SHEVCHENKO'S
UNFORGOTTEN JOURNEY
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SHEVCHENKO'S
UNFORGOTTEN JOURNEY
George Luckyj
CANADIA N SCHOLARS' PRESS / TORONTO / 1996
Shevchenko's Unforgotten Journey
George Luckyj
First published in 1996 by Canadian Scholars' Press Inc.
180 Bloor Street West, Ste 402
Toronto, Ontario M5S 2V6
Copyright by George Luckyj and Canadian Scholars' Press.
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission
of this publication may be made without written permission.
Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data
Luckyj, George, 1919-
Shevchenko's unforgotten journey
ISBN 1-55130-102-4
1. Shevchenko, T. H. (Taras Hryhorovych),
1814-1861 - Biography. 2. Poets, Ukrainian -
19th century — Biography. I. Title.
PG3948.S51L83 1996 891.7'912 C96-931397-7
Book design by George Kirkpatrick
PRINTED AND BOUND IN CANADA
Contents
Part One
To St. Petersburg
9
Part Two
In Ukraine
23
Part Three
Exile
57
Part Four
Correspondence
83
Part Five
Homecoming
99
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Acknowledgements
THE IDEA FOR THIS BRIEF biographical sketch of Taras
Shevchenko's life was born when I was translating the scholarly bio-
graphy of the Ukrainian poet by Pavlo Zaitsev in 1986. I decided to
write a different story of this life, to set Shevchenko in the wider con-
text of Ukrainian intellectual history as well as to capture his unique
personality. A great deal is known about Shevchenko's life, and my
account consists of 90 per cent factual material and ten per cent fic-
tion. I have attempted to give a new emphasis to this life story, without
reproducing all the details of a full biography. Some of his poetry is
offered in translation and some illustrations have been provided.
I wish to acknowledge the use of the following sources. All the
translations of Shevchenko's poetry have been adapted from
C. H. Andrusyshen and Watson Kirkconnell's The Poetical Works of
Taras Shevchenko and are used here with the permission of the pub-
lisher, the University of Toronto Press. Other translations have been
adapted from W. Kirkconnell's The Ukrainian Poets. The translations
by R. Macguire and J. Malmstead (A. Bely's Petersburg) have been
used with the permission of the translators. The excerpts from Gogol's
"Dikanka" were translated by Constance Garnett. The final "duma,"
translated by G. Tarnawsky and P. Kilina, is reprinted with the per-
mission of the publishers, The Canadian Institute of Ukrainian
Studies and Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. Special thanks are
due to Christine Borsuk and Jennnifer Glossop for their expert edit-
orial assistance. I would also like to thank Ralph Lindheim for initi-
ating me into the arcane knowledge of the computer. Last but not least
I wish to thank my wife, Moira, for her whole-hearted collaboration.
SHEVCHENKO'S UNFORGOTTEN JOURNEY 7
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Part One
To St. Petersburg
O Moroz, gallant warrior,
Great Cossack of renown,
The whole Ukraine, brave hero,
Laments as you go down.
DUM A ABOUT MOROZENKO
PAVEL VASILIEVICH ENGELHARDT was enjoying life. In 1828, he
inherited a large part of his father's estate in Ukraine even though he
was illegitimate. The Engelhardts, as their name suggests, were of
Baltic German origin, but they served the Russian empire with devo-
tion. In return, they received land and more than 8000 serfs. Five years
before he was born, in 1793, this part of Ukraine, which was occupied
by Poland, was, after the second partition of Poland, ceded to Russia.
Polish culture and tradition were still quite strong in that part of the
world and the Polish language was widely used. Engelhardt himself
spoke it well. He divided his time between Vilnius, where he served the
tsar in a military capacity, and his splendid manor house near the vil-
lage of Kyrylivka, on the right bank of the Dnieper. In addition to
being a landowner (his estate was run by a manager) he was a guards
officer and an aide-de-camp to the governor of Vilnius, which was
quite a distance away.
It was summertime. All the guests had departed, and the dinner
plates had been cleared away by the servants. Engelhardt was left alone
with his thoughts. They were mostly occupied with city life in Vilnius
and St. Petersburg, which he visited regularly even though he had to
travel there by carriage. Yet sometimes he also thought of Kyrylivka,
which he enjoyed so much. Here, in the beautiful orchard and park, he
could relax and let his memory speak softly. Perhaps he was not, after
all, born to be an official, but rather a Russian barin, a gentleman of
SHEVCHENKO'S UNFORGOTTEN JOURNEY 9
leisure. He recalled the events of his life on his estate, this peaceful
haven.
In the year he had received his Ukrainian estate he had recom-
mended that a 14-year-old serf, Taras Shevchenko, enter his service to
perform the duties of a page boy. Engelhardt liked the youngster whom
he called "quick-witted." Taras was issued with a uniform and admit-
ted to the manor. His duties were not onerous. He would hand his
master a pipe or fetch a book or a glass of water. The walls of the
rooms were adorned with engravings and the atmosphere here was
quite different from Taras' home. Sometimes, when there was nothing
to do, Taras would recall his childhood.
Taras had two brothers and three sisters, one of whom, Kateryna,
he was especially fond of. She helped to nurse him when he was small.
Hryhorii Shevchenko, Taras' father, was a little different from most
peasants in Kyrylivka. Unlike them, he was literate and there are rea-
sons to believe that he came from an old, impoverished Cossack family.
His father Ivan, Taras' grandfather, lived to be 90 and had witnessed
the peasant rebellion in 1768. At that time the peasants were still serfs
of the Polish landlords and magnates, not enserfed by Russia, as they
became 20 years later. They harboured memories of the Cossack
Ukraine, when their rights were defended by the Cossacks, the real
rulers of the countryside. The leaders of the rebellion, Ivan Honta and
Maksym Zalizniak, were Zaporozhian Cossacks who seized, with
their forces, the town of Uman. They were crushed by the Russian
army under General Mikhail Krechetnikov, who crossed the Dnieper
River and routed the rebels. All these terrible events were narrated by
grandpa Ivan to a rapt audience including his little grandson.
Taras' father was often allowed to become a chumak, that is, to
travel to distant places to purchase salt, fish, and other goods. He
would take his favourite son with him. These were the first journeys in
Taras' life and he treasured their memory. Not only did he visit new
places, such as the town of Uman, but lying down in a cart driven by
his father, he could observe the sky during the day and at night let his
fancy roam freely. He imagined that there must be some pillars hold-
ing up the sky, and he wondered how to get there. After all, in
Ukrainian, the Milky Way was called the Chumak Pathway.
Taras' early life was full of hardship. Later, he described his home
as "an old, poor house, though whitewashed outside, covered with a
thatched roof. Near the house grew an apple tree and a dense orchard
stretched at the back." Much later Taras referred to his life at home as
hell. Most peasants, including his brothers and sisters, accepted this
10 GEORGE LUCKYJ
Figure 1: Schevchenko's birthplace (1843)
hell as something inevitable, perhaps sent by God. But occasionally
old pagan beliefs survived in popular customs and folkways. Easter
eggs were painted every year as talismans against evil spirits. Spells
and charms were used to avert illness and bad fortune. People's spirits
not only persevered, they were indomitable.
On one occasion the curious little boy decided to walk through the
fields to find the pillars that propped up the sky. He got lost and was
brought home by some chumaks. However, he had experienced an
environment different from home. The world opened up to him, and
he welcomed it without any fear. Was this only the natural curiosity of
a peasant boy, or was there also an unusual adventurousness? On that
occasion, while walking through the fields, Taras noticed many grave-
mounds dotting the landscape. These were, he learned later, of two
kinds. First, they were ancient kurhans (Turkic for a hill), sometimes
dating back to Scythian times. These round mounds of about 100
metres in diameter served in ancient times as burial grounds for war-
riors and their weapons. Then, there were Cossack mohylas
(gravemounds) from the 17th century, where the Cossacks were laid to
rest. One such mohyla, which the little boy did not see but learned
about from his grandfather, was the famous Savur mohyla. This, the
SHEVCHENKO'S UNFORGOTTEN JOURNEY 11
legend claimed, was the burial place of the famous Cossack Savur,
who fell fighting the Tatars. To the little boy the gravemounds brought
both a sense of the unknown and the presence of history.
Once, on a trip with the chumaks, little Taras clung to his father
when the train of wagons approached the steep bank of the river
Dnieper. The chumaks stopped, unharnessed their horses, and were
ready to take a rest. They soon lit a fire under a cauldron and boiled
some fish and kasha. While eating and relaxing they started to sing sad
chumak songs about their wanderings. Taras listened for a while but
then ventured to the brink of the riverbank and looked across. There
were green islands in the middle of the wide and mighty Dnieper, and
his eyes gazed on the blue distance beyond. He was elated.
In Ukraine (or, as the Russians called it, "Little Russia"), the condi-
tions of serfdom were different from those in Russia, where there was
communal control (obshchina). In Ukraine, individual landholding
persisted, and the peasants did not practice the so-called communal
repartition of land. The serfs eked out a meagre existence, working
most of the time for their landlord. Serfdom was introduced into
Ukraine in 1783 by Catherine II, who had also destroyed the Cossack
stronghold on the Dnieper, the Zaporozhian Sich. Before that time
Ukraine enjoyed the semi-autonomous rule of the Cossack Hetmans,
from 1648 till the ill-fated battle of Poltava in 1709 in which the com-
bined forces of King Charles XII of Sweden and the Ukrainian
Hetman Ivan Mazepa were defeated by the armies of Tsar Peter I. Both
these rulers, Catherine and Peter, the destroyers of an ancient freedom,
were hated in Ukraine and were later castigated by Shevchenko.
The sense of history was still alive in Kyrylivka. Old memories of
better days could not be erased. On the contrary, they shone brightly.
Songs preserved many glorious as well as sad happenings, and they
nourished the imaginations of sensitive children who gathered on
warm summer evenings in the orchard to listen to the old dumy. Their
poetic, lyric language found eager listeners. What they lost by not
going to school, they gained through oral discourse.
However, Taras managed to receive some education partly from his
father, who, in his spare time, read to him the Lives of the Saints, and
partly from an abusive village church cantor named Bohorsky, who
occasionally beat Taras by giving him several lashes when the cantor
was drunk. Much later Taras recalled how Bohorsky's pupils were "his
absolute slaves." Shevchenko had to "carry out his orders with total
obedience, since there was nobody to defend me." At this early age
Taras wrote down some of the verses of the well-known itinerant
philosopher Hryhorii Skovoroda. He also heard many folk songs
12 GEORGE LUCKYJ
glorifying the Cossacks. He loved to sing them, too, since, as a
contemporary reported later, "He learned new songs very quickly and
sang them well." Even as a boy he had a good voice. (Singing,
especially in a small choir, is a favourite Ukrainian recreation. It has
survived to the present day, and visitors to that country are sometimes
astonished by the readiness of everyone to sing in a choir. Like the
Welsh, the Ukrainians excel in this art, which comes naturally to them
and has a long tradition.)
When Shevchenko's mother died in 1823, his father married a
widow with children of her own. Taras' stepmother was, proverbially,
unkind and even cruel to her stepson. Sometimes, when things became
unbearable, Taras ran away to a neighbouring village to stay with his
sister, Kateryna, who had married. Then, when Taras was eleven, his
father died. His father, on his deathbed, said, "My son Taras does not
need anything from my estate. He will not be an ordinary man. He
will either be someone very good or a good-for-nothing. In either case
my bequest will be of little help to him."
When Taras was 13 years old he was still tending sheep beyond the
village. However, he was also fond of drawing, although most of his
work then was done with rough charcoal on cottage walls or on the
reverse side of cheap prints.
These memories gathered as Taras sat in Engelhardt's comfortable
manor. They prompted him to draw with the pencils he found in the
room, while his master was away on a visit. When Engelhardt unex-
pectedly returned home and found Taras drawing by candlelight, he
had his servants give the young artist several lashes for creating a fire
hazard. Physical abuse of serfs was common. It was also practiced in
schools — spare the rod and spoil the child. Life was altogether much
rougher in those days. It is debatable whether physical violence left the
scars then that it leaves on people today. It did not necessarily perpet-
uate itself in later generations. Shevchenko's life, full of abuse, had not
led him to practice violence. On the contrary, he abhorred it. The lash-
ing did not, however, stop Taras from his pursuit of art. Instead, he
tried to find a teacher of painting. Since teachers were unavailable in
Kyrylivka, he went to a neighbouring village and for two weeks was
trained by a local painter of churches. Engelhardt took note of this
and decided to take pageboy Taras with him when he was travelling to
Vilnius. Perhaps there he could find an outlet for the boy's talent. The
person in charge of this journey by horse-drawn carriage noted that
Shevchenko was "suitable to be a house painter." Perhaps Engelhardt
had it in his mind to apprentice Taras to a painter and to earn some
money from the labour of this talented serf. It was Taras' artistic
SHEVCHENKO'S UNFORGOTTEN JOURNEY 13
talent that made it possible to go on the first extended journey of his
life. He was naturally thrilled and expected to paint not only houses,
but real pictures. His eagerness to follow his art drove him relentlessly.
But the journey was to be full of surprises and adventures he was not
expecting.
The best road to Vilnius was roundabout, through Kiev, Chernihiv,
and Belarussia. Sometime in the late spring of 1830, Engelhardt's
party, which included Shevchenko, set out for the distant city, which, at
that time, was more Polish than Lithuanian, and was known as Wilno.
They reached the city after several days of travelling through desolate
countryside, changing horses at dilapidated towns and villages. Vilnius
boasted a university and some fine churches. Its architecture alone cap-
tivated the young artist.
In Vilnius the party stayed at a tavern, which offered room and
board. Soon they met some local people who spoke Polish rather than
Russian. In a church, Shevchenko, who just turned 16,met a young
Polish girl, the black-browed Dunia Husikowska. He spoke halting
Polish with her and they got on famously. Taras found her quite
appealing. As he often would in his adult life, he found himself in a
moment of spiritual crisis. However, what began as a flirtation soon
developed into an intellectual friendship. Dunia was an ardent Polish
patriot and told Taras about Wilno, the town that the poet Adam
Mickiewicz and the historian Joachim Lelewel had called their home.
Taras and Dunia walked down the old city streets, past the mag-
nificent Cathedral of St. Stanislas, a neoclassical structure rebuilt in
1801. They were especially fascinated by the Gothic facade of the
small St. Anne's church, which had so impressed Napoleon. The
remains of Polish history could be seen in the imposing Pointed Gate
(Ostra Brama) with its venerated picture of the Madonna. The uni-
versity, founded by the Polish king, Stefan Batory, was a true centre of
Polish culture, although it was closed at the time because of student
disturbances. The city was on the eve of rebellion, and Taras and
Dunia were filled with apprehension and wonderment. Taras, a peas-
ant viewing a magnificent city for the first time in his life, was
impressed not only by its architecture, but by the fact that all the citi-
zens were free people, not serfs.
Dunia also read to Taras some of Mickiewicz's revolutionary
poetry. To Shevchenko's undisguised approval she quoted the lines
from Mickiewicz's "Ode to Youth": "Arise! United stand! With chains
of harmony let us encircle the vast world. I Our thoughts into one
mighty focus hurled, Our spirit united, yet free!" This romantic poetry
challenged the very regime under which they lived. It was more
14 GEORGE LUCKYJ
revolutionary than any painting Taras had seen. Perhaps with words one
could express one's pent-up emotions better than with paints? Recited
by this young girl, who was no serf, Mickiewicz's verses made a strong
impression on Taras, who later told a friend that at that moment he "for
the first time thought why we, unfortunate serfs, cannot be free people."
Soon, the thought of freedom was reinforced by new events.
Engelhardt decided to stay in Vilnius for several months. He had not
forgotten Shevchenko's artistic aspirations and apprenticed him to a
well-known Lithuanian painter, Jonas Rustemas, who lectured at
Vilnius University. At last, young Taras could learn something about
oil painting from this 70-year-old master. New vistas were opening
before him. In November, however, Taras witnessed the outbreak of
the Polish uprising against Russia. The streets of the city were full of
demonstrators, leaflets were passed around to everyone, and Russian
soldiers were being targeted by snipers. All this overwhelmed Taras,
who continued to see Dunia.
