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.

At all events we do not know what occasion set Shevchenko to writing. We do not have any of his first attempts and the earliest poem which we know is the Prychynna, (the Mad Woman) which is very definitely based upon the weird, supernatural type of ballad which was so popular at the time and which had been acclimatized in Russian by Zhukovsky and in Polish by Mickiewicz on the basis of Bürger’s Lenore.

It is interesting in this poem that Shevchenko has completely Ukrainianized the scene. The lover is a Kozak who has fallen in battle. There is a sympathetic description of the Ukrainian landscape and unlike the vast number of ballads of this period, the stanza form has been completely neglected and can be marked only by the rhyming sequence which already has taken the form which is characteristic of most of the mature poems of our author. There is the same variation in metre which we are to find in his later poems and it is with good reason that critics regard this as one of his most successful works. Wonder grows when we reflect that this is the work of a twenty-three year old poet who was still a serf at the time when he composed it.

The same characteristics can be found in the other ballads which were included in the original Kobzar and in those which he wrote before his arrest. They are ostensibly based upon the Ukrainian folklore; they handle the traditional themes in a highly original way, but at the same time they fall well within the limitations of the form as it was worked out by the general Romantic movement. The same question comes up again and again in Gogol’s Ukrainian stories, Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka, when there can be no decision how far the author is using exclusively peasant material and how far he has been influenced by literary models.

A careful examination of these ballads will show that Shevchenko was by no means the guileless and unthinking poet of nature that he appeared to Russian critics as Belinsky. When the Kobzar appeared, Belinsky with all of his critical sense was so hostile to the use of the Ukrainian or Little Russian language for literary purposes, that he emphasized with malice aforethought the use of the vernacular and of peasant words, and regarded the poems as unimportant and unliterary. The Russian radicals and progressives certainly interpreted the brotherhood of man and the superiority of Russian to the other Slavonic languages as organs for their attempts to unify all inhabitants of the Russian Empire and their opposition to the Tsar and the system of Nicholas I did not lead them to have a shred of sympathy for any one who sought for himself the same privileges which they were so proudly acclaiming. From the beginning to the end of Shevchenko’s career he did not find among the Russian radicals any who appreciated what he was really endeavoring to do. They might sympathize with his attacks on tyranny and slavery but they all looked askance at his use of the native speech of Ukraine as much as did the tsarist officials.

In the historical ballads as Ivan Pidkova and the Night of Taras, we have likewise the use of Ukrainian subjects and the adaptation of the ballad form for historical episodes, such as we find in Schiller and Byron. They are filled with the wild ferocity, the careless love of freedom that were the traditional features of the Zaporozhtsy throughout their history.

When we turn to Katerina, we are on different ground, for here we are dealing with the story of the peasant girl abandoned by her noble lover that was familiar in the Romantic period and which had been introduced into Russian literature as early as Karamzin’s Poor Liza. It is typical also of Shevchenko that he dedicated this poem to Zhukovsky who had been so instrumental in securing his freedom. A lesser and less outspoken person might have hesitated to do this, for Zhukovsky was himself the illegitimate son of a Russian nobleman and a Turkish slave girl. Yet apparently there had been a happy outcome to this situation, for the girl and Mme. Bunina, the wife, remained friendly and Zhukovsky was not faced with the hardships that confronted Ivas.

Through all these poems runs the fervent belief in Ukraine and her tragedy. Perhaps in Perebendya, Shevchenko modelled his old bard on the Lay of the Last Minstrel in the poem of Sir Walter Scott, who was himself an apologist for the long overthrown Stuart dynasty in England. The minstrel had been compelled to suffer by the changes of politics and Shevchenko could easily parallel him to the blind bards wandering around Ukraine and singing of the past glories of the Kozaks and the Ukrainian people. The Romantic glorification of the past fitted in well with his point of view and in the Kobzar almost every poem breathes the poet’s sadness over the loss of his country’s liberty and the present hardships of the people. They emphasize his dislike for Poland and his aversion to the indifference of the Moskals to the people of Ukraine.

