dramatist novelist and poet, who with all of his liberal ideas was attracted and repelled by the strange figure of Ivan the Terrible, his cousins, the brothers Zhemchuzhnikov, the poet Lev Aleksandrovich Mey, the mathematician M. V. Ostrogorsky, Admiral Golenishchev, and many others. They all accepted the broken Ukrainian, they admired his poetry and Mey translated several of his poems into Russian.

On the other hand he also became acquainted with the leading radicals of the day as Nikolay Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky and Nikolay Aleksandrovich Dobrolyubov. Both of these men were connected with the _Sovremennik_, for which Kostomariv and Kulish also wrote. Chernyshevsky relied heavily upon Shevchenko in pointing out that the evils that befell the Ukrainians were due to the master-class, which was identical whether it was Russian, Polish or Ukrainian. To some extent Shevchenko agreed with him and this is greatly stressed by the Soviet critics as L. P. Nosenko (Velyky Poet-Revolyutioner, Odesa, 1939, pp. 51 ff.). It is very likely that there is some basis for their claims but on the other hand in a few poems which Shevchenko wrote after his return, his references to Khmelnitsky and to Ukraine show well that he had no desire to see his native country in any connection with Moscow and the Russian Empire.

He resumed his studies at the Academy of Arts but this time in etching. He achieved in this great success and his work under Prof. Yordan was so distinguished that in the spring of 1859 he was authorized to submit engravings for a promotion to the grade of Academician. He did this and on October 31, 1860, he was formally made an Academician of the Imperial Academy of Arts.

His life in St. Petersburg was relatively pleasant but he could not forget Ukraine and his unfortunate brothers and sisters who were still in serfdom. He finally secured permission to go there and left St. Petersburg for his last visit early in June, 1859. He planned to visit several friends and to pay a visit to his brothers and sister at Kirilivka. He met his sister Irina. They sat down under a pear tree, he placed his head in her lap, and listened to her sad story of all that she had had to suffer, especially since she became a widow. Shevchenko told her of his troubles also and asked her to find him a wife, for now that he was more or less free, he was determined to marry and have a home in Ukraine before he died.

From Kirilivka, he visited other friends and then new troubles overtook him. He was suddenly arrested at the town of Moshni. The police authorities at St. Petersburg had notified the police of the various sections where he would be of his coming and asked them to keep watch of him. He seems to have expressed himself incautiously to some friends and apparently some Polish landowners reported him to the police. He was arrested in Moshni on July 13, taken to Cherkasy, and then to Kiev. Here his case was brought before the Governor General Ivan Vasilchikov, who studied it with interest and very soon decided that Shevchenko had been unjustly accused. He advised the poet to return to St. Petersburg, “where the people are wiser and do not worry about trifles, in order to serve well.”

The poet who had been brought to Kiev on July 27, stayed a few days longer at liberty under police supervision and then on August 14, he started back for St. Petersburg. He had been negotiating for a little piece of land near Mezhirich on the bank of the Dniper but this plan had fallen through with his arrest, and there was nothing for him to do but to see a few friends again and make his way back to the capital. He arrived there on September 7, profoundly convinced that nothing had changed in Ukraine with the accession of the more liberal Alexander II.

There was still the problem of his marriage. After his experiences with Piunova and perhaps with Princess Repnina, he had come to the conclusion that he should marry a peasant girl as much for symbolic reasons as for inclination. But where to find one?

By now he had become friendly with Vartolomey Shevchenko whom he addressed as his brother. This was not strictly accurate. Osip, the brother of Taras, had married the sister of Vartolomey, so that Vartolomey was really the brother of the sister-in-law of Taras. He had known him earlier but now the two men became very friendly, for Vartolomey was a practical and business-like man and the manager of the Korsun estate of Prince Lopukhin. He did not agree with the poet in his revolutionary and extreme views but Taras recognized his fundamental honesty and often was willing to follow his advice.