One day they were walking together near Ostra Brama when they
came across a young man whose arm had been wounded by a bullet
fired by a Russian soldier. He was bleeding profusely and in need of
medical help. Taras and Dunia learned that his name was Ryszard. He
did not want to be taken to the hospital because he suspected that the
Russians would arrest the wounded Poles. He told them that he lived
on Swietokrzyska Street, not very far from where he had been shot. He
could walk, and all three of them went along to his home.
As soon as they reached his home, his mother came and examined
his wounded arm. He had lost some blood and was glad to sit down.
His mother made some tea and called his father, who was in his study.
Ryszard's father, whose last name they never learned, expressed his
thanks to them. He told them that the uprising had spread throughout
Wilno and that the Poles expected a strong Russian counterattack.
Ryszard's father was an ardent Polish patriot, who in 1811 had served
in Napoleon's advancing army on Moscow. He was not in the mood to
reminisce about it, but he was full of hatred for the Russians. Learning
that Shevchenko was a Ukrainian, he shook his hand and claimed that
Ukraine and Poland had a common enemy — Russia. Shevchenko
spoke a little Polish, which pleased Ryszard's father.
In the meantime Ryszard was feeling better and was anxious to
return to his comrades. Both his father and mother persuaded him to
stay at home. They sent for a local doctor, who dressed his wound. As
the four sat talking and drinking tea, a Russian patrol went by.
Fortunately it did not come inside the house and they saw the caps of
Russian soldiers disappearing past the window. Peace had returned at
SHEVCHENKO'S UNFORGOTTEN JOURNEY 15
least temporarily to this Polish home. When Taras and Dunia left to
face the turmoil on Vilnius's streets, they were both relieved but not
happy at what they had witnessed. The rebellion did not last long
before it was put down, but Taras would never forget the panic among
the Russians or the bravery of the Poles.
It was in Vilnius, too, that Shevchenko came to face the Jewish
problem. As a Ukrainian peasant he did not particularly like the Jews;
they were regarded as allies of the Poles and Russians and as exploiters
of the peasants. Shevchenko, however, was never an anti-Semite. Much
later he recalled a Jewish episode in the "most celebrated city of
Vilnius." He described it in a somewhat melodramatic fashion, nar-
rating in verse the love story of a Jewish woman and a Lithuanian
man. The woman's father kills the young suitor and is, in turn, mur-
dered by his own daughter. It is quite possible that during his stay in
Vilnius Shevchenko saw the popular vaudeville Success from Failure or
Adventures in a Jewish Tavern, which has, in one of its songs, the lines
about the "most celebrated city of Vilnius." The play must have
impressed Shevchenko, who might also have heard the story of the
double murder there.
His master, Engelhardt, decided at once to leave Vilnius and to pro-
ceed to St. Petersburg. He was in such a hurry to leave that he left
Shevchenko behind. Weeks later Taras had to make his own way to
St. Petersburg, along with other servants forsaken by Engelhardt. Some
areas of the country were controlled by Polish revolutionaries, and the
refugees had an adventurous journey to the capital. Sometime in
February 1831, Shevchenko arrived in St. Petersburg.
It was a combination of sheer luck and the ambition to become an
artist that made this journey possible. But this 17-year-old serf had
other advantages that are usually ignored by his biographers. He was
not only an usually gifted and independent young man, he had had the
good fortune to avoid much formal schooling and had therefore relied
on developing his own resources and originality often stifled by
schools. Had he gone to school he would have received a Russian edu-
cation and might have accepted the dominant Russian culture. As it
was, his education was informal, based on stories and folk songs and
on a rich native tradition. For the Ukrainian serfs kept the old beliefs,
celebrated the old folk festivities, and offered valuable homespun wis-
dom. All this was to provide, in a few decades, the awakening
Ukrainian intellectuals with material for new cultural theories of
romanticism and nationalism. Shevchenko did not have to study this
native tradition; he imbibed it with his mother's milk. He was, thus,
uniquely qualified to later become a member of the Ukrainian
16 GEORGE LUCKYJ
intellectual elite. All this still lay ahead for he was unaware of his lucky
star. He was proud, not ashamed, of his humble origins, and he never
betrayed any desire to embrace the city with all its attractions.
Although he was bent on an artistic career, this did not interfere with
his love for his country.
St. Petersburg, of course, could be very tempting, especially for
Ukrainians, many of whom lived in the city. Beginning in the 18th cen-
tury, when they lost the last vestiges of political autonomy, they came
in droves to the capital of Russia, enticed by new and attractive gov-
ernment posts. Ukrainian clerics, favoured by Peter I, came to Russia
to help build a stronger church and empire. Others, former members
of the Cossack starshyna (officer corps), were given Russian dvo-
rianstvo (nobility) and co-opted into government service. Ukrainian
artists and writers also flocked to Russia, for it alone offered them
fame and status.
At the time of Shevchenko's arrival in St. Petersburg, his country-
man Mykola Hohol was publishing his first collections of stories in
Russian there. He was to become the famous Nikolai Gogol, the first
major novelist in Russia. To succeed as an artist one had to do it on
Russian terms. This was, after all, how an imperial culture developed
and flourished: not by promoting multiculturalism, but by absorbing
all the non-Russian talent into what Russians called the "common
pot" (obshchii kotelok). For centuries this policy worked successfully.
But now and then someone was unwilling to sink into this melting pot
— especially if he or she came from the Ukrainian peasantry.
For a while Shevchenko lived in Englehardt's apartment on
Mokhova Street in St. Petersburg and performed his duties as a page-
boy. Late in 1831 Engelhardt signed an agreement with the painter
Vasili Shiriaev, apprenticing young Taras under a four-year contract.
The terms of the agreement stipulated the pay Englehardt would
receive and made it clear that the pupil "would be obedient and hum-
ble" towards his teacher. Shiriaev was a hard taskmaster, and
Shevchenko later compared him to the cruel village cantor. Several of
Shiriaev's pupils lived in his apartment. They assisted him in decorat-
ing the walls of the houses of St. Petersburg's wealthy burghers.
In the little free time he had, Taras tried to paint portraits. One por-
trait by him of Engelhardt has survived. Engelhardt liked it and asked
for a portrait of his mistress, which Taras duly painted. Gradually,
having improved his technique, Shevchenko painted churches and,
along with other pupils of Shiriaev, the large decorative panels in the
Grand Theatre. These commissions were well paid, and although
Shevchenko received only room and board, Engelhardt and Shiriaev
SHEVCHENKO'S UNFORGOTTEN JOURNEY 17
shared the profits. In one year alone this amounted to over 30,000
rubles.
During his work on the Grand Theatre Shevchenko met a sympa-
thetic machinist, Petr Ivanovich Kartashov, who told him about the
Imperial Academy of Fine Arts. Serfs were not admitted there.
Shiriaev's apartment had a library and Shevchenko borrowed some
books from it. He had now mastered Russian, which had still been
rather shaky when he arrived in the capital. He read some poetry by
Alexander Pushkin, but his favourite book was Jean Jacques
Barthelmy's Travels in Greece, which he read in a Russian translation.
The routine at Shiriaev's was rather boring and the painting assign-
ments not very exciting. The pseudo-classicist, style which was then in
vogue, was also compulsory for Shevchenko. Taras was not satisfied
with being a decorator-painter. Therefore, in the evenings, which in
St. Petersburg were often very light, he went to the Summer Gardens
to copy classical statues. The Summer Gardens were established in
1704, soon after St. Petersburg was built on the orders of Peter I.
Forced labourers, among them Ukrainian Cossacks, were used in the
construction. The gardens, located between the rivers Neva and
Fontanka, occupied ten hectares. There were more than 80 stone stat-
ues in the gardens, which were also famous for their ironwork fencing,
considered the finest in Europe. Not all the statues captivated the
young Taras. He did not like the "ugly Saturn."
On one such occasion Taras met Ivan Soshenko, a student in the
Academy of Fine Arts, who observed and liked Shevchenko's sketches.
It turned out that Soshenko, too, was a Ukrainian and came from
Vilshana, a village not far from Shevchenko's Kyrylivka. They quickly
became friends, both sharing memories of home and both aspiring to
become painters. Their meeting endured in both their memories. In an
autobiographical novel, The Artist, written years later, Shevchenko
recorded the meeting in these words spoken by Soshenko: "I came
across a young man in dirty overalls, sitting on an upturned bucket...!
stopped. The youngster looked round and began to hide something in
his shirt.... 'Show me what you have sketched,' — I asked.... He was
shy, but showed me a good sketch of Saturn. I found him very appeal-
ing and his face was quite feminine."
This meeting must have happened in the summer of 1835, for in
that year, due to Soshenko's efforts, Shevchenko was enrolled as a
member of the "Society for the Encouragement of Young Artists." The
secretary of the society was Vasyl Hryhorovych, another Ukrainian
who took an interest in Shevchenko, and who was also a professor at
18 GEORGE LUCKYJ
the Academy of Fine Arts. These new friends soon realized that Taras
had great talent and that he should enrol as a student in the academy.
But he could do so only if he were a free man, not a serf. Still, he could
visit the famous Hermitage Museum and feast his eyes on the paint-
ings. The museum opened in 1764 and originally contained the art
collection of Catherine II. It grew and spread to five different build-
ings, embracing one of the finest collections of art in the world.
At about the same time, Shevchenko met yet another Ukrainian,
Yevhen Hrebinka, a minor poet who wrote in Ukrainian. Shevchenko
visited him often and Hrebinka introduced him to works of the fledg-
ling Ukrainian literature, among them the poetry of Ivan Kotliarevsky
and the prose of Hryhorii Kvitka. Shevchenko borrowed their works as
well as a manuscript of the "Istoriia Rusov," a romanticised history of
the Cossacks by an unknown author who was widely read in Ukraine
and Russia and had been praised by Pushkin himself. These books
were a revelation to the young artist. His country's past came alive
before him. What he had known only from stories and folksongs was
confirmed by literary creations. Hrebinka told young Shevchenko not
only about works written in Ukrainian but informed him of the latest
literary trends abroad, many of which were just reaching Russia. In the
West, a new literary movement, which had started in England and
Germany and which some people called Romanticism, was now fash-
ionable. Hrebinka had read Schiller's The Robbers. This new
movement brought not only new ideas but pleaded for the use of the
language as spoken by ordinary people. The Germans, in particular,
were following their philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder, who wrote
about the "national spirit" (Volksgeist) as the foundation of all cul-
ture. Herder praised the popular oral literature of the Slavic peoples
and foresaw a bright future for Ukraine. Following Herder's call many
collections of folk songs and legends appeared in print in Europe. Even
in Ukraine one such collection, edited by Mykhailo Maksymovych,
was published in 1827. Hrebinka lent his copy to Shevchenko.
All this was new and provocative. There were, as yet, no Romantic
poets writing in Ukrainian, but their advent was assured. Art was not
merely painting and decorating but also writing poetry. In 1834
Hrebinka published a collection of Ukrainian poems, and a year later
a Ukrainian translation of Pushkin's long poem Poltava. It is certain
that Shevchenko read them, but he must also have read Gogol's
Ukainian Dikanka tales which appeared in 1831. Gogol was also in
St. Petersburg at that time, immersed in the study of Ukrainian history,
but the two probably never met.
SHEVCHENKO'S UNFORGOTTEN JOURNEY 19
Figure 2: Karl Briullov (1835)
20 GEORGE LUCKYJ
Soon, Shevchenko's Ukrainian friends began efforts to free him
from serfdom. Russian help was essential. In 1836 they approached
Karl Briullov, a Russified descendant of French Huguenots who was
the leading painter in Russia. He had just returned from Italy and his
huge canvas The Last Days of Pontpei had been widely acclaimed. He
was a Freemason and a man of great influence despite or perhaps
because of his liberal views. Hryhorovych and Soshenko introduced
Shevchenko to Briullov, who was pleased with his sketches. He was
ready to join the campaign for his liberation. The men in Briullov's cir-
cle represented a small but influential libertarian group in Russia. Even
before the abortive Decembrist anti-tsarist rebellion of 1825, the
Russian writers Nikolai Novikov and Alexander Radishchev exposed
the injustices of serfdom. The memory of the Decembrists, five of
whom were executed and over 100 exiled, was still very much alive in
liberal Russian circles.
The Freemasons were allowed to operate in Russia under Tsar
Alexander I and were not so much dedicated to political change as to
individual self-perfection. They emphasized philanthropic activities
and were very concerned with alleviating the cruelties of serfdom.
They were given to secrecy and conspiracy, which appealed to many
liberal-minded Russians. In 1822 a ministerial decree banned all secret
societies, including Masonic lodges. Their activity, however, continued
underground. The prospect of liberating a serf, therefore, was very
appealing to Briullov and his friends.
After several approaches to Engelhardt, whose obstinacy prompted
Briullov to remark that Shevchenko's owner was a "fat pig in mer-
cenary slippers," it was agreed that the sum of 2500 rubles was to be
paid for the young artist's freedom. Other prominent Russians joined
the campaign: Count Feodor Tolstoy, Count Mikhail Velgorsky, an
accomplished musician, the painter Aleksey Venetsianov, and the poet
Vasily Zhukovsky, who was the tutor to the tsarevich. Even the
Russianized Nikolai Gogol later claimed that he had assisted in this
effort.
It was agreed that Briullov would paint a portrait of Zhukovsky,
which would then be sold in a lottery. All this took a long time. In the
spring of 1837 the portrait was ready. At about the same time
Shevchenko fell seriously ill and was hospitalized. After a month of
very high fever he slowly recovered. Briullov's portrait was sold. Many
lottery tickets were bought by members of the imperial family who
wanted to display their philanthropy. Finally the sum of 2500 rubles
was raised and the money delivered to Engelhardt who, on April 22,
1838, signed the papers granting freedom to his former serf.
SHEVCHENKO'S UNFORGOTTEN JOURNEY 21
It was a typical spring day in St. Petersburg. Early fog was blown
away by winds from the sea and the sky turned blue. In the evening it
might rain, even snow. Soshenko was sitting in his room reading, when
suddenly through the open window a jubilant Shevchenko jumped in,
shouting "freedom." They embraced and cried. That night Briullov
hosted a party in honour of Shevchenko. It was a happy occasion for
everybody present and a great deal of Caucasian wine was consumed.
Early in the morning, exhausted but still elated, Taras returned to
his rooms. It took him a long time to fall asleep. Just as the dawn was
breaking. He dreamt about his home. Vague figures of former friends
appeared. They were sad and melancholy, reminiscent of the artist's
unhappy youth. Suddenly, a figure of a young girl came forward and,
just before offering her kiss, said — "You have abandoned me." With
a start Shevchenko woke up and slowly, still thinking of the girl's
words, remembered that he was a free man.
22 GEORGE LUCKYJ
Part Two
In Ukraine
How INTOXICATING, how magnificent is a summer day in
Little Russia! How luxuriously warm the hours when midday
glitters in stillness and sultry heat and the blue fathomless
ocean covering the plain like a dome seems to be slumbering,
bathed in languor, clasping the fair earth and holding it close in
its ethereal embrace! Upon it, not a cloud; in the plain, not a
sound. Everything might be dead; only above in the heavenly
depths a lark is trilling, and from the airy heights the silvery
notes drop down upon adoring earth, and from time to time
the cry of a gull or the ringing note of a quail sounds in the
steppe.The towering oaks stand, idle and apathetic, like aimless
wayfarers, and the dazzling gleams of sunshine light up pic-
turesque masses of leaves, casting unto others a shadow black
as night, only flecked with gold when the wind blows. The
insects of the air flit like sparks of emerald, topaz, and ruby
about the gay vegetable gardens, topped by stately sunflowers.
Grey haystacks and golden sheaves of wheat, like tents, stray
over the plain. The broad branches of cherries, of plums,
apples, and pears bent under their load of fruit, the sky with its
pure mirror, the river in its green, proudly erect frame — how
full of delight is the Little Russian summer!
Such was the splendour of a day in the hot August of eigh-
teen hundred...eighteen hundred...yes, it will be about thirty
years ago, when the road eight miles beyond the village of
Sorochintsy bustled with people hurrying to the fair from all
the farms, far and near. From early morning, wagons full of
fish and salt had trailed in an endless chain along the road.