Thus the Kobzar is far more than a mere imitation of peasant songs. It goes far beyond the talented reworking of peasant themes and it shows us Shevchenko as already a person well familiar with the literatures of Europe as reflected through Russian and Polish, with the Russian influence predominating. This was only natural for he was living at the time in the Russian capital, and his associates were drawn from the Russian cultural circles. The Kobzar appealed to the Ukrainian people. It set forth their case and their sufferings as well as their past glory, and it naturally won for the poet their love and esteem.

The next year he produced the Haydamaki, the longest of all his works. It is a long epic poem describing the revolt of the Koliishchina, the last outbreak of Western Ukraine against the Polish domination. The movement had been convulsive and brutal and the poet has endeavored to catch that fierce spirit of revolt that animated the unfortunate peasants. He studied the materials available for the history of the movement but he was also influenced by the stories which he had heard from his grandfather and his associates in childhood and like epic poets in general he did not content himself with a mere versified history. He followed the better artistic method of creating a relatively minor figure as hero, in this case Halayda and here again Shevchenko followed the favorite device of Scott, which had also been adopted by Pushkin in his novel, The Captain’s Daughter, a study of the revolt of Pugachov, the last great outbreak of the Russian peasants against the new order in Russia at almost the same time as the Koliishchina.

There are passages in this poem, which seem to the modern reader unnecessarily brutal but on the whole Shevchenko was not a military poet. The parts of the Haydamaki which will live forever are not so much the scenes of battle and of bloodshed, as the descriptions of Ukrainian nature, the oppression of the peasants by their overlords, the blessing of the arms, and the introduction and epilogue which give the motif of the poem, “Ukraina’s weeping.”

The work met with the same reception as the Kobzar. The Ukrainians in St. Petersburg and at home welcomed the work. It was appreciated by many of the foremost Russian poets, but the leaders of liberal thought like Belinsky attacked it savagely. The great liberal and lover of freedom remarked of it (Vol. VII, p. 214 ff.) “Works of such a character are published only for the pleasure and edification of the authors themselves.” They rest “on an abundance of vulgar and commonplace words and expressions, lacking simplicity of conception and story, filled with pretensions and mannerisms natural to all bad poets—often not at all popular, although they are supported by reliance upon history of song and tradition.” Belinsky had nothing better to say than to urge the poet if he desired to help his people “to talk to the people in a simple, intelligible language about various useful subjects of civil and family life, as Osnovyanenko commenced (but unfortunately did not continue) in his pamphlet, Thoughts for my dear countrymen.” Incidentally this pamphlet had aroused amusement and irritation, because Kvitka-Osnovyanenko as a provincial nobleman was giving vent to views on the divine rights of the Tsar which had long been unpopular even with the most reactionary circles in the capital. Such comments on the Haydamaki can be explained only by the ardent desire of Belinsky and his friends to bar the development of literature in the Ukrainian or Little Russian language as they insisted upon calling it.

Belinsky did not change his opinions and about the time of Shevchenko’s arrest, the great liberal critic wrote to Count Annenkov in December 1846 that “common sense must see in Shevchenko an ass, a fool and a scoundrel, and above all a bitter drunkard, a lover of spirits because of Khokhol patriotism.”

Perhaps it was as a result of these attacks, that Shevchenko came to feel himself even more isolated in the Russian capital. He wrote very little during the next year and what he wrote breathes with every syllable the feeling that he was a stranger in a strange land and that the glory of Ukraine had definitely departed. He gradually ceased to glorify the past and to hope that it might return and he came to bewail the past.

It was in this state of mind that he returned to Ukraine for a visit in 1843 and was overwhelmed with the tragedy, the poverty, and the unhappiness which he found in his own country and his own family. His naturally radical propensities were reinforced and he felt on his return that his stay in St. Petersburg was rather taking him away from the field of action and of practical life. The pleasant associations which he had with Bryulov and his friends, his occupations with painting and writing, all seemed to him insignificant in comparison with the festering sore which he had seen at home. In Three Years he deplored the passing of his youth in unimportant occupations and he yearned to be able to do something more positive, more immediate for his fellow men. In this he was probably stirred by the general note of sentimentalism that swept over Russian literature in the forties and the beginnings of definite sympathy with the people and a call for the liberation of the serfs.