At this moment he met and became devoted to a servant in the family of Vartolomey. She was the sixteen year old Kharyta Dovhopolenkivna, an attractive but illiterate serf on the estate of Prince Lopukhin. She seemed to Taras to represent exactly the type of girl that he wished to marry. It was in vain that his friends advised him against the union, for they realized that Kharyta could not share in any of his higher interests, in his poetry or his painting. It was all in vain. Shevchenko insisted on formally offering her his hand. The girl solved the problem by refusing him because she was unwilling to marry an aged _pan_ and she had no intention of becoming the slave to another nobleman. The fame of the poet was so great that the girl insisted upon looking at him as a person of a higher social stratum and Shevchenko despite his efforts could not disillusion her on this point. Besides she already had her own fiancé whom she had selected herself.

It was another blow to the aged man, but he even yet did not lose hope. He spent some time in the composition of his last great poem, _Mary_, an unconventional retelling of the life of the Blessed Virgin, largely on the basis of the apocryphal legends. His choice of material and the realistic tinge which he gave to the sacred story annoyed many of his friends and his enemies used it to spread a charge of atheism. The work is however fundamentally religious but the poet modified the story to bring it closer to the fate of Ukraine.

He was friendly at that time with a nephew of Aksakov, Karteshevsky. The latter’s wife was a sister of Mykola Makarov, a Ukrainian landowner and literary man, and at their house many of the Ukrainian and Russian writers used to gather for pleasant evenings. It was here for example that Shevchenko met Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev, although the two men never became close friends. At one of these parties, to honor Shevchenko, they dressed in an elegant Ukrainian costume a young serf girl, Lykeria Polusmakivna.

She was a clever, coquettish and scheming little creature who knew both Russian and Ukrainian but for the occasion she pretended to know only Ukrainian. Her charm and beauty completely fascinated the poet and still saddened by the rebuff of Kharyta, he decided to marry her. He had her taught to read and tried to educate her. The girl responded quickly but it was soon clear to all, even to Shevchenko, that she was hoping to marry him only to get to Paris and to move in society. This completely broke the poet’s heart and he began to feel that his chances for a happy married life in Ukraine were doomed never to be realized.

At the same time, however, he was busy with other plans. He was working hard on his etching and was achieving real success. He also reopened negotiations with the censor to bring out another edition of the _Kobzar_ and he secured it in 1860, provided only it did not include poems written after his arrest and exile.

His visit to Ukraine and his new realization of the hardships of his family in serfdom aroused in him the desire to have them liberated. It was certain that a general emancipation would not be long delayed, but the poet would not wait. He opened negotiations with their master, V. E. Fliorkovsky, to emancipate, with a little piece of land, his two brothers, Mykola and Osip, and his sister Irina with their families. Fliorkovsky refused and demanded a considerable sum for the emancipation but refused to give them land, even when the Society for Aid to Russian Writers, with such imposing names as those of Turgenev, Kavelin, a professor of the University of St. Petersburg, Chernyshevsky and various others appealed to him. Finally on July 10, 1860, Fliorkovsky succeeded in coming to an agreement with his serfs and gave them their liberty in return for 900 silver rubles but without land. The poet was angry at this solution but there was nothing that he could do. He saw his relatives freed but they were compelled to rent their land on disadvantageous terms until 1865 when as a result of the emancipation settlement they were able to receive some.

During the exciting year when it seemed as if the general emancipation would come almost daily, Kulish and his friends worked energetically on educational plans for the Ukrainians. Sunday schools were established, textbooks prepared in the Ukrainian language, and in general the future seemed rosy. Shevchenko was not behind in his interest and he set to work on a _South Russian Primer_ for the Ukrainian children. It consisted of an alphabet, prayers, and easy selections for reading, with somewhat moralizing texts. It was an unimportant work which the poet had prepared to meet a real national need and it came out early in 1861.

