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Shevchenko, Taras [Ševčenko] b 9 March 1814 in Moryntsi, Zvenyhorod county, Kyiv gubernia, d 10 March 1861 in Saint Petersburg, Russia. (Photo: Taras Shevchenko.) Ukraine’s national bard and famous artist. Born a serf, Shevchenko was orphaned when he was twelve and grew up in poverty and misery. He was taught to read by a village precentor and was often beaten for ‘wasting time’ on drawing. At the age of 14 he became a houseboy of his owner, P. Engelhardt, and served him in Vilnius (1828–31) and then Saint Petersburg. Engelhardt noticed Shevchenko's artistic talent, and in Saint Petersburg he apprenticed him to the painter V. Shiriaev for four years. Shevchenko spent his free time sketching the statues in the capital’s imperial summer gardens. There he met the Ukrainian artist Ivan Soshenko, who introduced him to other compatriots, such as Yevhen Hrebinka and Vasyl Hryhorovych, and to the Russian painter A. Venetsianov. Through these men Shevchenko also met the famous painter and professor Karl Briullov, who donated his portrait of the Russian poet Vasilii Zhukovsky as the prize in a lottery whose proceeds were used to buy Shevchenko's freedom on 5 May 1838.
Soon after, Shevchenko enrolled in the Imperial Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg and studied there under Briullov’s supervision. In 1840 his first poetry collection, Kobzar, consisting of eight Romantic poems, was published in Saint Petersburg. It was followed by his epic poem Haidamaky (The Haidamakas, 1841) and the ballad Hamaliia (1844). While living in Saint Petersburg, Shevchenko made three trips to Ukraine, in 1843, 1845, and 1846, which had a profound impact on him. There he visited his still enserfed siblings and other relatives, met with prominent Ukrainian writers and intellectuals (eg, Hrebinka, Panteleimon Kulish, and Mykhailo Maksymovych), and was befriended by the princely Repnin family (especially Varvara Repnina). Distressed by the tsarist oppression and destruction of Ukraine, Shevchenko decided to capture some of his homeland’s historical ruins and cultural monuments in an album of etchings, which he called Zhivopisnaia Ukraina (Picturesque Ukraine, 1844).
After graduating from the academy of arts in 1845, Shevchenko became a member of the Kyiv Archeographic Commission and traveled widely through Russian-ruled Ukraine in 1845 to sketch historical and architectural monuments and collect folkloric and other ethnographic materials. In 1844 and 1845, mostly while he was in Ukraine, he wrote some of his most satirical and politically subversive narrative poems, including ‘Son’ (A Dream), ‘Sova’ (the Owl), ‘Kholodnyi Iar,’ ‘Ieretyk’/ ‘Ivan Hus’ (The Heretic/Jan Hus),‘Slipyi’ (The Blind Man), ‘Velykyi l'okh’ (The Great Vault), and ‘Kavkaz’ (The Caucasus). He transcribed them and his other poems of 1843–45 into an album he titled ‘Try lita’ (Three Years).
While in Kyiv in 1846, Shevchenko joined the secret Cyril and Methodius Brotherhood. Like the other members of the brotherhood, he was arrested, on 5 April 1847. The authorities’ confiscation and discovery of his anti-tsarist satirical poems in the ‘Try lita’ album brought Shevchenko a particularly severe punishment—military service as a private in the Orenburg Special Corps in a remote region by the Caspian Sea. Tsar Nicholas I himself ordered that Shevchenko be forbidden to write, draw, and paint while in military exile. While serving at the Orenburg and Orsk fortresses, however, Shevchenko managed to continue doing so. He hid his secretly written poems in several handmade ‘bootleg booklets’ (1847, 1848, 1849, 1850). Many of the drawings and paintings he made while in exile depict the life of the indigenous Kazakhs. Owing to Shevchenko’s skill as a painter, he was included in a military expedition to survey and describe the Aral Sea (1848–9).
In 1850 Shevchenko was transferred to the Novopetrovskoe fortress (now Fort Shevchenko in Kazakhstan), where the terms of his captivity were more harshly enforced. Nevertheless, he managed to create over a hundred watercolor and pencil drawings and write several novellas in Russian. Finally released from military exile in 1857, two years after Nicholas I’s death, Shevchenko was not allowed to live in Ukraine. After spending half a year in Nizhnii Novgorod, he moved to Saint Petersburg. He was allowed to visit relatives and friends Ukraine in 1859, but there he was detained and interrogated and sent back to Saint Petersburg. Shevchenko remained under police surveillance until his death. He was buried in Saint Petersburg, but two months later, in accordance with his wishes, his remains were transported to Ukraine and reburied on Chernecha Hora (Monk’s Mountain) near Kaniv. Since that time, his grave has been a ‘holy’ place of visitation by millions of Ukrainians. Today it is part of the Kaniv Museum-Preserve (est 1925).Shevchenko has had a unique place in Ukrainian cultural history and in world literature. Through his writings he laid the foundations for the creation of a fully functional modern Ukrainian literature. His poetry contributed greatly to the growth of Ukrainian national consciousness, and his influence on various facets of Ukrainian intellectual, literary, and national life is still felt to this day.