A striking result of this visit was a mitigation of his hostility for the Poles. In the more romantic dreams of his youth, he had harked back to the Kozak exploits against the Polish state. Now he definitely turned upon Bohdan who had been the first to sign a formal treaty with Moscow. It is idle to argue that Shevchenko was thinking only of the Russian tsar and the Russian landowners. The whole trend of his works, his denunciation of the German bureaucracy, his attitude toward individuals all indicate that he sharply differentiated the Russians and the Ukrainians and was willing to risk his life in order to create again an independent Ukraine.

The poems of the years between his first visit to Ukraine and his arrest are perhaps his greatest consistent mass of writing and in them he allows his imagination to play over the whole field of life. Working in the Archaeological Commission, he resented the Russian excavation of the Ukrainian funeral mounds and the removal of the contents, where they were of artistic character, to the capital. He resented the glorification of Peter the Great and Catherine, the two rulers who had wiped out the Ukrainian self-government. He resented the praise of Bohdan for his subservience to Moscow and the condemnation of Mazepa for his joining with Charles XII against Peter. He resented the Russian advance in the Caucasus and the attempts of Russia to strengthen her power without solving her internal difficulties. He resented the willingness of many of the Ukrainian landowners to climb upon the band wagon of Moscow and to avoid their own culture. He hated the injustice of the people themselves towards the unfortunate girl who had been seduced, especially by a Russian stranger. His moral indignation urged him to speak out against every form of oppression.

He therefore willingly accepted the ideas of Kollár, a Slovak, when he wrote the Heretic and glorified Jan Hus as a Slav hero, but it is to be noted that in the introduction which was dedicated to Šafařík, he definitely criticized Pushkin’s views on the necessity of Slavonic union under Russia and demanded a real Slavonic brotherhood in which all the Slavs would appear as brothers.

Naturally the Society of Sts. Cyril and Methodius and the association of the United Slavs made a strong appeal to him. Here was a group of young idealists who seriously believed, following Kollár, that all the Slavs should be brothers, that the German influence should be eradicated, and that a great Slav republic should be set up. Like the Decembrists a quarter century before, these young leaders had very little idea as to the ultimate consequences of their acts and the methods by which they would realize their ideals. Shevchenko saw in them a standard which would help humanity and he turned to it.

Naturally it was impossible for any author to express these thoughts openly under the iron rule of Nicholas I. To the administration, the problem of Ukraine had been settled when the country had been divided into governments and the full Russian administrative system introduced. It was therefore necessary for the poet to indicate rather than to state definitely the goals for which he was striving and hence it is that we have such poems as the Dream and the Great Grave. There is much that is unclear about them. The Great Grave is a masterpiece of allusion and of vague indirection but the reader is able from it to grasp a full sense of the indignation which Shevchenko felt over the ruin of his country and his guarded expressions of hope that it will rise again free of Russian domination. The old nostalgic note of sorrow for the failures of the past still continues but the pressing needs of the present and the realization that there is much internal reform, much increase of brotherhood, much hard and unromantic work to be done, before the glorious days of the past can return, now take precedence over the old laments for a golden age. Shevchenko had come to realize that it was internal disunion as well as foreign pressure that had brought the country to its present state and he believed that this had to be fought at home as well as on the field of battle.

Just as before Ukraine is pictured as a poor widow, an orphan, abandoned by all in a cold world, and he poured out his heart over it. At the same time he expressed his bitter condemnation of the court and in the Dream he produced an unforgivable and unforgettable satire on the slavish manners of the court itself. He must have been aware that he was risking his own personal liberty and fortune on such attacks. At times they were hardly tactful or in good taste but the bitterness which rankled in Shevchenko’s soul made him oblivious to this.