Mountains of pots wrapped in hay moved along slowly, as
though weary of being shut up in the dark; only here and there
a brightly painted tureen or crock boastfully peeped out from
behind the hurdle that held the high pile on the wagon, and
SHEVCHENKO'S UNFORGOTTEN JOURNEY 23
attracted wishful glances from the devotees of such luxury.
Many of the passers-by looked enviously at the tall potter, the
owner of these treasures, who walked slowly behind his goods,
carefully wrapping his proud crocks in the alien hay that would
engulf them.
On one side of the road, apart from all the rest, a team of
weary oxen dragged a wagon piled up with sacks, hemp, linen,
and various household goods and followed by their owner, in a
clean linen shirt and dirty linen trousers.
With a lazy hand he wiped from his swarthy face the stream-
ing perspiration that even trickled from his long moustache,
powdered by the relentless barber who, uninvited, visits fair and
foul alike and has for countless years forcibly sprinkled all
mankind with dust. Beside him, tied to the wagon, walked a
mare, whose meek air betrayed her advancing years.
Many of the passers-by, especially the young men, took off
their caps as they met our peasant. But it was not his grey
moustache or his dignified step that led them to do so; one had
but to raise one's eyes a little to discover the reason for this def-
erence: on the wagon was sitting his pretty daughter, with a
round face, black eyebrows arching evenly above her clear
brown eyes, carelessly smiling rosy lips, and with red and blue
ribbons twisted in the long braids which, with a bunch of wild
flowers, crowned her charming head. Everything seemed to
interest her; everything was new and wonderful, and her pretty
eyes were racing all the time from one object to another. She
might well be diverted! It was her first visit to a fair! A girl of
eighteen for the first time at a fair....
The river Psiol gradually came into our travellers' view;
already in the distance they felt its cool freshness, the more wel-
come after the exhausting, wearisome heat. Through the dark
and light green foliage of the birches and poplars, carelessly
scattered over the plain, there were glimpses of the cold glitter
of the water, and the lovely river unveiled her shining silvery
bosom, over which the green tresses of the trees drooped luxuri-
antly. Willful as a beauty in those enchanting hours when her
faithful mirror so jealously frames her brow full of pride and
dazzling splendour, her lily shoulders, and her marble neck,
shrouded by the dark waves of her hair, when with disdain she
flings aside one ornament to replace it by another and there is
no end to her whims — the river almost every year changes her
course, picks out a new channel, and surrounds herself with
24 GEORGE LUCKYJ
new and varied scenes. Rows of watermills tossed up great
waves with their heavy wheels and flung them violently down
again, churning them into foam, scattering froth and making a
great clatter. At that moment the wagon with the persons we
have described reached the bridge, and the river lay before them
in all her beauty and grandeur like a sheet of glass. Sky, green
and dark blue forest, men, wagons of pots, watermills — all
were standing or walking upside down, and not sinking into the
lovely blue depths.
Nikolai Gogol, Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka
SHEVCHENKO'S UNFORGOTTEN JOURNEY 25
1
I have lost my heart into my rhymes,
That you, in the dim coming times,
May know how my heart went with them
After the red-rose-bordered hem.
W.B. Yeats "To Ireland"
THE YEAR WAS 1843. Five years had passed since that memorable
day in April 1838. Shevchenko was a successful art student, a favourite
pupil of Briullov. St. Petersburg, one of the most grandiose capitals of
Europe, enveloped him in its glow and suffused his entire being. The
life of a free man was at first intoxicating. Young Taras greedily
accepted it. Despite his meagre means (he was on a scholarship) he
went to theatres, concerts, operas, and ballets, where he admired
Maria Taglioni, and he became a bon vivant. He also read a great deal,
mostly English literature in Russian translation, and learned French.
Some friends feared he was indeed dissipating. But he was not.
The temptations of city life proved, at first, too much for the ambi-
tious young man. He wanted to succeed and realized that friendships
could help him. Then there were women. He was always susceptible to
feminine beauty. As an art student he painted many nudes and met the
models later in town. He was no saint and occasionally visited disrep-
utable places. He recalled later how "he sated his passions at
Adolphina's." This Adolfinka, as he called her, was his favourite. His
young life bubbled like wine he could ill afford. There was also the
unfortunate marriage of his teacher Briullov to the gorgeous Emilia
Timm from Riga. Two months later the tsar took Emilia as his mis-
tress, and Briullov had to divorce her. He grieved partly in seclusion
and partly, accompanied by Shevchenko, in taverns. These were the tri-
als of a young artist as a man.
It slowly dawned on Shevchenko that his beloved Academy of Fine
Arts was becoming, for him, a blind alley. He was an excellent student,
but he was not satisfied with his work. The contemporary art, even
that of the great and divine Briullov, was something he could not
respond to. Once, when he was looking at an art collection, he
recorded that "Oh, God, I saw lanky lifeless Madonnas, surrounded
26 GEORGE LUCKYJ
by skinny cherubs." For some time he had hoped to continue his stud-
ies in Italy on a government grant. But these scholarships were
awarded to students who had received gold medals for their work. For
three years in a row Shevchenko received only silver medals and had to
abandon dreams of Italy. It was, therefore, not unnatural that his
thoughts should turn to poetry and to Ukraine. Perhaps his true call-
ing lay elsewhere.
Shevchenko found himself giving in to an insistent yearning to write
verse. The words in his native Ukrainian tongue came forth fluently
and effortlessly. Later, in his diary, he would recall that as a student:
I wrote Ukrainian verses, which were to settle like a terrible bur-
den upon my poor soul. Before Briullov's bewitching canvas I
would fall into reveries and evoke in my heart my blind kobzar
and the bloodthirsty haidamaks. In the twilight of his luxurious
studio, as though on the torrid and wild steppes embracing the
Dnieper, there passed before my eyes the martyred shadows of
our hapless Hetmans. The vast steppe, dotted with its high bur-
ial mounds, unfurled itself to meet the edges of the sky. My beau-
tiful, my unfortunate Ukraine preened herself before me in all
her immaculate and melancholy loveliness.... And I grew increas-
ingly pensive, and the eyes of my soul would not be torn from
this panorama of enchanting beauty, which they so intimately
knew, to which they were so intimately bound.
The young student could hardly, as yet, fully realize that in his
attempts to transform these relentless visions into verse he had come
face to face with his destiny. His first poem, "The Bewitched Woman,"
written in 1837, was in the form of a ballad. Close to German Lieder,
ballads, according to Herder, were an expression of a people's soul.
But this rather vague concept assumed in Shevchenko's poem not old
cliches of oral literature, but, in the words of one scholar, "a new
poetic form expressing the deepest and most intimate human experi-
ences, ideas and philosophical interpretations of life." Very early in his
poetic work Shevchenko was already conscious of his task. In a pro-
logue to his poetry in 1839, he wrote:
My pensive, heavy-laden songs
My precious blooms, 1 vow!
I've tended you, I've reared you up,
Where shall I send you now?
Go to Ukraine, my children dear,
SHEVCHENKO'S UNFORGOTTEN JOURNEY 27
To our own dear Ukraine;
Wander like waifs by hedge and road,
For here I must remain.
There you will find a friendly word,
And there a mood sincere;
There you will meet an open heart.
Nay, hints of glory hear...
In 1840 Shevchenko published his first collection of poems, Kobzar
(The Minstrel). These lyric and historical verses were inspired by his
native land. The best sampling of them may be shown in one lyrical
and one historical short poem:
What use are coal-black brows to me?
What use my hazel eyes?
Those years of happy maidenhood
What joys from them arise?
Years of youth will pass away,
Eyes will weep and beauty fade,
Vanish like the rose.
With the wind it goes..
There was a time in our Ukraine
When cannon roared with glee,
A time when Zaporozhian men
Excelled in mastery!
They lived as masters — freedom's joy
And glory were their gain:
All that has passed, and what is left
Are gravemounds on the plain
1
.
The Haidamaks, a long poem that appeared in 1841, described a
peasant rebellion in a romantic manner. The first collection received
six positive reviews in Russian periodicals; the second drew sharp crit-
icism from the well-known Russian critic, Vissarion Belinsky. But
Shevchenko's renown grew, among both the intelligentsia and the peas-
ants.
With somewhat mixed feelings, Shevchenko decided to return home
for a visit. On the one hand he wanted to visit Ukraine, but he also
wanted to discover something about its history and contemporary
condition and to confirm his new dedication to writing poetry. He felt
28 GEORGE LUCKYJ
acutely responsible for his own destiny. Early in May of 1843
Shevchenko and his old friend, the poet Yevhen Hrebinka, set out from
St. Petersburg for Ukraine. Hrebinka's sister, Liudmyla, joined them.
They took a mail coach along the Belarussian tract. Shevchenko had
travelled this road once before years ago with his master Engelhardt,
though in the opposite direction. Once again he beheld the unwashed
villages alongside the road, the dirty postal stations where horses were
changed, and, above all, the miserable peasants begging for food. All
this was familiar to him but, nonetheless, dismaying and repugnant. A
contemporary traveller along the same road wrote that "such a jour-
ney, without proper rest, was exhausting and fraught with danger and
adventure."
Spring was very late that year, and nature did not provide the pop-
ulation with relief from what was for the most part, the simple
drudgery of their lives. The surrounding poverty of Belarussia was
aptly described in the memoirs of Shevchenko's friend, Nikolai
Mombelli: "There was a general shortage of flour and, as a result, the
bread was uneatable. Even though I am an opponent of physical pun-
ishment, I should like to see our emperor eating the bread of Vitebsk
peasants for several days." Shevchenko's sentiments about the tsar
were similar; he was soon to give them unrestrained expression in his
clandestine poems.
The travellers passed Homel and reached Chernihiv in Ukraine,
finally leaving the Belarussian tract. On May 25, one week after the
commencement of their journey, they entered Chernihiv, the seat of an
ancient principality and, in 1648, the headquarters of a Cossack regi-
ment. Hardly a town, it was, rather, a collection of thatch-roofed
houses without a paved main street; indeed, only some of the streets
were laid with wooden logs. In the whole town there were only three
stone houses.
Nizhyn was the group's next stop. It was here that Nikolai Gogol
had received his schooling. Shevchenko had read some of Gogol's
Ukrainian stories written in Russian. Later Shevchenko would dedicate
a poem to him, but now he wondered whether Ukrainians like Gogol
should not stick to their native language. Shevchenko insisted on con-
tributing to the young Ukrainian literature. For Hrebinka, Nizhyn held
many precious memories. Shevchenko hoped to look up his old friend
from St. Petersburg, the artist Ivan Soshenko. The immediate goal of
this journey for Shevchenko was Kachanivka, the private estate of the
Ukrainian magnate Hryhorii Tarnovsky. Hrebinka, along with his sis-
ter, went on their separate way to his khutir "sanctuary."
SHEVCHENKO'S UNFORGOTTEN JOURNEY 29
Shevchenko had heard a great deal about Kachanivka from friends
of the Russian composer Mikhail Glinka, who on his visits there had
composed some of his best works. But the very sight of the estate sur-
passed all his expectations. The eighteenth-century manor, looking
more like a palace, was surrounded by a park of 600 desiatinas, or
nearly 1800 acres, all beautifully maintained in their natural state. The
winding access road led to the main building over which a flag flew to
signify that the owner was at home. Old Cossack cannons stood
nearby, silent now.
Shevchenko was escorted into the building. The manor's ground
floor was divided into several guest apartments for Tarnovsky's rela-
tives and friends. Shevchenko ascended the carpeted, ornate staircase
to the upper part of the mansion, the Great Hall decorated with por-
traits of Ukrainian hetmans. The furniture standing against the carved
walls of the large room was in Empire style, probably of local crafts-
manship. Here Shevchenko was met by the master of the house, who
lost no time in pointing out to his visitor an orchestra platform, and
informing him that the piano in the room was the one on which Glinka
had composed his Ruslan and Liudmila. Tarnovsky prided himself on
being a great connoisseur of art and music. "If you like Beethoven," he
told Shevchenko, "we can play him for you." Later in the evening, the
orchestra did, in fact, play Beethoven's Third Symphony to which an
extra passage had been added composed by Tarnovsky himself.
Shevchenko did not openly express his reaction to this extravagant,
rather bizarre gesture. He had journeyed here hoping to paint
Tarnovsky's portrait. Indeed, he was being treated as an artist and
found this to be not at all unpleasant.
But on a solitary stroll through the grounds, Shevchenko had an
unexpected encounter that brought one critical aspect of the reality of
life in Ukraine into focus for him. Trees were already in leaf here, and
birdsong filled the air. Shevchenko chanced upon an elderly peasant
with whom he struck up a conversation. The old man, Prokip, worked
in the apiary. He was very garrulous, almost indiscreet. Within a few
minutes he had informed Shevchenko that his master, Tarnovsky, was
in love with his own very beautiful niece, who was, in turn, hoping one
day to inherit the estate. Furthermore, the guest learned, it had come
to pass that in the neighbouring village a peasant girl had hanged her-
self after being seduced by this same landlord. It was a sad fact that
there were many Ukrainian landowners who sentimentally and osten-
tatiously displayed a love for their native traditions, folklore, and
culture, yet who simultaneously shamelessly exploited the peasants
within their jurisdictions.
30 GEORGE LUCKYJ
Shevchenko found that he could not tolerate such hypocrisy. He saw
the lavish life at Kachanivka for what it was: an anomalous island in
the midst of widespread destitution. Moreover, he knew full well that
it was not the only one of its kind in this land. He had no illusions
about the realities of life in Ukraine. He knew that the country had
been raped and enslaved by Moscow as well as by the Russified
Ukrainian landowners and bureaucrats who faithfully served the tsar.
Shevchenko had recently declared in a letter to a friend: "I will not go
to Little Russia, the devil take it, for there I'll hear nothing but weep-
ing." Yet in a corner of his heart there lived an ideal, just as each of us
reserves a place in our souls for a paradise.
Shevchenko's vision was nurtured by wide-ranging influences. A
constant source of sustenance derived from the principles of the
Enlightenment, the ideals of the French Revolution, and the Europe-
wide Romantic movement, which was born of political and social
upheavals across the continent and fed by the human spirit's yearning
for unrestrained expression in the arts to counter the balance and con-
trol of the Classicist age. Nationalism, which gave form to the pride of
powerful nations and to the strivings for freedom of oppressed ones,
became an integral and compelling part of the Romantic movement
and of the very breath of the 19th century. In addition to these perva-
sive surrounding forces, all the intense personal experiences of
Shevchenko's young life continued to affect his impressionable psyche.
They were never denied or suppressed by plans, ambitions, and desires
of the moment, but always integrated anew into his maturing outlook
upon the world. He was ever receptive to the vivid memories of the
harsh realities and inequities of his serf origins and to the familiarity
gained in childhood with the historical, national, and social perspec-
tives of a mostly oral culture, all in a living Ukrainian language: the
folk songs into which the people poured their hearts and invested their
moral and political ideals; the dumy, lyric-epic poems about the
Cossacks; and his grandfather's tales of Ukraine's tragic past. His
father acquainted the youngster with the popular Lives of the Saints,
which evoked worlds of wondrous archetypal motifs in the boy's imag-
ination, and had initiated him into a communion with the almost
mystical expanses of the Ukrainian steppes. Shevchenko never lost
sight of the natural beauty of the country and of the basic goodness
of its people, which existed in spite of the devastating misery of their
existence. His close friend, the artist Willi Schternberg, had depicted
scenes from the Ukrainian countryside as a series of canvasses, which
deeply moved Shevchenko.
SHEVCHENKO'S UNFORGOTTEN JOURNEY 31
Figure 3: Self-portrait (1843)
32 GEORGE LUCKYJ
These factors converged to make a powerful claim on the young
man's sensitive nature, on his creative imagination, on his genius. This,
in turn, must have played a crucial role in determining Shevchenko's
choice of activities, associates, friends, his further experiences, and the
very direction of his life. What began as heartfelt sympathy for an
ideal was fired by the stark contrast between this ideal and reality and
by Shevchenko's growing conviction that there existed here a potential
for great change, that progress towards achieving the essence of his
ideal was possible, and that he himself must be involved, must play a
role in the unfolding of this momentous and marvellous drama of lib-
eration and rebirth. But destiny has a way of revealing herself only
slowly to her human vessels, for they are bound by time.