It was about the end. By the fall of 1860, the hardships which he had undergone began to tell upon his health. He complained of pains in his chest but continued to work. In vain doctors and friends tried to persuade him to be careful. At Christmas he insisted upon visiting his friends but it was too much of an exertion. In the middle of January, 1861, he became worse and for some weeks was unable to leave his bed or to go out of his room. A watery swelling came in his chest and it grew constantly worse. Towards the end of February he was in constant pain. On February 25, his birthday, his friend Lazarevsky visited him and the dying poet asked him to write to Vartolomey about his condition. Late that evening he came back with a friend and they found Taras sitting up, breathing heavily but unable to speak. All that night he suffered greatly and could not sleep. In the morning he asked to be taken to his study but he had hardly crossed the threshold into the hall, when he staggered and fell--and never rose again.

The poet had lived to be one day over forty-seven. Out of those years he had been a serf for twenty-four, a free man for nine, a Russian soldier for ten and under police supervision for four. It was a sad life.

Two days later on February 28, there was an enormous funeral in the Academic Church and his friends and admirers gave glowing eulogies of his life and merits. Among the speakers were Kulish, Bilozersky, and Kostomariv. He was buried in the Smolensky cemetery.

Meanwhile his friends planned to have the body taken back to Ukraine. The necessary permission was secured and on May 8, the body left the capital. It was taken through Moscow, Tula and Orel to Kiev. In every city ever increasing crowds welcomed the funeral procession. Finally on May 18, it reached Kiev but again there was a question whether the body could be taken to the Church of the Nativity. Permission was finally granted by the same Governor Vasilchikov who had freed the poet at his last arrest. At the bank of the Dniper, his friend Mikhaylo Chaly made a last eulogy: “The poetry of Shevchenko has won for us the right of literary citizenship and has spoken aloud in the family of Slavonic nations. In this is the great merit of Taras Shevchenko and his glory, which will never perish.” He told the truth. The Dniper was in full flood but the enthusiastic admirers succeeded in getting the body across and in burying it on the Chernecha Hora, one of the poet’s favorite spots. In 1892 Vartolomey bought this ground and handed it over to the local duma of Kaniv to preserve as a memorial to the poet.

Shevchenko lived a life of tribulation and sorrow. There was little that was joyous about it. His muse is one of sadness but of firm belief in the ultimate triumph of the right and of human brotherhood and he saw the Ukrainian cause as a part of this noble movement. Whatever he did for it politically, from the standpoint of spirit and of literature he placed his native land and literature on a firm basis among the Slavonic nations. He perfected the work of his predecessors and he still remains the greatest example of the Ukrainian genius.

_CHAPTER THREE_

THE POETRY OF SHEVCHENKO

In estimating the greatness of the poetry of Shevchenko, we can never forget that he must be judged in two different spheres and on two different planes. He is first and foremost the poet of Ukraine, and his poems breathe the secret longings of every Ukrainian heart. He is the spokesman of his people and from his lips we hear in all their clarity and intensity the prayers, the hopes, the disappointments of the Ukrainians. No one of the other Ukrainian poets has equalled him in the understanding of his fellow countrymen and his people have accorded him the highest praise and honor that they can bestow upon a man.

At the same time, his sympathy and compassion range far beyond the boundaries of his own people and here he becomes a world poet, able to stand comparison with such writers as Pushkin and Mickiewicz, the great masters of Russian and Polish verse at their periods of greatest excellence. Far more even than they he expressed the sufferings of humanity, the evil of injustice and of wrong, the need and the inevitability of the triumph of right, of kindness, and of brotherly love. His poems in this sphere have a message for all humanity and are an appeal for a better, a truer, a more decent life for all men and women everywhere.