It is perhaps idle to wonder what change would have taken place in him, had he received a fellowship to study abroad. He had already come a long way culturally from the little village where he was born and he was familiar with the accomplishments of the world outside. He lacked that personal knowledge that even a short trip to the West would have given him. We cannot tell how he would have reacted to a freer and a better life. He might have become a potent factor as an emigré in the life of his country as Drahomaniv was in after years. He might have, but it is hardly likely, been swept from his feet by the allurements of the outside world. Almost certainly his active mind would have drawn some lesson for his people, would have gained some experience, had he had the opportunity to make friends and to observe.

It was not to be and perhaps we are not going too far when we ascribe to the introduction of the second Kobzar which never appeared a fairly good summary of Shevchenko’s views on the very eve of the catastrophe. He had planned to publish some of his poems and they were already in the hands of the censor when he was arrested. In the introduction which he submitted with the text and which was only discovered in the files of the police in 1906, he bewailed the fact that all the Slavonic races were able to print freely, Poles, Czechs, Serbs, Bulgars, Montenegrans, Moskals but not his own people, and he complains even more bitterly that a large part of the Ukrainian educated class are ashamed of their own mother tongue and try to read and write Russian. “Do not pay attention to the Moskals; let them write in their fashion, and let us write in ours. They have a people and language—and we have a people and language, and let people decide which is the more beautiful. They rely upon Gogol, because he wrote not in his own language, but in Muscovite, as on Walter Scott, because he did not write in his language. Gogol grew up in Nizhen and not in Little Russia, and does not know his own language; and W(alter) S(cott) in Edinburgh and not in Scotland—and perhaps there was some reason why they gave it up.... I do not know. But Burns was also a great folk poet, and Skovoroda would have been, had he not been beaten from his course by Latin and then by Muscovite.” “Why were not V. S. Karadjić, Šafařík and others not turned into Germans (it would have been easier for them) and why did they remain Slavs, sincere sons of their mothers, and acquire good fame?” This and other passages disposes of the widespread idea that Shevchenko was only opposed to the Russian autocratic rule. The whole trend of his thinking and development shows that he regarded Ukraine and the Ukrainians as entirely different from the Russians and on a par with the other Slavonic races. His comparison with Scott and Burns shows his general feelings and also his acquaintance with what European literature had to offer. He had worked through many of his original difficulties, and if he was of a radical term of mind, he still viewed his radicalism only through the eyes of his own people. It naturally made it harder for him in the capital and it alienated him from many of his more easy-going countrymen and more than that it prepared the way for the great catastrophe that was to overtake him.

Up to this time with the single exception of the Heretic he had confined himself entirely to Ukrainian themes. But during these years his understanding had broadened. He was as devoted as before to the cause of Ukraine but in his shift from the Romantic glorification of the past of his country to an eloquent plea for the elimination of the evils which he saw there, he had come to realize that these evils were universal. The sins of injustice, of cruelty, and of meanness were everywhere and the poor of all nations suffered as did the Ukrainians. This gave to his poetry a far wider human significance than before. From this time on, the suffering and insulted girl who had been conceived as a Ukrainian phenomenon now becomes a universal figure. This type which had figured in world literature and been naturalized in Russian, Polish, and then in Ukrainian, now is seen as a universal phenomenon. The appeals for justice for the mother, for the poor are universal appeals, placed in a Ukrainian setting with a background of Ukrainian nature and reality. They can be read with sympathy throughout the civilized world and not merely as local peculiarities. A sort of national ethnography had served as the basis for many of the early Ukrainian writings and the authors had vied with one another to see how accurately they could describe the minutiae of village life. Shevchenko was not satisfied with this and he laid the weight of emphasis on the individual and the universal rather than on the local background.