Shevchenko was not preoccupied with his fate when he left
Kachanivka, after paring his sojourn there to two weeks. He could not
bring himself to spend more time in the company of his obtuse host
who had pretensions to being a great patron of the arts. Later, in the
novel The Musician, Shevchenko painted a sharp satire of Kachanivka
and its master: the estate here bears the name Klenivka and its owner
Klenovsky.
Having quickly recoiled from Kachanivka and intending to visit his
family on the right bank of the Dnieper, in the village of Kyrylivka,
Shevchenko took the best and shortest road to these parts which led
through Kiev. In those days this ancient city had only 80,000 inhabi-
tants. Its main street, Khreshchatyk, was under construction. Before
reaching Kiev Shevchenko stopped at Brovary, a mail-coach station. He
visited a tavern run by a Turkish woman whose coffee, served with
home-brewed liquor, was famous. The Turks, along with other
national groups, were well settled in Kiev. They were probably the
descendants of the Turks who had fought the Cossacks in the 17th cen-
tury. Now they were traders and innkeepers.
From Brovary the poet took a ferry to Kiev. The venerable city shone
in the distance with the golden cupolas of its churches. Kiev's governor
at this time was the notorious Dmitri Bibikov, one of the most cruel
tyrants in the empire, especially keen on persecuting young Polish stu-
dents who were plentiful at Kiev University. Kiev, on the right bank of
the Dnieper, was under strong Polish influence. As an anti-Polish mea-
sure of the Russian divide-and-conquer policy, a temporary favour had
been granted to Ukrainians: the creation of the Commission for the
Study of Ancient Documents, which fostered Ukrainian research. The
well-known apostate Russian writer Alexander Herzen characterized
Bibikov as "full of gall, with blood in his eyes." Later Shevchenko him-
self would draw a portrait of this "tsarist corporal" in one of his
SHEVCHENKO'S UNFORGOTTEN JOURNEY 33
poems. Bibikov's deputy, Nikolai Pisarev, was widely recognized as a
bribe-taker. Both these tsarist officials had special agendas devoted to
uncovering secret political societies. These societies, which evolved in
Russia in the middle of the century because of the oppressive regime,
were not necessarily political and they numbered among their mem-
bers Freemasons who preached self-improvement and general
enlightenment.
In Kiev Shevchenko stopped at one of the taverns in Pechersk, per-
haps the well-known Green Tavern. He soon discovered kindred
Ukrainian spirits, known as the "Young Minds," who, together with
him, two years later came to form the secret society, the brotherhood
of Sts. Cyril and Methodius, dedicated to the abolition of serfdom and
to freedom for Ukraine. In 1843 only a few of the future "brethren"
were in Kiev. Among them were Panteleimon Kulish and Vasyl
Bilozersky. Kulish, five years younger than Shevchenko, was the leading
intellectual light of the small group, which was to evolve into a per-
ceived threat to the tsar. At that time he was a teacher in Kiev and lived
not far from the Cathedral of St. Sophia. Coming from an old Cossack
family, he was of a different social background from Shevchenko. In
addition to being very erudite and well read, he had tried his hand at
painting and at writing poetry and prose in Ukrainian. In his memoirs
Kulish recorded his first meeting with Shevchenko in Kiev:
I was sitting behind the easel, lost in the play of lines, tones and
colours, when before me appeared the still unfamiliar figure of
Shevchenko in a loose canvas coat and a cap pushed back like
Cossack headgear.
"Greetings! And guess who?" these were Taras' first words
pronounced in the captivating gay voice which endeared him to
women and children.
"Don't you want to offer me a drink?" was the second sen-
tence I heard from Shevchenko. I could not help but be aston-
ished.
Kulish goes on to say that he did not like Shevchenko's "cynical"
appearance. There was, indeed, a sharp contrast between them. Kulish
was abstemious, orderly, and punctual while Shevchenko's ways were
quite bohemian. Shevchenko, in Kulish's mind, represented the lower
strata of Ukrainian society while he, Kulish, was a descendant of the
Cossack officer corps. But in spite, or perhaps because, of these dif-
ferences, the two became friends. In the days following their first
meeting, they visited many places of historical interest around Kiev,
34 GEORGE LUCKYJ
sketching and sharing impressions. Contented hours were spent along
Shevchenko's cherished "Dnieper with its sacred hills," where he and
Kulish also discovered their mutual love of fishing. Shevchenko was
particularly moved by the threadbare ruins of the venerable
Mezhyhirsky Transfiguration Monastery, whose origins dated back to
the turn of the millennium. During the 17th and 18th centuries the
monastery had been patronized by the Zaporozhian Cossacks, who
often retired, on completion of their service, to live out their lives
within its walls. But several years after the 1775 destruction of the
Zaporozhian Sich and the abolition of the Hetmanate, the Russian
government closed down the buildings and appropriated the land
holdings. A fire gutted the monastery in the following year, whereupon
a faience factory was built on its grounds. One of the many Cossack
tales that Kulish related to Shevchenko was the story of the otatnan
Semen Palii who, at the crucial battle of Poltava in 1709, sided not with
the Ukrainian Hetman Mazepa but with Peter I of Russia. According
to this account, Palii retired to the monastery soon after the battle,
perhaps realizing his blunder. In 1847, while already in exile,
Shevchenko would write the poem "Chernets" (The Monk) about
Palii, dedicating it to Kulish.
Kulish, having a deeper and more systematic education behind him
than did Shevchenko, was inclined to dominate their relationship
imbuing it with a certain air of patronage and pedagogy, though never
without respect for Shevchenko's genius. He recounted to his new
friend many details of Ukrainian history of which the poet was
unaware. Shevchenko, a more colourful, intuitive, and imaginative per-
sonality than Kulish, would listen patiently and then recite some of his
verses dealing with the Ukrainian Cossacks. Kulish was favourably
impressed by the poetry, though he regarded it as rather bloodthirsty.
Ideologically, Kulish was a moderate, prepared to encourage a slow,
gradual process of enlightenment, with an aversion to the idea of rev-
olution. Shevchenko tended to be more radical in his thinking.
From Kiev, Shevchenko went to visit his friend Hrebinka in his
khutir near Pyriatyn. They rested and talked and visited Hrebinka's
brother-in-law Svichka who lived nearby. Svichka ("candle") was
"burned out" and in total decline. He was famous for having once
bought all the champagne available in Kiev in order to treat his friends.
Now he was living in near poverty. Hrebinka took Shevchenko to call
at the estate of Mosivka, owned by the rich Tatiana Volkhovska. She
was an 80-year-old dowager of Russian and German descent who lived
a life of luxury. Her ornate residence was known as the Ukrainian
Versailles. Her balls were famous and usually lasted several days and
SHEVCHENKO'S UNFORGOTTEN JOURNEY 35
nights. One such ball, which was celebrated annually on June 29 to
mark her late husband's birthday, was in progress when Hrebinka and
Shevchenko arrived. They met the cream of the local gentry. Everyone
was speaking French, as was customary among the aristocracy and
gentry of the empire throughout the 19th century. The recent fashion
of "Ukrainophilism," as yet purely a sign of the romantic idealization
of the native village and its commonfolk, accommodated the use of
the "peasant language" — Ukrainian. Shevchenko was welcomed and
made to feel at home; his poems were well known here, and very well
received, and there ensued some reading and recitation of favourite
verses.
The leading families at the Mosivka ball were the Seletskys, the
Zakrevskys, and the Chuzhbynskys. Afanasiev-Chuzhbynsky, the poet
and ethnographer, became a friend of Shevchenko and later described
the poet at the ball as "a stocky man, with shining eyes which attracted
attention." Another, less flattering description of Shevchenko by a vis-
itor talked of him as "an artist by profession and a poet by vocation.
Of medium height, broad-shouldered, strong and fit in body, pock-
marked, with volatile, hazel, not bad-looking eyes, angular, awkward,
dishevelled, unwashed, and carelessly dressed — that was
Shevchenko's appearance, not at all elegant."
Among the other guests whom Shevchenko met at this estate were:
Oleksii Kapnist, a former Russian revolutionary Decembrist and son
of a noted writer of Venetian origin; Victor Zakrevsky, a landowner in
the neighbouring estate Berezova Rudka, where Shevchenko would
become a frequent visitor; and the artist Yakiv de Balmen, a man
partly of Scottish and French descent who had travelled widely in
Europe and was well informed about various freedom movements, par-
ticularly those in Poland. He so admired Shevchenko's Kobzar that he
wanted to republish it in Polish transcription, with his own illustra-
tions. Drafts of this project remained unfinished. Two years later, de
Balmen was killed in the Caucasus, where he had been sent with the
imperial army to battle the insurgents struggling against Russian occu-
pation. On hearing of his friend's death, Shevchenko wrote the fiery
poem "The Caucasus," dedicating it to de Balmen's memory. The
poem is a scathing indictment of Russia's expansionist mentality and
policies.
It might be instructive at this point to consider briefly the
"Decembrists" in Russia at the beginning of the 19th century. This was
a secret revolutionary movement centred in Russia and Ukraine, which
had its origins in the dissatisfation of Russian military officers who
had come into contact with Western European liberal ideas during the
36 GEORGE LUCKYJ
Napoleonic wars. The aims of the movement were an overthrow of the
tsarist autocracy in favour of a limited monarchy and the abolition of
serfdom in the empire. However, the military uprisings in
St. Petersburg in December 1825 and in the Kiev region in January
1826 failed. The Decembrist movement in Ukraine was not interested
in Ukrainian national aspirations. Although the movement was
quashed by the tsarist forces, it nevertheless was a significant factor in
fostering the convergence of national-political ideas and views among
the Ukrainians, which later became much more fully articulated.
Not long after the Mosivka ball, Shevchenko paid a visit to the
Zakrevskys at Berezova Rudka. It was here that he met Victor
Zakrevsky's sister-in-law, Hanna, wife of Victor's brother Platon. Her
beauty at once captivated the young poet who lost little time in falling
in love with her. She must have returned his affection, for life in
Berezova Rudka was rather dull, especially for women. Some women
among the gentry were fairly well educated. Victor Zakrevsky's sister,
Maria, was a talented pianist and another sister, Sophia, wrote novels.
Hanna's husband and Victor were at the helm of the so-called
"Mochemordy" (wet mugs), a male society of drinkers, many of
whom, aware of the gross inequities of their time, espoused progres-
sive social and political ideas. Shevchenko enjoyed the company of
these "wet mugs," as he himself was not averse to an occasional drink,
but particularly because most of these men were liberals who treated
their peasants humanely and well. Victor Zakrevsky actually gave
away much of his land to them and was content to live in a simple cot-
tage among the cherry trees with a young peasant woman.
Early in July, Shevchenko accompanied Oleksii Kapnist on a brief
visit to Yahotyn, the residence of Prince Repnin, whom the poet had
also met at Mosivka. The old prince was a descendant of a line of the
Rurikid dynasty in Kievan Rus'. At one time he had been the military
governor in Ukraine but had been removed from this post by Tsar
Nicholas I because of his sympathies with Ukrainian autonomists and
his persistent defence of Ukrainian interests before the Russian gov-
ernment. He was the elder brother of the Decembrist Sergei
Volkonsky, whose son had lived in Yahotyn while his father was in exile
in Siberia. The prince was in good health, despite his 65 years. His wife
was the granddaughter of the last Hetman of Ukraine, Kyrylo
Rozumovsky. They had an unmarried daughter, Varvara. Their spa-
cious palace, built of wood, had stood at one time in Kiev but had
been moved and rebuilt in Yahotyn.
"When we returned into the garden," wrote Varvara Repnina, "it
was raining. On reaching home, Kapnist returned to the garden in
SHEVCHENKO'S UNFORGOTTEN JOURNEY 37
search of the newcomer. I went to the balcony and saw both of them
come in, completely soaked." Kapnist and Shevchenko stopped briefly
there, viewed the art gallery, and Shevchenko made plans to return at
a later date to paint a portrait of the prince and his family. Kapnist was
anxious to take Shevchenko to neighbouring villages to visit friends.
They spent a few days back at Berezova Rudka, then travelled to many
estates where they were often invited to stay by the landowners. These
landowners, whether Ukrainian or Russian, varied greatly from each
other in their attitudes towards their serfs. Shevchenko was deeply per-
turbed and angered by some landlords' cruelty and disdain in their
dealings with their peasants. He did not hide his resentment of their
inhumane behaviour, often confronting them with his feelings about
their actions; this frequently served only to reinforce his pain and dis-
tress.
While travelling through these areas of central Ukraine, Shevchenko
carefully observed the landscape, sketched historical monuments, and
even conceived a plan to produce a series of drawings on historical as
well as folk themes, with commentary in accompanying text, which he
tentatively called "Picturesque Ukraine." It would not only be a work
of art and of popular enlightenment, but was seen by Shevchenko as
perhaps bringing some profit, so that he could buy freedom for his
brother and sister. He shared these ideas with his new friends.
The country he travelled through was lovely. A Russian traveller, to
whom the mild Ukrainian climate was reminiscent of Italy, has left the
following impression of this part of the world:
Under the radiant sky of the South, in happy Little Russia [that
is what the Russians called Ukraine], April brings heavenly plea-
sures: the air, the birds, the greenery, the rivers — everything cap-
tivates the traveller. He wants to stay outdoors, to be enraptured
with nature, to settle for ever on a shady khutir, not far from
Kiev... or to see the majestic waves of the Dnieper, whose banks
never change. They will remain the same, picturesque and calm,
while entire kingdoms perish....Not far from here, he can see a
wide valley with sparkling streams, running through thick
groves, and in the distance white peasant cottages....In the quiet
evening he can feel everything to be peaceful and fragrant. The
traveller's heart rejoices; after a day of sorrow it rests quietly...
Was this an evocation by a romantic, or was the Ukrainian scenery
truly exceptional? Shevchenko was particularly saddened when, on vis-
iting the island of Khortytsia further south on the Dnieper, the
38 GEORGE LUCKYJ
Figure 4: Environs of Kiev
stronghold of the Sich, as it was called, of the Zaporozhian Cossacks
in the 17th century, he found its heritage to be utterly neglected,
scorned, and abandoned. After destroying it in 1775, Catherine II had
leased it to Serbian and German colonists, and now, as Shevchenko
later wrote, potatoes grew on this ground, in the same earth that had
been so abundantly watered by the blood of the generations of
Cossacks who had died in its defence. A decade later, Shevchenko's
friend Afanasiev-Chuzhbynsky visited the same area and left this
account:
The island of Khortytsia is very picturesque, especially in the
spring when between its wild craggy banks there sparkle green
trees that add a gay appearance to the gloomy granite boulders.
The island, like the riverbanks, is high and in the distant past
formed part of the left bank of the Dnieper. Its surface is covered
with all kinds of fruit trees. There are also high gravemounds, tes-
tifying that it was once inhabited. Scythians and Pechenegs have
left here their traces. Bloody battles must have been fought here....
Likewise, during his stops at the ruins of Chyhyryn, the former cap-
ital of the hetman state, and Subotiv, the residence of Bohdan
SHEVCHENKO'S UNFORGOTTEN JOURNEY 39
Khmelnytsky, hetman from 1648 to 1657, Shevchenko confronted the
essence of the tragedy of Ukrainian history. The relics symbolized all
that was at once great and catastrophic in Ukrainians' struggle to
define and develop their identity as a society and a nation. Here,
within the span of a tumultuous decade, there had emerged a power-
ful centre around which millions of Ukrainians of all social strata
could and did begin to organize their common hopes and to defend
their own interests. But here also followed the disillusionment born of
the failure to maintain these accomplishments, and the subsequent dis-
sipation of energy and resolve under both external and internal forces.
Standing alone, newly under Moscow's overlordship, without trust-
worthy allies in the entire circle of nations attending its borders,
grappling with the sudden dearth of strong leadership, the structure of
the nascent nation collapsed. The hard-earned constructive sensibili-
ties gave way to incessant internal strife, thus weakening and exposing
the country to foreign intervention and partitioning. External preda-
tors and internal decrepitude enhanced each other's influence in a
pathetic, ruinous cycle of dissolution, which lasted for years.