It is one of the mysteries of genius how the poor serf was able to develop into the magnificent poet that he was to become in after years, despite the blows that fate hurled upon him, of poverty, of suffering, of imprisonment and of ill health. Yet there is no royal road to genius and there is no predicting where or when a genius will be born. The world can only note it and give due acclaim to the man who is thus favored or cursed by fortune.

Let us look a little more closely at the work of Shevchenko in the national sphere. For centuries the free Kozaks had been holding up to view the principles of a free life and a free political organization on the steppes of eastern Europe. They had paid for their liberty with their blood. They had fought a losing fight, for disunity and factionalism had destroyed them even at the moments when they seemed the nearest to success and victory. Social classes had made an appearance among them. The Kozak officers had tended to turn themselves into nobles and to seek from outside powers the ratification of their claims. They paid the price for their ambitions and with them the people who might have stood out as a strong and self-contained band were thrown into serfdom. It was a long, slow process and with unfailing psychological truth Shevchenko put his finger unerringly upon the defects of the Kozak system. He traced the downfall of his country through the ages. He pictured it in its ruin and he never lost hope that someway, somehow it would rise again. He was not a soldier at heart. He was not a conspirator. He was not interested in the secret passwords, the underground existence, the spiritual isolation and discipline that must become the dominating features of the life of every revolutionist. In childhood he had learned why the Koliishchina had failed. As a kindly, loving soul, he could not excuse the ferocity of that movement which he painted so vividly. He had seen the failure of the Decembrist movement in Russia and of the Polish revolt in 1831 and he understood the lessons. Yet he did not waver in his belief. He did not express himself as to the manner in which Ukraine would become free. He was not a political theorist and did not speculate on the form of government which would then come. He was too cultured, too modern to believe that the old Kozak system could return, that the Hetmans could be reestablished and recover their power. But never for a moment did he give up his feeling of loyalty to his mother-country. Never for an instant did he mitigate or reduce her claims to independence. Full friendship and trust in the Moskals could only come when Moscow was ready to greet Ukraine as a brother with all the rights and obligations that that meant.

At the same time that he avoided political revolution, Shevchenko was a bold and defiant revolutionist in the ideal sense of the word. He was not satisfied with a revolution which would remove the tsars whom he hated and put other men in power with the same privileges. To him the goal of human life was freedom, brotherhood, democracy. He wanted a society which would not injure the unfortunate and the downtrodden, which would not be composed of hypocritical Pharisees and snobbish and ambitious and conceited rulers and wealthy roués, no matter what terms they applied to themselves.

It is here that Shevchenko far transcended Ukraine and her problems. Wherever there was a suffering soul, an oppressed woman or child, an enslaved man, the message of Shevchenko demanded unflinchingly that evil must be wiped out, that need and want and fear must be eliminated from the earth, and that greed and lust must be annihilated. In holding up these goals which are independent of and above national existence, which are in the realm of religion and of ethics, Shevchenko has a message for the entire world. His works are far more modern in their direct and simple speech than are those of most of his contemporaries. They cannot grow old or fade until those great ideals which we to-day call by the name of democracy and for which the world is fighting, are fully brought to reality. They are the dominant factors in man’s struggle to achieve civilization and on man’s success in obtaining them depends the future of peace and prosperity.

Yet we would be very wrong to think that Shevchenko acquired his point of view only from his own meditations and ideas. The picture that is often drawn of him as a mere serf who somehow or other appeared in literature is far from the mark. Of course he had no formal education--but that was true of many of the scholars and gentlemen of the early nineteenth century. We often say of them that they acquired their knowledge and outlook on life through constant association with the outstanding men of a previous generation. This is obviously untrue of Shevchenko who was born a serf and passed his childhood under the harsh conditions of life in a poor Ukraine village, where he could only secure an education from the ignorant and inefficient clerks and chanters of the various village churches and they were hardly the proper instructors for a young and ambitious man. Yet somehow or other Taras Shevchenko acquired a real education which enabled him to meet on an equality many of the most distinguished men of his time, he won a real insight into the psychology of his people, and he mastered their language as no one else has ever done. There is needed far more study than has hitherto been undertaken as to the way in which he acquired knowledge and trained himself for his great work.