It all marked another step in the transformation and broadening of the poet and the process would have continued with beneficent results, had it not been for his unfortunate arrest and exile. During the weeks of confinement, his poetry became more purely lyrical, more definitely personal than before and the little collection In the Fortress, shows a newer and deeper insight into his own psychology and that of his people. He realized that it meant the shattering of his hopes, the possible ending of his career, and the regret that he could not have done more burned him deeply. Yet it is interesting that in this very series, there grew in his mind the comparison between Ukraine and the poor girl driven from her own village. This was to be one of the main themes of his later verses.

Then came the stunning sentence that he was to be exiled and put in the army without permission to write or paint. He at first made attempts to have the ban on painting lifted. We cannot tell whether this was because painting was nearer to his heart or because it was his verses that had brought his condemnation and he believed that since his pencil and brush were less guilty of political opposition, he might be granted more mitigation of his sentence on this score than on the field of poetry in which he had definitely offended the Tsar.

The sentence was carried out spasmodically. Thus at Orsk he was apparently able to write a little. During the winter at Kos-Aral, he had still more liberty and while he was at Orenburg, he was able both to write and paint. It was only after his second arrest that the ban was ruthlessly and rigorously enforced for some years and apart from some reworking of old themes in Russian, he did not attempt anything.

Life in the army was not kind to the poet. The needlessly harsh and stern discipline hurt his sensitive soul. His companions were largely ignorant peasants; many of them were political exiles and criminals. Their rough and obscene language, their brutal cynicism disgusted him as much as did the ignorance and lack of culture of many of the officers. He never became a good soldier and by his rigid performance of his duties never won some sort of alleviation of the hardships of his life. In addition, even on the expedition to Kos-Aral, there was a surprising lack of the necessaries of life for all, high and low, willing and unwilling. All this coupled with the prohibition of indulging openly in his favorite pastimes wore him down and his health was gravely shattered by scurvy and other diseases. In short by the time of his liberation, he had become a prematurely old man.

Intellectually he was, like Dostoyevsky at almost the same period, cut off from all the currents of literature and confined in his reading to the New Testament. Unlike him, Shevchenko did not grow and expand his range of interest during this period. He did not drink in and transcend his new experiences but he retreated more into himself and maintained his intellectual poise by meditating upon the same themes which had been stirring in his brain before he was arrested. He deepened his meditations and his thoughts and universalized them instead of absorbing the world around him and meditating upon it.

It is highly typical of Shevchenko and indeed of all the Russian intelligentsia of the period that this sudden forcible intrusion into a new and strange life did not produce in his writings any pictures of his experiences. The treeless steppe and the impoverished and nomadic Kirghiz might become the proper subjects for his painting and sketching. They leave on his poetry only his feeling of isolation from Ukraine. The hardships on the expedition do not rouse him to song to describe them nearly as much as do his memories of the green fields of Ukraine and the sufferings of the unfortunate serfs.

More than ever his poetry re-echoes the same motifs that we have already seen—the unwedded mother, a comparison of her with the widowed and desolated Ukraine, his solitude, his dreams of liberty. A Lermontov or a Tolstoy could thrill to the beauty of the Caucasus, the grandeur of the mountains, the sandy desert. Shevchenko could not but every step, every new event only increased his nostalgia and led him to a deeper and deeper lyricism which contrasts with the narrative themes which he reworked with slight variations. We can explain this in many ways, his feelings of alienation from his surroundings, his dislike of the army, his sufferings from the discipline, but the fact remains that his experiences remained apart from his poetry and his mind dwelt upon the past and the dreams that he had once cherished.

In Orenburg he came to know many of the exiled Poles and Ukrainians. On his release he met some of the Decembrists who were returning after a quarter of a century in Russian prison camps. The period taught him to overlook many of the Polish misdeeds in Ukraine. This was foreshadowed by that memorable passage in the epistle where he told his countrymen that the Kozaks had overthrown Poland but that her fall had ruined them. So in the poem To the Poles he was able to plead for a renewal of brotherly relations.