Shevchenko absorbed these lessons of history, perceiving them to be
embodied in these ruins. His most powerful political poetry would
scrutinize them and lay them bare for every one of his compatriots to
comprehend.
Shevchenko was anxious to visit his native village, Kyrylivka. He
parted company with his new friends in Kiev and made his way home.
For it was still his home, although both his parents had died when he
was still a child. His grandfather, Ivan, whom Taras remembered so
fondly, was still living, having married for the third time at the age of
80. The old man said that he was waiting for freedom from serfdom,
but that it had not yet come. Shevchenko's older brother, Mykyta,
looked like an old man, beaten down by hard work. His sister, Yaryna ,
was married to a drunkard. His younger brother, Yosyp, had recently
married and the couple were expecting their first child. Life went on
despite the interminable hardships of serfdom. There was little hope
for the future, no discernible end to or even mitigation of this bleak
existence. The village seemed to the poet "dark and deaf," unchanged,
unenlightened, unredeemed by the passing of the years. His anguish
deepened when Mykyta, after insistent questioning by Shevchenko,
told him the tragic story of Taras' childhood sweetheart, Oksana
Kovalenko. The prettiest girl in the village, she had been seduced by a
Russian soldier, a common occurrence in those days. Unwed, she bore
a son returned to the village where she lost her sanity and drowned
herself. This account wounded Shevchenko profoundly. The insanity
40 GEORGE LUCKYJ
and the death of this friend from his early years were to leave on the
young poet a scar that never fully healed. The story is immortalized in
his poetry, where the theme of the seduced woman and her bastard
child is elevated to a symbolic level.
On returning to Yahotyn, Shevchenko was extended a warm wel-
come. He was given a suite, which for a long time thence was referred
to as "Shevchenko's study." It consisted of a working room, a bedroom
with a washstand, and a sitting room. Shevchenko painted there in
serene peace and quiet, and joined the Repnins for meals, though most
regularly for tea. He listened to the old prince's memories of the
Decembrist uprising and to his description of his efforts to publish the
first history of Ukraine by Bantysh-Kamensky. The Repnins became
important patrons of the young Shevchenko, who loved them above all
for their liberal opinions. The family circle in which the poet found
himself included not only the old prince and princess, their daughter
Varvara and a married son, Vasili Nikolaevich, but had long since
expanded to embrace also the family physician, Ferdinand Fischer, the
tutor, Roman Strandman, and two orphaned sisters, Hlafira and
Oleksandra Psiol. Hlafira was a young painter whose company the
poet found very agreeable; her sister wrote poetry in Ukrainian but
was too shy at first to show it to Shevchenko. Later, however, he read
and praised her poem "Holy Water."
The friendliest relationship developed between Shevchenko and
Varvara, who was several years older than him. She was well educated,
knew several foreign languages (though she did not know Ukrainian),
and conducted a voluminous correspondence with her teacher and
mentor in Switzerland, Charles Eynard. Upon getting to know
Shevchenko, she wrote a novel in Russian, Devochka (A Girl), in which,
thinly disguised, she portrayed her friendship with him. Apart from a
portrait of Varvara Repnina, painted by Hlafira Psiol, the following
description of her by one of her friends has been preserved: "She was
energetic and even enthusiastic. She was a mature young woman, thin,
with large, lively eyes...good-natured, clever, and cordial. She was the
kind benefactress of the less fortunate, whom she helped a great deal."
Princess Varvara shared her parents' liberal views; she was vehemently
ashamed of her country's cruel regime, of its social injustices. In her
personal life she had experienced great disappointment, for her stern
mother had forbidden her to marry her father's aide-de-camp, the
brother of the poet Baratynsky. No wedding took place. For solace, she
had turned to religion, mysticism, and charitable work.
As Varvara came to know Shevchenko better, her highly strung and
sensitive nature embraced him as her white knight, as a "saintly and
SHEVCHENKO'S UNFORGOTTEN JOURNEY 41
radiant" emissary of Apollo, as an enchanter and genius upon whom
she could lavish all her resources to guide him in achieving his destiny.
As she fell in love with Shevchenko, she became very possessive of him;
she perceived herself to be his guardian angel, to whom was entrusted
the protection of his soul in the face of all sorts of wordly temptations,
and was very jealous of anyone and anything that revealed the man in
his total self, which often did not coincide with the holy icon she had
created in her heart's fancy. Her letters reflect her neurotic personality.
In one of them, written in November 1845 to Eynard, her thwarted
eros is clearly evident. She writes, "qui me presents des tableaux
brulants de passion et quelque fois meme de volupte."
In the evening the guests gathered to hear Shevchenko recite his
poetry. Varvara left her impression in her diary: "If I could only tell
you what I experienced during the recitation! What lofty thoughts,
what beauty, what excitement, and what pain. My face was wet from
crying, but I felt happy because I felt pain in my heart. I was deeply
moved. After the recitation I did not say anything. I was lost for words.
It was like listening to music. Later I told him that I would buy for him
a golden pen." This aristocratic young woman found the poet even
more enchanting than his verse. For his part, though he was fond of
Varvara and had a great deal of respect and admiration for her, even at
times a certain reverence towards her, he simply did not love her in the
way she wished he would. This led, naturally, to the emergence of ten-
sion within their relationship. Although Shevchenko had told Varvara
on many occasions that he had never met a more kindred soul, he felt
uncomfortable with her increasingly confessional revelations and
gradually became more aloof.
This delicate impasse was resolved by Kapnist, who was an old and
close friend of the Repnins. He convinced Princess Varvara that the
intimate relationship she envisaged between herself and Shevchenko
was inappropriate, that such a marriage would never survive, indeed,
would be disastrous because of the discrepancy in their social posi-
tions. He advised Shevchenko to leave Yahotyn so as to avoid
provoking any further embarrassing scenes. The poet did, in fact, take
his leave several weeks later; he and Varvara parted as friends. She
would remain an active and committed promoter of his artistic and lit-
erary efforts and a source of moral support in the years to come. (For
more details see the chapter on correspondence.) Before leaving
Yahotyn, however, Shevchenko was involved briefly in an unsuccessful
undertaking to stage a new opera, Mazepa, for which he was to write
the libretto. The project fell through because the composer of the
music, Petro Seletsky, who was also a local marshal of the nobility and
42 GEORGE LUCKYJ
Figure 5: Varvara Repnina (1845)
SHEVCHENKO'S UNFORGOTTEN JOURNEY 43
a man of very reactionary views, did not agree with Shevchenko's por-
trayal of Hetman Mazepa as a defender of Ukraine and of freedom
against the tyrannical Tsar Peter I. Seletsky preferred to view the
famous hetman as a traitor to Russia, and would not relinquish his
position even when confronted with Alexander Pushkin's half-sympa-
thetic appraisal of Mazepa in the long poem Poltava.
Shevchenko's first, long and moving visit home to his native land,
was drawing to an end. He called once more, perhaps for the last time,
at the Zakrevskys, who were good friends of his by now to admire
Hanna, whose portrait he was painting. He felt happy in the presence
of a woman he really loved and who ignored the sentimentality of high
society. His relationship with Hanna remained unfulfilled; she was a
married woman and would not take a lover. But she remained in his
life as one shining facet of his ideal beauty.
He stopped briefly in Kiev, where some landowners of his acquain-
tance took him along to the kontrakty, the famous Kiev fair, which
provided a grand social occasion for the gentry from all over Ukraine.
Champagne flowed freely here, bands played, amateur theatre compa-
nies presented cabaret-style performances. Estates changed hands as a
result of victories or losses at cards; some landlords lost fortunes while
others made new ones. The return route to St. Petersburg led through
Moscow, which Shevchenko reached early in 1844. Here he met the
acclaimed actor Mykhailo Shchepkin, about whom he had heard so
much at Yahotyn. Shevchenko also came to know Professor Osyp
Bodiansky, a historian, Slavicist, and ethnographer who defended the
independence of the Ukrainian language and literature. A strong
mutual admiration is evident from their subsequent correspondence.
In late February Shevchenko arrived in St. Petersburg.
What did Shevchenko bring back with him to St. Petersburg from
his travels in Ukraine? His experiences had been many and varied, and
the impressions he had garnered were potent and disturbing. He had
perceived the whole country to be subjugated. The people's sense of
history and their own place within it was fading quickly in the daily
struggle for a meagre existence. How long would it be before their
sense of their basic humanity would begin to ebb? A person's feeling
of his or her own self-worth may be sustained to some extent by other
values, but some sense of responsibility for his or her destiny within
the context of the community is indispensable. Could it be that the
peasants' desire for freedom would be stifled and finally extinguished
altogether? And was it conceivable that the inhumanity of the
Ukrainian gentry would now finally give way to a respect for the
44 GEORGE LUCKYJ
dignity of fellow human beings? Could these lords, indeed, forever per-
sist, degrading others and dishonouring themselves?
Having witnessed all this at this juncture in his life produced a sub-
tle change in Shevchenko. There burgeoned within his consciousness a
definitive centre of concern, whose source was inside him but whose
orientation was outside himself. His personality became focused in a
new way. At this centre stood Ukraine. He realized that his relationship
with his people, his responsibility towards them, and, indeed, towards
their ancestors and their children was the most vital matter in his life.
He realized that his liberation from serfdom had plucked him out of
the large identification with the serfs of Ukraine and had set him down
at some distance from the field of battle. He had, in effect, climbed out
of his familiar matrix and into a new, larger one. He was now able to
interact with the first matrix, his homeland, in a way that would have
been impossible had he not separated from it. His visit home helped to
crystallize his identity vis-a-vis Ukraine. No longer was he only one of
its people. He was now distinct from his people and able to build a
relationship with them, for a creative relationship can exist only
between independent entities. The daimonic, indwelling force, which is
at the same time the creative power, found an ideal mould in his con-
tact with his country. Ukrainianness became Shevchenko's sustaining
theme.
SHEVCHENKO'S UNFORGOTTEN JOURNEY 45
2
The garden's lord, a poet young,
I walk the night with quiet tunes
And from my loaded arm is slung
A basket full of ripened moons.
B.I. Antonych
IN ST. PETERSBURG once again, Shevchenko continued the work he
had started during his journey. He had decided to expand the
Picturesque Ukraine project into a series of annual issues, with 12 pic-
tures in each. In the title he deliberately used the word "Ukraine," not
the more common "Little Russia." In his poetry, too, he used
"Ukraine," although he never employed the noun ukrainets (a
Ukrainian). Giving his country back its old name — Ukraina — was,
on the poet's part, almost a political act, liberating it from being little
Russia. Shevchenko was not the first to do so, but his practice was of
great importance at that time. He published an announcement of the
book in the press and soon put out the first part consisting, at that
point, of six sketches. The illustrations portrayed the well-known
landscapes and historical monuments and figures of Ukraine, as well
as folk customs and traditions. A typical example was the drawing
"Gifts at Chyhyryn," depicting Turkish, Muscovite, and Polish envoys
bringing gifts to Cossack Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky. The sketch
"Matchmaking" illustrated the traditional Ukrainian custom of a
suitor sending matchmakers to the young woman who had caught his
fancy and whom he would like to marry. In a letter to the Chernihiv
governor, requesting support for his undertaking, Shevchenko wrote:
"It seems to me that if this country of mine were the most miserable
in the world, I would still consider it more beautiful than Switzerland
or Italy. Those who see it claim that they would want nothing more
than to live and die in our beautiful land."
Impressions garnered during the months in Ukraine were also coa-
lescing into poetry, and the words Shevchenko wrote during his return
trip and on his arrival in St. Petersburg were a potent distillation of the
pain and shame he had felt on treading so much of the ground of
Ukraine. This pain is particularly evident in a short but powerful poem
46 GEORGE LUCKYJ
"Chyhyryn" written in the course of his stopover in Moscow and ded-
icated to Mykhailo Shchepkin. As mentioned earlier, Chyhyryn was
the one-time capital of Cossack Ukraine; this poem picks up on
another, "The Ransacked Grave," composed four months earlier,
shortly before Shevchenko's departure from Ukraine. "The Ransacked
Grave" marks the poet's first venture into political utterance in his
verse. The poem opens with a lament for Ukraine-Mother, asking that
she explain to him what has happened to her, why she is wasting away.
O gentle region, fair Ukraine,
dear beyond every other!
Why are you plundered and despoiled,
why do you perish, Mother?
Have you not prayed, before the dawn,
for fortune in the strife?
Have you not taught your wavering sons
to live a virtuous life?
Her answer poignantly blames Hetman Khmelnytsky for his folly in
handing her fate over to the Russian tsar, and she is equally critical of
many more of her own children, the generations of those who had
turned away from her to serve Moscow, to better their own lives at the
cost of her very existence. Several brief concluding lines of the poem
introduce, with consummate subtlety, the motif of the burial mound
ransacked by order of the government in Moscow. The pillagers who
sought riches will find nothing therein — but the poet knows what
truly lies hidden in these Cossack graves: he now tells us only that,
were this essence exhumed, Ukraine's tears would flow no longer.
Though he does not specify the identity of this elixir in the present
poem, later poems make it clear that it is freedom itself that lies buried
deep within these gravemounds in the Ukrainian steppe.
On July 8, 1844, Shevchenko wrote the long comedic poem The
Dream. The vision of the 580-line poem is truly Dantesque. A dream
enables the poet to fly over Ukraine and see the horrors of daily life for
the common people. Everything is covered with blood and tears. At the
same time it is a picture of great natural beauty and unspeakable
human misery. The poet's flight brings him finally over the capital city,
St. Petersburg. A military parade is in progress. Tsar Nicholas loved
military pomp and participated in it. Shevchenko draws a savagely
satirical portrait of the tsar and the tsarina — "the shrivelled mush-
room." The tsar's servile entourage is further ridiculed when the tsar,
to show his absolute power, strikes one of his subordinates in the face,
SHEVCHENKO'S UNFORGOTTEN JOURNEY 47
who then strikes the one beneath him, until all are soundly thrashed,
all the while yelling salutes to the tsar. There follows a sharp personal
attack on Tsar Peter I and Tsarina Catherine II, the two monarchs who
"crucified" Ukraine. Tsar Peter is singled out for special condemnation
since his capital, St. Petersburg, was built on the "bones" of the
Cossacks. He is the true "executioner" of Ukraine. The survey of the
Russian capital ends with a sharp rebuke of the poet's Ukrainian com-
patriots, who, having forgotten their own language, went to serve the
tsar. They are dismissed as traitors, but the hatred of Russia is bal-
anced somewhat by self-criticism.
Shevchenko's political poetry was very quotable. This quality later
proved almost a disadvantage since many frequent quotations tend to
become cliches. At the end of December, Shevchenko wrote a short
poem "To Gogol" in which he paid tribute to his great countryman
who chose to write in Russian. But Shevchenko admonished Gogol for
ignoring Ukraine's evil fate. It was not a time to laugh, as Gogol did,
but to cry. "The Dream" and other poems he wrote at this time were
not for publication, but Shevchenko made some copies of them for his
best friends.
In several of his shorter poems Shevchenko paid tribute to the pio-
neers of modern Ukrainian literature. He showed a sense of literary
history and his own place in it. But while he praised some predeces-
sors, such as Kvitka-Osnovianenko, he also criticized others, such as
Kotliarevsky. He pleaded for originality and independence: "You could
say that [Kotliarevsky's] Eneida is good but is still ridicule in
Muscovite vein....Do not pay attention to the Russians. Let them write
as they like and let us write as we like."
In March 1845, the academy's council conferred on Shevchenko the
title of Artist. His seven-year academic study had come to an end. On
March 25, Shevchenko secured a document from the academy attest-
ing that he was proceeding to the Ukrainian provinces on an "artistic
assignment." He left St. Petersburg immediately and travelled first to
Yahotyn to visit the Repnins. Princess Varvara was in deep mourning
after the recent death of her father. She had written a letter to
Shevchenko describing her father's funeral. It had almost turned into a
demonstration with the peasants carrying their defender's coffin in
procession through the town. Shevchenko did not stay at Yahotyn very
long. He thanked the princess for her efforts in financing and distrib-
uting the publication Picturesque Ukraine.
