Т.Г.Шевченко

In 1926 the Taras Shevchenko Scientific Research Institute was established in Kharkiv, with a branch in Kyiv, to collect Shevchenko's manuscripts and artworks and study his life and oeuvre. Research was published in the institute’s annual collection Shevchenko ( 1928, 1930) and its bimonthly Literaturnyi arkhiv (1930–1). The Kyiv branch prepared a dictionary of Shevchenko's lexicon and a dictionary of his acquaintances, but the Stalinist terror prevented their publication.Serhii Yefremov was a leading Shevchenko scholar of the first quarter of the 20th century was. His many articles were reprinted in the collection Taras Shevchenko (1914). In 1921 Yefremov became head of the VUAN Commission for the Publication of Monuments of Modern Literature. One of the commission’s objectives was the preparation of an academic edition of Shevchenko's works. Only two vols appeared—vol 4, Shchodenni zapysky (Daily Notes, 1927), and vol 3, Lystuvannia (Correspondence, 1929), edited by Yefremov and annotated by various scholars. The remaining volumes, as well as O. Novytsky's volume on Shevchenko’s artistic works, were never published, because most of the above scholars were arrested and perished in Stalinist prisons and concentration camps during the 1930s.

The terror of the 1930s cut short the meaningful study of Shevchenko in the USSR for decades. The relatively few scholars who survived were placed under the control of Party officials who had nothing to do with scholarship and whose main role was to liquidate all manifestations of independent thought and opinion. A long period of systematic falsification of Shevchenko's works began, and it lasted, to a greater or lesser degree, until the demise of the USSR. Most Soviet studies of Shevchenko written in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s by Party officials (eg, Volodymyr Zatonsky, Andrii Khvylia, and Yevhen Shabliovsky) merit little discussion.

Meanwhile, meaningful Shevchenko studies were produced by йmigrй scholars in the West. In the 1930s, the main center of Shevchenko studies was the Ukrainian Scientific Institute in Warsaw, whose associates prepared and published 13 volumes of a 16-volume edition of Shevchenko’s complete works (1934–38) before the German and Soviet occupation of Poland in 1939 put an end to the project. Vols 2–4 and 6–12 were edited by Pavlo Zaitsev, vol 14 by Bohdan Lepky, and vol 15 by Roman Smal-Stotsky; vol 16 consisted of a bibliography compiled by Volodymyr Doroshenko. Vol 1 was not published; Zaitsev’s biography of Shevchenko, which had been planned for that volume, was published separately two decades later, in 1955, in the United States. The volumes contained commentaries and annotations by the editors and other Shevchenko scholars such as Leonid Biletsky, Ivan Bryk, Dmytro Doroshenko, Oleksander Lototsky, Yevhen Malaniuk, Stepan Siropolko, and Dmytro Chyzhevsky. In 1934 two other books on Shevchenko were published in Warsaw: Zaitsev’s Polish study on Shevchenko and the Poles in the context of Ukrainian-Polish relations in the mid-19th century; and Stepan-Stotsky’s Taras Shevchenko: Interpretatsiп (Taras Shevchenko: Interpretations, reprinted in New York in 1965), which focused on the bard’s criticism of and opposition to Russian domination.

In Prague, meanwhile, Vasyl Simovych wrote a popular study of Shevchenko’s life and works (1934; reprinted in 1941 and 1944). Much earlier, in 1921 while in Berlin, he had prepared an annotated edition of Kobzar. Also in Berlin, Dmytro Doroshenko prepared a popular booklet in German, Schewtschenko, der grosse ukrainische Nationaldichter (1929); it was also translated and published in French (1931), English (as Taras Shevchenko: The National Poet of the Ukraine and Taras Shevchenko: Bard of Ukraine, 1936, repr 1946), and Italian (1939). Doroshenko also wrote a survey of post-First World War Shevchenko studies, ‘Die Forschung uber Taras Ševčenko in der Nachkriegszeit,’ published in Zeitschrift fur slavische Philologie, 9 (1932). In 1937 the Ukrainian Scientific Institute in Berlin published Taras Schewtschenko, der ukrainische Nationaldichter, l814–l86l, a collection of articles by K. H. Meyer, G. Specht, and Zenon Kuzelia and of translations of Shevchenko’s poems.

In France, Elie Borschak (I. Borshchak) pointed to Shevchenko's role in the struggle for Ukrainian self-determination in his article ‘Le mouvement national ukrainien au XIXe siиcle,’ Le Monde Slave, November 1930. A few years later the Shevchenko Scientific Society (NTSh) in Lviv published Borschak’s Shevchenko u Frantsiп: Narys iz istoriп franko-ukraпns’kykh vzaiemyn (Shevchenko in France: A Historical Sketch of Franco-Ukrainian Relations, 1933). Another notable contribution to Shevchenko studies before the Second World War was Filaret Kolessa’s book on Shevchenko’s poetry (Lviv 1939); it contains two monograph-length works, on the folkloric element in Shevchenko’s poetry and on Shevchenko’s verse form.