The Decembrists impressed him but it is highly significant again that not one word of his poetry pleaded for a reconciliation between them and Ukraine. He viewed them as martyrs, he eulogized them, but the fact that Pushchin, the Decembrist, the poet, and the friend of Pushkin, had an illegitimate daughter just like a gay hussar, shocked him to the depths. He must have remembered that passage in Katerina,

But there is a difference in his last period. He returned unbroken in spirit and almost his first experiment in poetry was the Neophytes written while he was detained at Nizhni Novgorod. His friend Kulish who was always cautious and fearful warned him that the poem was dangerous but that made no difference to Shevchenko. Even after his experiences in the army and while he was still in doubt as to whether he might be returned to the cheerless steppe, he wrote a poem which pointedly drew a comparison between the Russian tsar and the Emperor Nero. It is a sharp criticism of the abuse of Christianity by the modern despots. In form it is a retelling of a story that might have been the theme of a painting by Bryulov, the picture of decadent, luxurious, persecuting Rome, and the fate of the early Christian martyrs. In a sense the poem offers a conventional picture. Shevchenko chooses however, and this is in line with his development, the emotions of a mother of a martyr who is converted by her son’s courageous death to a belief in the Crucified. There are phrases which express the poet’s dissatisfaction with organized Christianity but they reveal nothing more than his belief that truth and right are being mocked by their so-called observers and believers. We can read the story as it stands or we can take the very obvious comparison of the mother and Ukraine, and read the moral that Ukraine can only arise when truth is restored to its supreme position on earth, and men live again as brothers.

Shevchenko’s return to St. Petersburg was almost a triumphal procession. He was entertained everywhere by the Slavophile leaders, as Sergey Timofeyevich Aksakov who had pleasant memories of that remote area among the Bashkirs which was somewhat similar to the land where Shevchenko had suffered. In St. Petersburg he met Count Aleksyey Konstantinovich Tolstoy and his relatives. He also became friends with Chernyshevsky and this friendship is of course exploited by the Communists who have tried to translate Shevchenko into their own language. It is true that the great radical spoke of the 1860 edition of the Kobzar in terms more favorable than did Belinsky but it is equally clear that he persisted in seeing in it only the folk elements and refused to grant it a proper place in the literature of a civilized nation. To him like Belinsky, Ukrainian had no right to exist except as a vehicle for folksongs. He rebuked the language and the writers for borrowing Russian and European words and believed that one East Slavonic language was all that had a right to appear and be counted. He denied to the Ukrainians that right which Russian in the eighteenth century had so generously utilized of modernization. He could quote Shevchenko on the abuses of serfdom with an easy conscience but both he and Turgenev were very sceptical of the validity of the underlying thesis of Shevchenko that Russia had its people and language and so had Ukraine.

Shevchenko had returned broken in body. His fiery will was unbroken but he was weary and the main notes in his later poems were a universal call for action against injustice and a personal lamentation for his bachelor life outside of Ukraine. Only rarely as in the attack on Bohdan did he revert to direct laments for the fall of his country. For the most part his works are adaptations of the Old Testament, breathing the moral indignation and the call to repentance that inflamed the Old Testament prophets. Again and again he emphasizes the need for truth and love and brotherhood, if mankind is to be truly happy.

To this series may be ascribed Mary. This is a striking study of the Blessed Virgin and Shevchenko deliberately changed the sacred story in order to make Mary typical of the lot of the average peasant woman. He also used apocryphal tales that were current among the peasants. Yet despite the surface variations in the story which take away much of the scriptural character, the story cannot fairly be called irreverent. It is not even unmiraculous in character, for the Star of Bethlehem, here called a comet, certainly plays a distinct role.

In writing this poem Shevchenko prefaces it with a glorious invocation of the Blessed Virgin, but exactly as he did in the Neophytes, the emphasis is laid upon the devoted woman, that truly human figure who carries on the work of her Son in the great cause of human freedom and human brotherhood after his untimely death at the hands of evil men. There is none of that spirit of deliberate blasphemy which appears so markedly in Pushkin’s Gavriliada or in most of the attempts to humanize the sacred story. It brought down upon the unfortunate head of the poet a great deal of criticism but here as elsewhere a more careful reader will see the fundamentally religious nature of the poet, even when he at first sight seems to turn his back upon the adherents of conventional religion.