He next visited some old friends in the neighbourhood, including
the Zakrevskys at Berezova Rudka. He also went to Kiev where,
through an old friend and benefactor of Kulish, Shevchenko secured a
48 GEORGE LUCKY]
Figure 6: Hanna Zakrevska (1844)
SHEVCHENKO'S UNFORGOTTEN JOURNEY 49
temporary position with the Kievan Archeographic Commission.
Under its auspices he travelled widely, sketching all the time. He stud-
ied his native land with insatiable zeal and enthusiasm. Developing a
keen interest in the newly established science of archaeology,
Shevchenko took part in the excavation of some gravemounds like
those he saw as a small boy on his trip to the pillars that propped up
the sky. He also spent some time sketching the sights of Kiev and of his
beloved river, the Dnieper, which wound its way through the heart of
the city.
He then revisited his native village Kyrylivka. There he saw a pretty
young girl he had met on an earlier visit, Feodosia Koshyts, the daugh-
ter of the local priest. The attraction to the girl had grown stronger
and he decided to propose marriage. However, Feodosia's parents did
not want her to marry a former serf. The marriage was cancelled and
Shevchenko, very disappointed, went away to spend some time with
Andrii Kozachkovsky, a physician and friend in Pereiaslav. The latter
had formerly been in the Russian navy and had returned from a voyage
around the world. Now he practised medicine in Pereiaslav but spent
most of his free time on a nearby khutir. Shevchenko visited him there
on the bank of the Dnieper. The beautiful panorama later fed his nos-
talgia for Ukraine, when he was in exile. "You will remember," he
wrote later, "that wonderful evening, the wide, distant panorama and
in the middle a long mauve ribbon and beyond it shone a golden-
domed cathedral in Pereiaslav. What a marvellous, solemn silence." In
his diary Kozachkovsky marked August 15,1845 as a "most wonderful
day." Looking across the Dnieper, he, Shevchenko, and other guests
sang Ukrainian songs. "These songs," wrote Kozachkovsky, "are full of
deep meaning. Apart from their gay and sorrowful notes, they reflect
the patriarchal life of Ukraine, her simple and heroic character, her
glorious and sad history and her enchanting landscape. That is the rea-
son Ukrainian songs serve the common people as a source of
self-respect and moral strength, which has protected their nationality
from alien influences." A few days later the poet went to visit Vasyl
Tarnovsky, an enlightened landlord in Potoky. Not all landowners were
bad. Tarnovsky had been Gogol's schoolmate at Nizhyn, and later had
studied at Moscow university. He was in favour of liberating the serfs.
At Potoky Shevchenko stayed two weeks, painted a self-portrait, and
grew fond of paddling in a little boat across the river at sunset.
From Potoky Shevchenko went to visit his beloved sister Kateryna in
the village of Zelena Dibrova. Here he listened to itinerant minstrels
and noted their songs chanted to the accompaniment of the bandura
or lira. With his brother, Varfolomii, he discussed plans for the cre-
50 GEORGE LUCKYJ
ation of village schools. The plans proved unrealistic under the exist-
ing conditions.
One of the longer stops in Ukraine was the village of Marianske on
the estate of O. Lukianovych, whose family portraits Shevchenko
painted. The poet kept somewhat aloof from his hosts, preferring to
talk with the peasants. In the evenings he would take part in their gath-
erings in the village streets. He liked to sing and dance and enjoy
himself. But he also found the time for writing serious poetry. It was in
Marianske that he wrote a long poem The Heretic about the Czech
freedom fighter Jan Hus. For some time Shevchenko took an interest
in Czech history and struck up a friendship with a Czech musician,
V. Jedlicka. In the historical figure of Jan Hus, the poet glorified not
only the Czech struggles against the Germans and the Vatican: in the
very first lines of the poem he made it clear that "lies and slavery reign
everywhere, and the tortured people are silent." The poem, dedicated
to the Czech scholar Safarik, was a protest against the subjugation of
Shevchenko's native land.
While visiting a part of Gogol's country of birth, the town of
Myrhorod, Shevchenko completed a long poem in three parts, The
Great Vault. He called it a "mystery," for in symbolic and veiled form
he discussed the injustices perpetrated on Ukraine by Russia. It is clear
from the poem that the poet strongly condemned Russian rule in
Ukraine. Yet, in an epilogue to the poem, Shevchenko, while berating
Bohdan Khmelnytsky for his union with Russia in the 17th century,
saw the moment when the "great vault" would crack and crumble and
a liberated Ukraine "will rise, dispelling the dark slavery."
While staying in Myrhorod, Shevchenko could not have been
unaware of the memories of people who lived there. Not only Gogol
but Hryhorii Skovoroda visited the little town frequently. In the nearby
village of Sorochyntsi, immortalized in Gogol's short story,
Shevchenko saw the splendid baroque church built by Hetman Apostol
in 1732. Some of the poems conceived that summer found their final
form towards the end of 1845. They were all inspired by his exper-
iences in Ukraine. One of the poems, usually referred to as a "friendly
epistle," castigates in vehement terms those Ukrainians who had for-
saken their heritage and had gone to serve Moscow. Like a biblical
prophet, Shevchenko lamented the evil fortunes of his country, but he
also pointed toward self-knowledge and regeneration.
Come to your senses! Human be,
Or you will rue it bitterly:
The time is near when on our plains
SHEVCHENKO'S UNFORGOTTEN JOURNEY 51
A shackled folk will burst its chains.
The Day of Judgment is at hand!
Dnieper will speak across the land;
Hundreds of streams will surge in flood
To bear along your children's blood
To the blue sea...
Biblical themes inspired the poet and he freely translated several of
David's psalms. Dangerously ill in December 1845, the poet wrote a
most memorable "Testament" in which he called on his compatriots to
"break the chains and sprinkle freedom with our enemies' blood."
When I shall die, pray let my bones
High on a mound remain
Amid the steppeland's vast expanse
In my belov'd Ukraine;
That I may gaze on mighty fields,
On Dnieper and his shore,
And echoed by his craggy banks
May hear the Great One roar!
When from Ukraine that stream will bear
Over the sea's blue sills
Our foemen's blood, at last shall I
Forsake the fields and hills
And soar up to commune with God
In His eternal hall.
But till that day of Liberty
I know no God at all.
Bury me thus — and then arise!
From fetters set you free!
And with your foes' unholy blood
Baptize your liberty!
And when in freedom, 'mid your kin,
From battle you ungird,
Forget not to remember me
With a warm, gentle word!
This inspired verse was written at a time when Shevchenko was still
painting. The question arises: how could the same man write fiercely
romantic poetry while painting classicist portraits and landscapes?
The contrast between the poet and the painter is startling. But, then,
52 GEORGE LUCKYJ
poetry for him was the mother tongue of mankind, while the art of
painting was a mere craft. The two were kept apart. The poetic harvest
of the second Ukrainian summer was complete. It reaffirmed
Shevchenko as a leading spokesperson of an oppressed people, who, in
powerful language, appealed to them to shake off their yoke. This was
no longer romantic posturing but a serious call to action. Could a rad-
ical change be brought about by poetry alone? Perhaps what was
needed was a group of dedicated young people who could provide
leadership? Was he aspiring to such a role?
Early in April 1846, Shevchenko settled in Kiev for a longer period
of time. He lived in the centre of the city, at one time on Khreshchatyk
Street, opposite the Bessarabian Square. He had a small stipend from
the Kiev Archeographic Commission, which helped him with living
expenses. A new friend he met in Kiev was Mykola Kostomarov, a
teaching assistant at Kiev University. Kostomarov, of mixed Ukrainian
and Russian birth, was a young historian who, earlier in Kharkiv,
developed a strong belief in the role of the common people in history.
Since he lived in Ukraine he tried to study its history from archival
sources. Kostomarov later recorded that he felt "deep affection" for the
poet, who lived nearby. They soon became devoted friends and it was
during meetings in Kostomarov's apartment that Shevchenko met sev-
eral other students. One of them was Vasyl Bilozersky who, in a letter
to a friend, wrote that Shevchenko's poetic "genius was akin to reli-
gious feeling." Shevchenko read to Kostomarov and his friends the
poems he had composed the previous year and they all received them
with enthusiasm.
The group gathered around Kostomarov formed the nucleus of
what soon became known as the Brotherhood of Sts. Cyril and
Methodius. This secret scholarly circle of young Ukrainians was dedi-
cated to the cultural and political regeneration of their country. They
based their ideology on a mixture of Christian doctrine and national-
ism, with special attention to the idea of liberating the peasant serfs.
Kostomarov embodied these ideas in what later became known as The
Books of Genesis of the Ukrainian People. Derived from Polish
sources, it traced Ukrainian history to ancient times, recorded the
injustices suffered by the Ukrainians, and forecast their future as a free
republic in a Slavic commonwealth. Shevchenko took no part in the
drafting of the books, yet he was kept in touch and was very sympa-
thetic to the brotherhood. Among its leaders were Kostomarov, Hulak,
Bilozersky, and Kulish, who was temporarily absent in St. Petersburg
but who corresponded with his Kievan friends. He compared them to
a "Christian commune." Shevchenko's poetry, read at their gatherings,
SHEVCHENKO'S UNFORGOTTEN JOURNEY 53
provided the necessary elan; it was regarded as "an archangel's trum-
pet." The secret brotherhood had a constitution but no formal
organizational structure. Its membership was small, not exceeding two
dozen men. Yet in Ukrainian intellectual history it is rightly regarded
as the first modern political body. Its effect on future developments
was profound.
Very few secret societies remain secret for long. The brotherhood
was no exception. In the spring of 1847 many of its member left Kiev
for a while. Shevchenko was invited to be best man at Kulish's wed-
ding. Kulish was marrying Bilozersky's sister and the wedding was
held in her village. The ceremony was traditional, and there was much
singing and dancing. In the meantime, in Kiev, a newly admitted mem-
ber of the brotherhood, Oleksii Petrov, was busy writing a report
denouncing his comrades to the police. Arrests soon followed. At that
time Shevchenko, having left Kulish's place, was making his way to
Kiev to attend, as best man, yet another wedding, this time that of his
friend Kostomarov.
On April 5, while waiting for a ferry on the right bank of the
Dnieper, he was arrested. On him police found manuscripts of his
poems. Soon, all the leading members of the brotherhood were appre-
hended and despatched to St. Petersburg to be cross-examined by the
dreaded tsarist secret police, the so-called Third Section. Shevchenko's
behaviour during and after his arrest was noteworthy. He was calm,
defiant, even in high spirits. The policeman who escorted him
remarked that "it was difficult to tell who was being arrested, because
of his carefree manner." During the trial the poet answered ten ques-
tions with a simple "don't know," not wishing to implicate his
comrades. He admitted writing rebellious poems but explained that
they reflected the views of many ordinary people. On the whole, he
remained unrepentant, which annoyed the tsarist gendarmes. Another
member of the brotherhood, Mykola Hulak, was also steadfast before
the police. But all the others, especially Kostomarov, broke down,
pleaded guilty, and repented of their activities. Shevchenko's behaviour
can best be explained in his own words, spoken to a gendarme: "No
devil has brought me here, but my own Muse." It was also his Muse
that helped him to rise above the tragic circumstances of the moment.
He was strangely detached from the proceedings of the trial and, in
moments when he was left alone in his cell, wrote some memorable
poems, which he dedicated to those "who were in chains with me."
He did not flinch when the sentence was read out to him. He was
judged to be the most dangerous offender and was sentenced to penal
servitude in exile for life as a regular soldier in the Orenburg Corps.
54 GEORGE LUCKYJ
The other "brethren" drew sentences of short or long terms of exile.
There was no public announcement of the trial or its outcome. The
tsar himself took a personal interest in the case and with his own hand
added that Shevchenko should be forbidden to write or to sketch dur-
ing his sentence. The chief prosecutor, Count Orlov, wrote in his
report that Shevchenko was the main culprit because his poems could
have stirred a desire for an independent Ukraine. It seemed that an end
was put to such ideas once and for all.
Yet poetry proved stronger than the tsar's edicts. Some poems
Shevchenko wrote in prison, notably his "Cherry Orchard," are filled
with nostalgia for an idyllic Ukraine. Others are more sombre. In one,
"It's All the Same to Me," he agonizes at the thought that "evil men
will one day put to sleep" his country only to awaken her later "plun-
dered and in flames." The poet wants to meet his friends again, so that
"words of truth and love may be carried into the steppes." All these
sentiments are unashamedly nationalist as well as humanist, and to a
people who were forcibly denied their nationality, they were potent
political messages.
The sentence of penal servitude meted out to Shevchenko put an
end to the freedom he had enjoyed for less than a decade. Before 1838
he was a serf, now, in 1847, he became a prisoner in exile. What this
meant became clear to him even during the trial in St. Petersburg. The
heavy sentence was not a surprise to a man who knew tyranny well. In
practical terms it meant above all a loss of friends like Kostomarov,
Kulish, and others. He would especially miss Kostomarov's mother,
whom he had met in Kiev. Like him she was a former serf and shared
with him memories unknown to the gentry. In Kulish, Shevchenko
would lose not only a friend but also a mentor. The second, even more
grievous loss would be his poems. An unpublished collection of them
had been seized by the gendarmes. And he was, from now on, forbid-
den to write. What harder punishment for a poet could there be? But
the urge to create could not be tamed. In the years 1848-50 Shevchenko
continued to write, defying his superiors and hiding his poems in the
folds of his high boots. All this, however, was still ahead on the morn-
ing of May 30, 1847 when the sentence was read out to him.
SHEVCHENKO'S UNFORGOTTEN JOURNEY 55
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Part Three
Exile
THE SUN WAS SLOWLY SINKING beyond the horizon which
was as flat as the sea. Above, the sky turned a transparent green
tinged with lilac. Suddenly dark, elongated clouds appeared
and were frozen in the splendour of this heavenly ocean, like
bluish-grey whales. The steppe spread out underneath the sky,
immeasurably vast, ending at the horizon. Feather-grass, still
retaining the silky appearance of spring, stood motionless and
appeared white in the distance, looking like an evening fog. The
steppe was bone dry; no dew or any moisture anywhere. A
snake-like unmarked rivulet could be seen in the distance.
There were no trees beside it, and it looked like the hidden
track of infrequent horses or camels. Even the wooden poles,
marking the versts (distances) were preserved only here and
there; some had fallen down, rotting in the thick brambles
showing their raspberry coloured caps.
The horse-drawn tarantas sped along amid clatter and din. A
metal bolt was noisily banging an axle. A cloud of dust rose
behind the vehicle. The horses trotted quickly, although it could
be seen that they were tired. Sometimes they were near exhaus-
tion and could not sustain the swift pace. But the coachman
lashed them again and again with a leather whip.
"They must be waiting for me in Orenburg since you are in
such a hurry," said one of the travellers ironically. He was a
man wearing a felt hat and an old military overcoat slung over
a crumpled dinner jacket and a dirty white shirt without a tie.
"You'd better shut up, you khokbol poet, and don't write any
more slanderous verses," retorted the angry military escort, sit-
ting nearby. "It would be bettter for you and for me if you
didn't write at all. We wouldn't have to travel to the ends of the
earth." Shevchenko silently shrugged his shoulders.
SHEVCHENKO'S UNFORGOTTEN JOURNEY 57
The horses didn't let up. The leather whip danced rhythmi-
cally on their spines. The acrid smell of horse sweat and wet
leather permeated the air.
The loose bolt on the axle banged louder. Dust swirled
around the travellers irritating their throats and eyes. Their
bodies, shaken by the long trip, were sore.
It was getting dark. The sun was fading fast, while from the
East there rose a bluish summer night, unexpected and beauti-
ful after the white nights of the North. "Thank God, I can see a
city," the coachman cried out, pointing ahead with his whip.