Several valuable studies appeared during the Second World War: Yarema Aizenshtok's Iak pratsiuvav Shevchenko (How Shevchenko Worked, 1940); O. Borshchahivsky and M. Yosypenko's book on Shevchenko and the theater (1941); Mykola Hrinchenko's book on Shevchenko and music (1941); Sviatoslav Hordynsky's booklet on Shevchenko the painter (1942); Yevhen Yulii Pelensky's Shevchenko—kliasyk (Shevchenko: A Classic, 1942); and some articles by Leonid Bulakhovsky and Oleksander Doroshkevych.After the Second World War, the Institute of Literature of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR concentrated on completing a 10-volume ‘full academic’ edition of Shevchenko's works begun in the 1930s. Vols 3–4 (dramatic works) appeared in 1949, and vol 5 (the diary and autobiography), in 1951. Vols 1–2 (the poetry) were reprinted from the 1939 edition in 1951 and 1953, and vol 6 (letters, notes, etc), in 1957. Vols 7–10 (the artworks) did not appear until 1961–4. Unfortunately this edition was not free of the censorship and falsifications that had marred Shevchenko studies in Soviet Ukraine. Some, though by no means all, of its deficiencies were removed from the subsequent ‘full’ edition of Shevchenko, which appeared in 6 vols in 1963–4. Reproductions of Shevchenko's artistic oeuvre were also published in a separate four-volume edition in 1961–4. Beginning in 1952 the Institute of Literature held annual conferences on Shevchenko and published the proceedings in collections; unfortunately, much of their content mirrored the Party line and limitations on scholarly freedom and rigor. Nonetheless, some worthwhile books did appear: Sava Chavdarov’s on Shevchenko’s pedagogical ideas (1953); V. Shubravsky’s on Shevchenko's dramaturgy (1957, 1959, 1961); D. Iofanov’s on Shevchenko’s life and works (1957); Yurii Ivakin’s on Shevchenko’s satire (1959, 1964); and Yevhen Nenadkevych’s Z tvorchoп laboratoriп T. H. Shevchenka (From T. H. Shevchenko’s Creative Laboratory, 1959).

Many works appeared in Ukraine to mark the 150th anniversary of Shevchenko’s birth in 1961 and the centenary of his death in 1964. Among the more notable books published then in Ukraine were Yurii Ivakin's on the style of Shevchenko's political poetry (1961) and his two-volume commentary on Kobzar (1964–8); Vasyl S. Vashchenko's on Shevchenko’s language (1963); Petro Prykhodko's on Shevchenko and Ukrainian Romanticism (1963); Hryhorii Verves's on Shevchenko and Poland (1964); a two-volume dictionary of Shevchenko's vocabulary (1914); and a two-volume bibliography of Shevchenkiana (1963) written on the territory of the former USSR during the years 1839–1959. The latter work was augmented in 1968 by F. Sarana's bibliography of Shevchenko studies published during the years 1960–64, but it also excluded works written outside the USSR.

In the 1970s the Institute of Literature of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR prepared three important ‘collective’ works: Shevchenkoznavstvo: Pidsumky i problemy (Shevchenko Studies: Summations and Problems, 1975) and Shevchenkivs’kyi slovnyk (A Shevchenko Dictionary, 2 vols, 1978), both of them under the chief editorship of Yevhen Kyryliuk; and Tvorchyi metod i poetyka T. H. Shevchenka (The Creative Method and the Poetics of T. H. Shevchenko, 1980).

In the postwar West, contributions to Shevchenko studies were published in the serials and books of the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences in Canada and the United States. These included a reprint of the four-volume Kobzar edited and annotated by Leonid Biletsky; and Taras Ševčenko, 1814–1861: A Symposium (1962), edited by George Yurii Shevelov and Volodymyr V. Miiakovsky. The Shevchenko Scientific Society (NTSh), which was reconstituted by emigre scholars in Western Europe, North America, and Australia after the war, created a Shevchenko Studies Commission; the commission, headed by Pavlo Zaitsev, published his afore-mentioned biography of Shevchenko (1955) as well as Ševčenko: Sein Leben und sein Werk (1965), edited by J. Bojko (Yurii Blokhyn) and E. Koschmieder. Various articles about Shevchenko and about his works were also published in Zapysky Naukovoho tovarystva im. Shevchenka, vols 161 (1953), 167 (1958), 176 (1962), 179–80 (1965), 187 (1976), and 214 (1991). The NTSh also prepared guides to Shevchenkiana in the libraries of Paris (1961) and Munich (1914).