The other note of his last days is the more personal one of grieving over his own unfortunate fate. His one ambition in life was to have a wife and a little home on the banks of the Dniper and his last years were a pathetic search for the girl who was to share it with him. His last poem written only a few days before his death is a real swansong and a definite assurance that it will be in the next world that he can satisfy these innocent desires.

Taras Shevchenko finished his sad and thwarted career at the age of forty-seven. For only nine years was he free to write as he would and even during that period publication was denied his works. He could be known officially only by the Kobzar and the Haydamaki. A second edition of the Kobzar was stopped by his arrest. Another edition which did appear in 1860 could contain only those early poems which had appeared before his arrest. All his other works were known either by manuscript copies which were in the hands of devoted friends and were circulated at the risk of arrest and imprisonment or were buried in his own notebooks or in the more inaccessible files of the Imperial police. All this makes it more remarkable that he was so widely known and highly valued during his own lifetime.

There is a deceptive simplicity about his works. He seems to be the mere imitator of the folksongs and the traditions of his people but he is far more than that. He possessed a command of language and a degree of metrical skill which overshadows that of many of his famous Slavonic contemporaries. Pushkin was content to ring changes upon the iambic metre. Shevchenko uses with equal skill iambics, trochees (perhaps his favorite) and anapaests. He was a master in the art. He could employ the simple measures of the folksong and give them a real dignity and he was equally at home with the formal rhythms but always he was the master of his medium and the freedom which he uses in his system of rhyming and of accentuation show a skill in technique that is not rivalled by any poet of his own or later times. The very simplicity and artlessness which he reveals conceal the master artist and are the more amazing when we realize that he has left us no hints as to the way in which he attained his skill, for the earliest poems which we possess from his pen are as perfect in their own way as are his greatest masterpieces.

Shevchenko commenced his work at the height of the Romantic period, when the poets of eastern and western Europe were heavily under the spell of the supernatural and the historical and from there with the ripening of his talent, he passed by evolutionary stages into the age of realism and of social reform. Through it all there is a majestic dignity that is characteristic of the finer passages of the Old Testament together with a tender and sympathetic understanding of all the sufferings and sorrows of humanity. It is this characteristic that has made him a timeless poet of the human heart and has given to his works not only national but permanent and universal value.

It is now nearly a century since the promising career of Taras Shevchenko was blighted by arrest and exile. The Russian authorities hoped that they had silenced him and with him the cause for which he stood and the uncomfortable and dangerous ideas which he was expressing. They failed miserably. They isolated him for ten years and warped his spirit; they broke his health but he never wavered in his ideas and to the end of his life he proclaimed the selfsame undying truths. Year by year his poems have been recovered, they have been studied, edited and reedited. Year by year his fame has increased and to-day it is abundantly evident that he was not a petty revolutionist and plotter, a poet who repeated in more or less agreeable form the old village folksongs, the last remains of a passing phase of life in one small period of human history, but that he was a man who against tremendous obstacles developed his heaven-given gift of song by long and serious study, who assimilated the best that the civilization of his time had to offer, and who was a flaming guide to the hearts of men and a prophet of a new and better world in which all that stains and ruins and tortures the human spirit will disappear. The poet of Ukraine, he is also a poet of humanity. His works have more than a purely local significance. To-day we realize as never before that freedom and truth and justice and mercy and brotherhood must be worldwide in scope and universal and eternal, if man is to be free and happy and peaceful. There are poets who express some of these ideals. There is none who speaks out more clearly, more artistically, and more touchingly to men everywhere than Taras Shevchenko. Those qualities which are local and temporal disappear. The underlying merits come to the surface and shine more brightly. Efforts to deride him or to bend him to the uses of aggressors and tyrants must fail and Taras Shevchenko appears to-day as some of the more keensighted and understanding of his contemporaries both at home and abroad realized, a poet of the first rank who deserves the ear and the study of every civilized man.