But the gendarme sitting next to him could not see anything
apart from some sort of stone structure in the steppe, looking
like a mosque with a nearby minaret. Shevchenko looked at it
and recognized the building as one designed by Briullov's broth-
er, Alexander. However, he did not want to pronounce the
name of his beloved teacher in front of the gendarme. He mere-
ly gazed at the slender minaret which seemed almost to touch
the first stars. The night was dark and forbidding. The tarantas
passed through the city gate and the exhausted and swaying
horses stopped in front of the barracks. The coachman without
getting down poked his whip into the shutters of the guard-
room. At last, a guard, reeking of vodka, opened the door and
the travellers went inside. "Where is the duty officer?" demand-
ed the gendarme sternly.
Zinaida Tulub, In the Boundless Steppe beyond the Urals
58 GEORGE LUCKYJ
1
Have you built your ship of death, O have you?
O build your ship of death, for you will need it.
D.H. Lawrence
THE DISTANCE FROM ST. PETERSBURG to Orenburg, where the
poet was to serve his sentence, was just over 2500 kilometres.
Shevchenko, with a police escort, covered it in eight days. They trav-
elled fast in a horse-drawn police wagon, stopping only to change
horses and have something to eat. Later, in one of his stories, the poet
wrote that they travelled so fast that "all the spaces flitted by so
quickly that I could not remember much of what I saw." They raced
through the desolate steppes along the river Samara, crossed the small
city of Buzuluk and arrived in Orenburg in the evening on the ninth of
June. The city was situated on the border of the Russian empire and
was therefore a fortress guarded by two battalions of soldiers. In their
ranks were many political and other prisoners, many of them former
Polish revolutionaries. The city housed the headquarters of the
Orenburg Corps and a cadet school. The military character of the city
could be sensed from the many uniformed men on the streets.
Shevchenko spent his first night in Orenburg sleeping on the floor in
the guardroom. He was exhausted and in the morning stayed in bed
reading the Bible, the only book he was allowed to bring with him.
Later, they gave him a bath and a haircut. On the same day he was fit-
ted with a private's uniform. How humiliating it must have been for a
man who had always castigated the Russian empire to appear now as
a soldier defending and expanding its borders. The decade of the good
life in St. Petersburg was to be succeeded by the squalor of penal ser-
vitude. Conditions in the barracks would throw him back to the
poverty of his childhood. At the moment utter gloom invaded his mind
and only his native stubbornness helped him face the new reality.
The news of the poet's arrival spread very quickly among
Ukrainians living in the city. Next day, two of them, Fedir Lazarevsky
and Serhii Levytsky, came to see Shevchenko in the barracks. They per-
suaded the commandant to let the poet come and stay with them while
he was awaiting posting to one of the battalions. The three enjoyed
themselves eating and singing in Lazarevsky's apartment. Shevchenko
SHEVCHENKO'S UNFORGOTTEN JOURNEY 59
had a fine baritone voice and loved singing Ukrainian folksongs. He
also recited from memory his poem The Caucasus. His mood was defi-
ant. He possessed a solitary fire. The poet stayed in Orenburg for a few
days, making friends with some Poles who lived there as exiles.
In the middle of June, Shevchenko was sent to the fortress of Orsk.
On the way there, in the village of Ostrovna, he discovered a Ukrainian
settlement and spent the night with his compatriots. Many were scat-
tered throughout the empire, but they had kept their language and
customs. On approaching Orsk, Shevchenko recorded later, he realized
that the local Kirghiz population justly called it a "dirty city." The
natives here were Kazakhs, but in Russian at that time all the central
Asian peoples were called Kirghiz.
Worse than the appearance of this fortress was his life in the bar-
racks of the third company. Most days were filled with military drill.
The barracks were infested with vermin, the company of soldiers was
degrading and stifling. The poet was hoping to receive some mail. He
had written letters from Orenburg to his friends in Ukraine and
St. Petersburg. Would they reply, daring to write to a political pris-
oner? He might soon find out, since mail came to Orsk once a month.
The first lucky break in Orsk came when Shevchenko was intro-
duced to the battalion commander, General Dmitry Isaev, who was a
cultured man. Learning that Shevchenko was a former pupil of the
famous painter Karl Briullov (who in St. Petersburg society was known
as Charles the Great), he invited the poet to his home and later asked
him to tutor his children. More importantly, on orders from Isaev.
Shevchenko was allowed to leave the hated barracks and live in a pri-
vate home. The grateful poet was a frequent visitor to the general's
family, and they enjoyed his company and conversation. Perhaps,
under the protection of this enlightened Russian general, Shevchenkc
became bold enough to write poetry again. He hid his poems, written
in small booklets, in his army boots and did not show them to anyone,
not even to Lazarevsky's brother who visited him in Orsk. Altogether,
in the second half of 1847 he wrote sixteen poems, some of them quite
long. But most of them were brief and revealed the complex mood of
an exile. In one of them he assessed his own present situation: it was
his poetry that made him "live in torment in a foreign land — yet, I
don't regret it." Now that he had some peace, even solitude, his Muse
came back to him. He begged that his "heavy-laden verses, darlings of
my art, do not forsake me and my stricken heart." Naturally, his
thoughts turned to Ukraine and they supported him here, in barren
exile. Ukraine was idealized — villages there were as "gay as any
Easter egg," and the "blue hills beyond the Dnieper" beckoned to him.
60 GEORGE LUCKYJ
He bewailed the loss of his homeland and his youth, lost to him for
ever. Yet precisely here in the deserted and bleak steppes his patriotism
was undiminished: "I love my Ukraine so that for her sake I'll lose my
soul."
His own suffering was joined with the suffering of his native land,
which arose before his imagination not only in its natural beauty but
in its bloody history of Russian subjugation. He wrote a longer poem,
"Irzhavets," about the consequences of the battle of Poltava in 1709 in
which Hetman Mazepa allied with the king of Sweden Charles XII was
defeated by Tsar Peter I. Shevchenko regretted that not all the
Cossacks supported Mazepa at this critical moment, and he depicted
the devastation of Ukraine by "Peter's dogs." A sense of the tragic his-
tory of his country was ever present, but it did not obscure the
universal theme of the poems. In one of them the poet asked — "Why
do we live? What is our will? Why do we die with a wistful mind?"
In a long poem, The Princess, Shevchenko returned to his old arche-
typal topic of the illegitimate child. Here the tragedy was deepened by
the rape of the young princess by her own father. The reverberations
of this crime were not only social but human and personal. The
trauma of the seduced Oksana Kovalenko was reawakened. Like many
of his other poems, this poem represented symbolically his autobiog-
raphy. The frequent theme of the seduced and raped woman led the
author to identify himself and sometimes his country with her bas-
tard, who had become the victim of an evil act. However, the
dominant theme in these poems was his own destiny, his longing for
Ukraine and his fear that he might have "to wait in silence for my fatal
end." His sense of national mission was strengthened by his determi-
nation that "although my heart is bruised and torn by sorrow, I may
gladly bring it here to rest upon the Dnieper hills." A little later, in Kos
Aral, Shevchenko would recall in a poem his love for Hanna
Zakrevska, imploring her "to bring in your train my youth's lost years
— let there rise up before me like a sea's magic the broad villages with
cherry orchards."
Altogether, the poetic harvest at Orsk was very rich, Shevchenko
defied the official ban on writing and proved to himself that no one
could stop his creative drive. Next, to satisfy his artistic urge, he was
going to try to draw. But drawing would be more difficult than writ-
ing, for where would he find the pencils and where would he hide his
drawings? He had so far received no mail, but on October 22 he wrote
a letter to his friend Lyzohub in Ukraine asking him to intercede on his
behalf with Princess Repnina, who had friends in high places. In
December he wrote again to Lyzohub begging him to send him pencils
SHEVCHENKO'S UNFORGOTTEN JOURNEY 61
and paints as well as Shakespeare's works. He also wrote directly to
Varvara Repnina. Finally, he received a reply from Lyzohub, written on
December 31 from Odessa. It was not until March 1848 that the
promised paints and Shakespeare arrived from Lyzohub. The poet was
so overjoyed that he did not sleep all night and kissed each single con-
tainer of paint. In May Shevchenko received official permission to
draw and paint.
In February the poet at last received a reply from Princess Repnina
to his earlier letter. She urged him to pray and to bear his suffering
with dignity and resignation. His friends had not forgotten him and
would pray for him and intercede on his behalf with the authorities.
He must submit to his fate, which had been sent by God. Shevchenko
replied with a long letter, written over three days, at the end of
February. He was deeply grateful to Repnina, whose religious feeling
he respected. He also told her that he had started a diary but had burnt
it after a few entries. Further, he asked her to send him Thomas
a'Kempis' The Imitation of Christ. He also complained that he had
recently suffered from scurvy. His spirit, however, was unbroken.
The princess fulfilled his request to intercede with the authorities
almost immediately. She wrote, in French, to Count Orlov, asking him
"to show that he can do good things. I am defending here the hapless
Shevchenko whom I knew well. That is why I can say that no matter
how grave was his offence, he has already paid for it dearly." To this
courageous letter came Orlov's short reply in which he rudely denied
her request to pardon "this depraved criminal."
In his letter to Repnina, Shevchenko mentioned the possibility of
being sent to the banks of the Aral Sea. This surmise proved correct,
for in May he was included in an expedition to study the Aral Sea. The
decision was taken on the advice of Captain Aleksei Butakov, who was
to lead an expedition to the Aral Sea and who had met Shevchenko in
Orsk. Butakov, a Russian born in Ukraine, became friendly with the
poet and helped to lift the ban on painting and drawing. As a member
of Butakov's expedition, Shevchenko would sketch and draw. Above
all, the poet would no longer be under army control. This was most
welcome.
Around the north shore of the Aral Sea, Russian forts were being
built as springboards for further imperial expansion. These outposts
of the Russian empire were being made ready for further conquests to
the east and south. Russian plans were made for the eventual subjuga-
tion of the central Asian khanates of Kokand and Khiva. Subjection of
the semi-nomadic Kazakhs was viewed as a "civilizing mission." With
the defeat and death of Kenesary Kasymov in 1846, Kazakh resistance
62 GEORGE LUCKYJ
was virtually at an end, but only by 1868 were all Kazakh lands
annexed by Russia. The Russian frontier was the so-called Syr-Dana
line stretching from the north of the Aral Sea to Lake Issyk Kul. The
khanates of Bokhara, Kokand, and Khiva were harder nuts to crack.
They had strong local traditions and resisted aggression. The conquest
of these khanates in the second half of the 19th century brought the
frontiers of the Russian Empire to the borders of Persia, China, and
Afghanistan. Ostensibly, however, Butakov's expedition was purely sci-
entific. It was to gather facts about the exploration of an uncharted
sea. Butakov was a naval officer of considerable experience who, in
1840-42, navigated around the world.
The leader of the expedition was a cultured and progressive-minded
man who realized that Shevchenko's sketches would be invaluable to
him. Photographs were yet unknown. In the middle of May the expe-
ditionary force was ready to leave Orsk. It consisted of 1500 Bashkirs
driving their horse-drawn wagons, a detachment of infantry, two com-
panies of Orenburg Cossacks, two cannons, and a disassembled boat
transported by land. It ended with 300 camels, driven by Kazakhs, and
a closing company of Ural Cossacks. The entire force was over a mile
long. Shevchenko was one of the marchers. He quickly became so tired
that he had to be picked up by a wagon. Later, in his story "The
Twins," he described the ordeal of this expedition:
On the second day we woke up at sunrise. It was a soft, bright
and beautiful morning. I drove with the forward Ural Cossacks
at the head of the transport and could abandon myself to my
quiet sorrow and to the observation of surrounding nature. This
was a flat steppe without the slightest elevation, a limitless steppe
covered with white feather grass like a table-cloth. A lovely, but
at the same time a sad view. There were no bushes, no gulleys,
nothing but a flat expanse with feathergrass which stood motion-
less as if petrified. There was no rustling of grasshoppers, no
chirping of birds. Not even a lizard would sparkle with a gay,
graceful spine. Apart from the feathergrass everything was laid
waste. Deathly still and lifeless. Only from behind could be
heard some gigantic monster — the moving transport.
In two days Shevchenko witnessed a new sight. The omnipresent
feathergrass caught fire and he was asked to paint, during a stopover,
a watercolour of the steppe on fire. The painting survived and is a fine
record of events in that desolate countryside.
SHEVCHENKO'S UNFORGOTTEN JOURNEY 63
The expedition crossed minor rivers and came to the fort of Kara-
Butak, where the tired poet met the cartographer from Orenburg, Karl
Gern, who later became his close friend. Whenever the transport
stopped, Shevchenko sketched various landmarks, sometimes of
Kazakh historical interest, like the grave of their leader Dustan. He
drew closer to the local nomads, visited their yurtas (huts), and used
their hooded carts. His spirits were good and he bore the daily hard-
ship with his usual endurance. Sometimes he even sang and joked.
In June the expedition reached Raim fortress on the right bank of
Syr Daria. Huge barracks dominated the place and Shevchenko
learned that the fortress had been built on the spot where the native
chieftain Raim was buried. Everywhere there were silent and not so
silent reminders of conquest. The stopover in Raim was longer
because the boat Constantine had to be assembled and slipped into the
river. From there, along the Syr Daria, it navigated to the Aral Sea. For
three months the schooner sailed along the Aral Sea banks exploring
the entire area. The vegetation and marine life were luxuriant. It
occurred to no one at that time that the same Aral Sea would, in 150
years, be dry as a result of the ruinous ecological policies of the Soviet
Union that deflected its waters to irrigation schemes.
Shevchenko was very busy sketching. His drawings were very pro-
fessionally executed. His attention to detail, already exhibited during
his years in the academy, proved to be a real asset. Sometimes his
sketches were minor works of art, as, for instance, the one of a beetle
drawn on the earth near a cactus. To the usual travails of sea voyage
was added another difficulty. Much of the food taken aboard had dete-
riorated and the crew had little to eat, mostly dried rusks. However, in
September the schooner returned to the mouth of the Syr Daria and
the food provisions improved.
Shevchenko took the opportunity of leaving the expedition for
Raim, where he received mail from Ukraine. Some of the letters men-
tioned the revolutionary events of 1848 in Western Europe.
Shevchenko welcomed the news and planned to write a poem about
them. The winter of 1848 was spent by the expeditionary crew on the
island of Kos Aral. Everybody lived in newly built barracks, which,
strangely enough, contained a small library. Winter was quite severe
and the books were welcome. To pass the time and to procure more
food, outings were organized to hunt animals. On one such hunting
trip Shevchenko watched the killing of a tiger. Butakov left the follow-
ing description of the tigre royal: "It had bright-orange fur with black
stripes, was very fat, and was six feet four inches long from nose to
tail." Shevchenko painted the dead animal. He also spent some time
64 GEORGE LUCKYJ
Figure 7: Self-portrait (1847)
SHEVCHENKO'S UNFORGOTTEN JOURNEY 65
with the Kazakhs. He drew Kazakh children and in one drawing they
are threatened by a Russian fist stuck out of the window. The impres-
sions of the subjugated Kazakhs caused the poet to write some poems
in which he recalled the oppression of his own country. Altogether 72
poems, some of them quite long, were written during the winter in Kos
Aral. They resemble the poems written a year earlier in Orsk.
Loneliness, yearning for Ukraine, its tragic history and cruel present,
occupied his poetic imagination as before, but now his vision was
deeper and more personal. His country's oppression was seen in the
wider context of God's justice or the lack of it. His own desolation did
not lead to self-pity but to a calm resolution to endure. This rare mood
is caught in the following poem:
A cloud is floating, following the sun;
It spreads its scarlet coat-flaps in the sky
And calls upon the sun to settle down
On the blue sea and there he covered up
As, with red quilts, a mother might her child.
One's eyes rejoice to see it...One brief hour,
One's heart relaxes and communes with God...
Meanwhile the fogbank, like an enemy,
Covers the sea and all the rosy cloud
The thick grey mist spreads darkness in its wake,
And in that darkness it enshrouds one's soul
So one cannot know where one should go.
One awaits dawn as children do their mother.
This other non-political or prophesy-laden dimension of his poetry
came to be appreciated only much later. For the myth of Ukraine as a
beautiful but violated country came from the depth of the poet's
being. His lyrical poems, Written in exile, also come from that deep
level. In them the poet escaped to his home once more — to Ukraine.