We can only dimly trace in broad outlines the process of his development. From his earliest boyhood he had ambitions to become an artist and his first teachers were the local ikon painters. From them he seems to have learned little except to read and sing the psalms, but he was so expert in this that his first master used to send him out to officiate at peasant funerals, when the master was too drunk to attend them himself. Of painting he could learn only how to draw and color the general types of saints that were to be found in the local ikonostases and the sketchy outlines of the details of hagiography and printing that were included in the cheap handbooks that served the rural workmen as patterns--and we must remember that at this period the art of ikon painting as an art was sadly on the decline. He also absorbed from his grandfather the latter’s memories of the Koliishchina and from the village a knowledge of the folksongs and of the dances and other traditional elements of the village culture. He had certainly read Skovoroda, Kotlyarevsky, and the other early masters of Ukrainian literature.

All this represented the full range of his possibilities until he appeared at the Engelhardt manorhouse and was taken with the young master to Wilno and Warsaw. He had not only picked up by this time a knowledge of the Church Slavonic but he had also a general acquaintance with both Russian and Polish and he probably used every opportunity to read what books were in the manorhouse exactly as he feasted his eyes upon the works of art that were there. Yet we must not lay too much stress upon this possibility, for in those days books were often more neglected than cherished and there were many great nobles whose libraries contained fewer books than windows.

Shevchenko’s opposition to serfdom and his irritation at being dragged from his homeland may have colored his own reminiscences as to the opportunities that he had for acquiring a knowledge of the cultures of the oppressors of his country. At the time he was far more interested in painting than he was in writing, and we are better able to trace the influences exerted upon his art than those upon his poetry. Yet his stay in Wilno was undoubtedly an important factor in his development.

At this time Wilno was the cultural centre of the movement for the liberation of Poland. Around the restored university there had gathered a group of talented young men who were ardent Polish patriots. Among them was Adam Mickiewicz who had been arrested and removed to Russia in 1824, just six years before the young serf arrived in the city. It was possible for him to be affected by the growing preparations for the Polish revolt of 1831 and his friendship with Dunia Haszowska undoubtedly did much to increase his already strong Ukrainian feelings. At the same time from her and from his teacher, Franciszek Lampa, he could hardly fail to become acquainted with the newer works of Polish literature and with the beginnings of the Romantic movement which was basing itself upon the newer German and English developments. He was probably already aware of the ideas of Schiller and Byron, before he went to St. Petersburg and there he was again subjected to the same type of influences in their Russian form.

During his work with Shirayev, he probably had little time to continue this self-education, although it is always hard to say exactly what he was reading or what opportunities the poor serf had to study. At all events with his meeting with Bryulov and his subsequent emancipation, he was brought definitely into contact with men who were familiar with Europe and who had known personally most of the great writers of the day in all the European literatures. Many of their works had appeared in poor and often anonymous Russian translations. Even translations of the stories of Washington Irving were appearing and an ambitious and intellectually eager young man, even with his limited opportunities, was able to assimilate a great deal of literary knowledge. Up to the present time there are no exhaustive studies of this type of Russian publications, for we can hardly call some of these translations by the proud name of literature. Many of the students of Shevchenko have sought to confine the influences upon him to Polish and Russian. In a sense this is true, for Shevchenko gives no sign of learning more than a few words in any non-Slavonic language, but it is equally false to neglect the possibility that the young man got to know the masterpieces of the world through such defective sources. Besides this, he was in touch with Zhukovsky, who was the outstanding student of European literature in Russia at the day and the foremost translator. The poet was a friend of Bryulov and it is not fantastic to suggest that the years of his stay in St. Petersburg both before and after his emancipation were used to good advantage to give him a knowledge of literature as well as of painting.