Shevchenko's literary oeuvre consists of one mid-sized collection of poetry (Kobzar); the drama Nazar Stodolia and two play fragments; nine novellas, a diary, and an autobiography written in Russian; four articles; and over 250 letters. Already during his first period of literary activity (1837–43), he wrote highly sophisticated poetic works. He adapted the style and versification of Ukrainian folk songs to produce remarkably original poems with a complex and shifting metric structure, assonance and internal rhyme, masterfully applied caesuras and enjambments, and sophisticated alliterations grafted onto a 4 + 4 + 6 syllable unit derived from the kolomyika song structure. He also abandoned use of the regular strophe. Innovations can also be found in Shevchenko's use of epithets, similes, metaphors, symbols, and personifications. A man of his time, his worldview was influenced by Romanticism. But Shevchenko managed to find his own manner of poetic expression, which encompassed themes and ideas germane to Ukraine and his personal vision of its past and future.
Shevchenko’s early works include the ballads ‘Prychynna’ (The Bewitched Woman, 1837), ‘Topolia’ (The Poplar, 1839), and ‘Utoplena’ (The Drowned Maiden, 1841). Their affinity with Ukrainian folk ballads is evident in their plots and supernatural motifs. Of special note is Shevchenko’s early ballad ‘Kateryna’ (1838), dedicated to Vasilii Zhukovsky in memory of the purchase of Shevchenko's freedom (see also his painting Kateryna, which is based on the same poem). In it he tells the tale of a Ukrainian girl seduced by a Russian soldier and abandoned with child—a symbol of the tsarist imposition of serfdom in Ukraine. Some of his other poems also treat the theme of the seduced woman and abandoned mother—‘Vid'ma’ (The Witch, 1847], ‘Maryna’ (1848), and the ballads ‘Lileia’ (The Lily, 1846) and ‘Rusalka’ (The Mermaid, 1846). The oblique reference to Ukraine's history and fate in ‘Kateryna’ is also echoed in other early poems, such as ‘Tarasova nich’ (Taras's Night, 1838), ‘Ivan Pidkova’ (1839), Haidamaky (1841), and Hamaliia (1844). Cossack raids against the Turks are recalled in ‘Ivan Pidkova’ and Hamaliia; ‘Tarasova nich’ and, especially, Haidamaky draw on the struggle against Polish oppression. Shevchenko wrote the Romantic drama Nazar Stodolia (1843–44) toward the end of his early period of creativity. Its action takes place near Chyhyryn, the 17th-century capital of the Cossack Hetmanate.
Although Shevchenko's early poetic achievements were evident to his contemporaries, it was not until his second period (1843–5) that through his poetry he gained the stature of a national bard. Having spent eight months in Ukraine at that time, Shevchenko realized the full extent of his country's misfortune under tsarist rule and his own role as that of a spokesperson for his nation's aspirations through his poetry. He wrote the poems ‘Rozryta mohyla’ (The Ransacked Grave, 1843), ‘Chyhyryne, Chyhyryne’ (O Chyhyryn, Chyhyryn, 1844), and ‘Son’ (A Dream, 1844) in reaction to what he saw in Ukraine. In ‘Son’ he portrayed with bitter sarcasm the arbitrary lawlessness of tsarist rule. Shevchenko’s talent for satire is also apparent in his 1845 poems ‘Velykyi l'okh,’ ‘Kavkaz,’ ‘Kholodnyi Iar,’ and ‘I mertvym, i zhyvym …’ (To the Dead and the Living.). ‘Velykyi l'okh, ’a ‘mystery’ in three parts, is an allegory that summarizes Ukraine's passage from freedom to captivity. In ‘Kavkaz’ Shevchenko universalizes Ukraine's fate by turning to the myth of Prometheus, the free spirit terribly punished for rebelling against the gods, yet eternally reborn. He localizes the action in the Caucasus, whose inhabitants suffered a fate similar to that of the Ukrainians under tsarism. In his poetic epistle ‘I mertvym, i zhyvym …’ Shevchenko turns his bitterness and satire against the Ukrainians themselves, reminding them that only in ‘one's own house’ is there ‘one's own truth’ and entreating them to realize their national potential, stop serving foreign masters, and become honorable people worthy of their history and heritage, in their own free land.Similarly, in his poem ‘Try lita’ (1845), which has also been used as the name of the second period of Shevchenko’s poetic creativity and the body of work he wrote at that time, he presents his own ‘awakening’ to the shame around him. Shevchenko laments his lost innocence and scorns the coming new year ‘swaddled’ in one more ukase. His scorn for the inactivity of his compatriots is also echoed in the poem ‘Mynaiut' dni, mynaiut' nochi’ (Days Pass, Nights Pass, 1845), in which somnolent inactivity is seen as far worse than death in chains. In December 1845 Shevchenko composed a cycle of poems titled ‘Davydovi psalmy’ (David’s Psalms). He chose the psalms that had a meaning for him (1, 12, 43, 52, 53, 81, 93, 132, 136, 149) and imbued those biblical texts with contemporary political relevance. He ends his ‘Try lita’ album with his famous ‘Zapovit’ (Testament, 1845), a poem that has been translated into more than 60 languages. After being set to music by H. Hladky in the 1870s, the poem achieved a status second only to Ukraine’s national anthem and firmly established Shevchenko as Ukraine’s national bard.