But there was also another, less deep level of his poetic self. After all,
he was surrounded by Russians and Russian language. How long
would he be able to resist these facts when he turned to writing?
In the spring of 1849 the Constantine set out to sea again, explor-
ing the eastern bank. The crew, including Shevchenko, was tired and
often exposed to severe storms; drinking water was rationed. In
September their mission was at last completed and they returned to
Orenburg. Here Shevchenko spent some time finishing and sorting out
his sketches and drawings. He was given an assistant, a Polish exile,
Bronislaw Zaleski, who in time became a close friend. Through him
66 GEORGE LUCKYJ
the poet met other Poles with whom he shared his anti-Russian senti-
ments. Shevchenko did not wear a uniform and lived in private
quarters, at first with Lazarevsky and later with Karl Gern, whose sis-
ter was married to a Pole. The poet felt very much at home in Gern's
household. Several evenings were spent in lively conversation. Musical
soirees were held with Shevchenko singing some folk songs. After the
rigours of the Aral Sea expedition the poet could finally relax among
friends, write poetry, read books, and paint. With secret yearning he
watched this gaiety, which had not been vouchsafed to him. He painted
some oil portraits of his friends, although officially the ban on paint-
ing (as different from sketching) had not been lifted. The ambience in
Orenburg was not as good as in St. Petersburg, but it proved to the poet
that he could enjoy life and new friendships. He had much to offer to
others and he seized the pleasures of life with both hands.
Among the pleasures of life in Orenburg was the company of
women. Lazarevsky wrote in his memoirs that "during the soirees with
ladies present, the constant companion of Taras was the Tatar woman
Zabarzhada, known for her beauty." Shevchenko was always drawn to
beautiful women. In St. Petersburg, as an art student, he drew and
painted voluptuous nudes. He was an impulsive man, a man of physi-
cal and emotional appetite. That women also found him attractive
could be seen during his travels in Ukraine, when Varvara Repnina and
Hanna Zakrevska fell in love with him. Now, in Orenburg, he felt old
temptations stirring again. He was, after all, in his prime, just 36 years
old. That he found a woman very appealing may be seen from a poem
that he wrote at that time:
Both with your supple form and with your beauty
That is so innocently young and sweet
I feast my waning eyes, and as 1 gaze
Intent upon you, in a fashion strange
I pray before you as before a saint.
In my advancing years pity begins
For this your heavenly beauty. What hereafter
Will be its fate in life? Who will become
Your blessed guardian-angel in this world?
This mildly erotic fragment from a poem is also an epitaph on the
poet's youth, which, in his words, "passed, alas, without adventure."
The feminine principle, gentle and caring, is opposed in Shevchenko's
poetry to the masculine domineering element. This tension between
SHEVCHENKO'S UNFORGOTTEN JOURNEY 67
women and Cossacks also characterized early Ukrainian stories, espe-
cially "Taras Bulba" by Gogol. In Shevchenko, the feminine element
prevailed. The feminine side of his nature led to the more sympathetic
portrayal of women than men. The identity of the woman who
inspired the poem is not clear. Was it the Tatar beauty, or was it, per-
haps, Sophia Gern, to whom the poet was also drawn? That she was
the wife of a friend would not ultimately have mattered so much. Was
not Hanna Zakrevska in Ukraine also the wife of a friend?
Just when the poet was beginning to enjoy life a little, a new blow
struck him. It also involved a woman. She was Sophia Gern, the wife
of his new friend Karl. Shevchenko discovered that she was betraying
her husband with a junior officer, Nikolai Isaev (no relation to Dmitry
Isaev). The poet told the husband about it. The offended Isaev, who
probably thought that liaisons with married women were not unac-
ceptable, denounced Shevchenko to his commandant, General
Obruchev, accusing the poet of wearing civilian clothes and of paint-
ing, both contrary to orders. Obruchev ordered the poet's quarters to
be searched. Forewarned, Shevchenko destroyed some letters and, with
Gern's assistance, hid his poems, and had only a few books seized by
the gendarmes who arrested him. On Obruchev's orders the poet was
sent on May 12 to Orsk fortress.
The pleasant sojourn in Orenburg came to an abrupt end. The case
was reported back to the Third Section in St. Petersburg and
Shevchenko was sent back to barracks, "under strict surveillance."
However, during the investigation it was found that not only
Shevchenko but his superiors were blamed for his indulgence in paint-
ing. They were reprimanded and the poet was given a new destination:
the fortress of Novopetrovsk on the peninsula of Mangyshlak on the
eastern shore of the Caspian Sea. On his way there, in the city of
Uralsk, Shevchenko met a Polish exile, Jakub Gordon, who, in his
memoirs, wrote: "I talked to him about his exile....His dream was an
independent Ukraine and his desire was a revolution. One could say
that he saw the world through rosy spectacles." Jakub remarked that
life is a cracked mirror, but Shevchenko did not agree.
68 GEORGE LUCKYJ
2
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise.
In my end is my beginning.
T.S. Eliot
THE FORTRESS OF NOVOPETROVSK was small and rather
squalid. Set in a desolate steppe, it consisted of large barracks for 200
soldiers, quarters for 20 officers, the commandant's house, a small
infirmary, and a church. Attempts were made to plant some trees there,
and, later Shevchenko planted a willow that grew and prospered. The
poet was received with mixed feelings. On the one hand he was posted
to barracks and put under strict orders. Military drill became his daily
duty. The drill was conducted under the personal supervision of
Captain Merkul Potapov, who took a strong dislike to Shevchenko. He
personally searched the poet's pockets and humiliated him with all
sorts of pointless questions about military procedure. In addition
Potapov often conducted the drill in a half-drunken condition. He was
motivated by the pure sadism that was often inherent in the servants of
imperialism.
On the other hand, some officers and the commandant, Colonel
Anton Maevsky, liked Shevchenko for his behaviour and intelligence.
Maevsky was a widower and he later hired the poet to be a tutor to his
children. Yet, on the whole, Shevchenko felt wretched and wrote to his
friend Kozachkovsky in Ukraine that he could not "say anything good
about this place." He was worried that his sparse correspondence
would become even sparser. He kept in touch with Varvara Repnina,
but she had been warned by the police not to write to him.
Was the poet to be condemned to solitude and misery, both very
hard to bear? Initially, conditions at Novopetrovsk could, at their
worst, be likened to a concentration camp. The complete loss of free-
dom, physical and mental suffering, and the tyranny of the drill
sergeants drove the poet to what one former inmate of a prison camp
described as "apathy, the blunting of the emotions and the feeling that
SHEVCHENKO'S UNFORGOTTEN JOURNEY 69
one could not care any more." It was a regression to a more primitive
form of intellectual and emotional life. This state was not prolonged
but nevertheless was very damaging. In his free moments Shevchenko
sought escape by reading the Bible and Shakespeare. Being the kind of
individual he was, he was unbroken and tried to preserve his inner free-
dom. The same would happen a century later to some Soviet dissidents
in concentration camps and in exile. Where did their strength come
from? Very often it was from Shevchenko's example. His life story they
knew well and valued it no less than his poems.
It was at that moment, in desolate Novopetrovsk, that Shevchenko
made a curious decision. He would give up writing Ukrainian poetry,
and would instead try to write Russian prose. Such a decision could
only have come out of utter despair. But that, more or less, is what he
did for the next six years. From that period only one short Ukrainian
poem has been preserved. At the same time, according to his own
words, he wrote over 20 long stories in Russian and kept a personal
diary in Russian. Only the diary and nine of the stories have survived.
Later, scholars would try to puzzle out this momentous decision.
Some would say that the poet was betraying his true calling, others
that he was trying to accommodate the Russians. Still others would
point to the "other, adjusted self" of the poet, who, after all, lived in a
Russian empire. The striking fact, however, was that his Russian prose
was mediocre while his Ukrainian poetry was unsurpassed. Was this
lapse into Russian brought about by the harsh conditions of exile? His
friend Kulish, on reading Shevchenko's Russian "novels," advised him
to burn them. A prominent Russian writer, Sergei Aksakov, also
advised against publication because "it would be beneath your huge
(ogromny) poetic talent." Yet Shevchenko wrote assiduously in
Russian, in the process recalling some Ukrainian folkways and history.
He seems to have been unaware of its low quality.
Another, more likely reason for changing to Russian prose might
have been the fact that, at that time, Ukrainian prose language was still
quite undeveloped. This may be seen from Shevchenko's short preface
to the unpublished Kobzar in 1847, which he wrote in very quaint
Ukrainian. Yet, perhaps he had to satisfy something that only
researchers into personality changes under the stress of incarceration
may be able to explain.
The poet could not suffer alone. He struck up a friendship with
another soldier from Ukraine, Andrii Oberemenko. Later, in his
Russian diary, he wrote "apart from his simple kindness I loved him for
the fact that during his 20 years in the army, that cheap and dreadful
70 GEORGE LUCKYJ
life had not extinguished his national and human dignity. He remained
faithful in every respect to his splendid (prekrasnoi) nationality."
In May 1851 Shevchenko was included in a new expedition to search
for deposits of coal on the Mangyshlak peninsula. He was delighted to
see his old friend Bronislaw Zaleski among the members of this small
party of explorers. Left behind were the hated barracks, and temp-
orary permission was granted him to draw the landscapes around
Kara-Tau. Blowing sand and scorching heat of 40° Celcius made his
work difficult. But he enjoyed talking to his old friend Bronislaw.
Altogether Shevchenko completed more than 60 sketches of the sur-
rounding scenes, many of them done on his knees (there was no table)
inside a kibitka (covered cart).
Life became a little easier on the return to Novopetrovsk. The com-
mandant showed some kindness in allowing Shevchenko to take part
in a play by Ostrovsky in which the poet acted very well. However, an
attempt to gain permission for Shevchenko to paint the local church
failed. There was very little to read and the poet wrote in one of his
letters that "it is not lack of freedom, but my solitude that is my great-
est enemy in this desert."
In 1852 Shevchenko learned of the deaths of his beloved teacher
Karl Briullov and his famous compatriot Nikolai Gogol. He did not
know that Gogol had died in Moscow, almost insane, by refusing to
eat. Like Shevchenko, Gogol spent most of his creative life out of his
country. He wrote his best works in Italy. However, Gogol's life as an
exile was far more comfortable than Shevchenko's. Not only was he a
free man but he also received a regular stipend from the Russian gov-
ernment. The two men never met and Shevchenko regretted this. As
early as 1844 he had dedicated a poem to Gogol, in which he wrote
"You laugh, my great friend, and I weep." He recognized Gogol as a
great comic writer whose satire he much admired. He knew and highly
valued Gogol's masterpieces The Inspector General and Dead Souls.
Although he never mentioned Gogol's early Ukrainian tales, he wrote
to Repnina that he virtually worshipped Gogol's talent.
Very different was Gogol's view of Shevchenko, unknown to the lat-
ter. Just when the poet was languishing in Novopetrovsk in 1851, a few
months before his death, Gogol had a long conversation about
Shevchenko with a Ukrainian writer, Danylevsky, and the poet's friend
Bodiansky. We have the following account of it by Danylevsky.
Bodiansky was anxious to find out Gogol's opinion of Shevchenko's
poetry, "There is much impurity (degtiu mnogo) in his poetry," said
Gogol, adding that he did not like Shevchenko's language. When
Bodiansky pressed him for a more precise answer, Gogol said: "We
SHEVCHENKO'S UNFORGOTTEN JOURNEY 71
should write in Russian....The dominant and only heritage for
Russians, Ukrainians, Czechs, and Serbians should be the language of
Pushkin...Russians and Ukrainians have twin souls..." Danylevsky
noted that Bodiansky was very upset by Gogol's words. Yet there was
no reason to protest this opinion. It came from a Ukrainian who, like
many of his compatriots regarded himself as a Little Russian.
Shevchenko, on the other hand, despised such people and believed that
Ukraine should liberate itself from Russia.
Another death in 1852, that of Shevchenko's friendly commandant
Maevsky, caused the poet much grief. He tried to find relief in attempt-
ing to sculpt in clay and alabaster. After all, sculpting was not
forbidden to him. The new commandant, Major Iraklii Uskov, proved
to be a compassionate man who relieved the poet from performing the
compulsory drill. Uskov's wife, Agatha, was especially fond of the
poet, who by now had lost almost all his hair and wore a beard. She
left some memoirs in which she speaks fondly of Shevchenko: "He did
not enchant us at once. He had an open face, a noble high forehead
with a large bald patch which made him look quite important. He
talked fluently and gracefully. On getting more closely acquainted I
found him to be an honest, truthful, and moral person. He avoided
large gatherings and never played cards." However, later on, the poet
discovered her to be "an empty and privileged beauty" whom he
slightly ridiculed in one of his long stories. Their relations remained
cordial but platonic. Perhaps, despite her conventionality, he was
drawn to her physically.
At that time the poet corresponded with Bronislaw Zaleski, to
whom he secretly sent his sketches for possible sale. Shevchenko's con-
tacts with Polish exiles continued to be very strong. It was Pole,
Zygmunt Sierakowski, who first raised the question of trying to inter-
cede with the authorities for an amnesty for the poet. Sierakowski
overcame exile by becoming an officer in the Russian army and mov-
ing to St. Petersburg. He took an active part in the Polish armed
uprising in 1863, was captured and hanged by the Russians. In 1855,
Countess Anastasia Tolstoy, the wife of the vice-president of the
Academy of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, began efforts to have the poet
released.
Uncertain as to whether he was allowed to paint and draw,
Shevchenko sketched a great deal. He drew portraits of both the
Uskovs and sketched various landscapes and Kazakh children who
reminded him of his own bereft childhood. In 1856 he was seized with
an ambition to draw an allegorical series of sketches, "The Parable of
the Prodigal Son," which had been in his mind for a long time. He
72 GEORGE LUCKYJ
completed eight sketches out of the planned 12 and they are true mas-
terpieces. Ostensibly they have little to do with the Bible and are
usually regarded as a disguised, biting satire of imperial Russia. The
striking half-naked, Cossack-like hero is portrayed in various scenes of
the desolation, filth, depravity, and brutality of Nicolean Russia. The
atmosphere is one of utter gloom and despair. The hero, whose face
recalls Shevchenko's, stands stoically among the drunken and
degraded inmates of Nicholas's vast barracks. He is impassive yet
unyielding and he knows that he has to come back to his father. What
he had committed was "a sin against heaven," but he will be forgiven
and reunited. Like so many other prodigal sons, Shevchenko depicted
the physical horror and spiritual anguish of his contemporaries and of
himself.
Was a return of this prodigal son possible? The momentous events
of a year earlier had made it more likely. In 1854 a war broke out
between the Western powers (Britain, France, Austria) and Turkey on
the one side and Russia on the other, which came to be known as the
Crimean War because decisive battles were fought in the Crimea. The
war ended in 1856 in a defeat for Russia. Disheartened by the failures
of his army, Tsar Nicholas I died in March 1855, shortly before the fall
of the Crimean fortress port of Sebastopol. This defeat marked a great
blow to Russia's imperial might and to her influence in that part of the
world.
The news of the war and especially of the sudden death of the tsar
reached Novopetrovsk. At first the possible repercussions were hard to
predict. They could lead to a tightening but also to a loosening of
imperial power. Shevchenko naturally hoped that, as the new tsar was
crowned, there would be, as was customary, a chance for an amnesty.
But the wheels of the tsarist bureaucracy moved very slowly. The poet
waited and continued drawing and writing his Russian stories. It was
not until February 1856 that Princess Anastasia Tolstoy wrote to him
that serious steps were being taken in St. Petersburg to secure his
release. The coronation of Tsar Alexander II was at hand. However, it
brought the poet no freedom. In April of that year he wrote to
Countess Tolstoy that he "was near despair when he heard the bad
news."
Shevchenko's friends, especially Zaleski and Sierakowski, tried to
encourage his hope. In February 1857 the poet wrote to Zaleski that he
hoped to travel to St. Petersburg soon. This was because a month ear-
lier Lazarevsky had written that the tsar had issued an order to free
Shevchenko. Of course, the whole procedure had to go through the
proper channels. In April the poet replied to Lazarevsky: "Devil knows
SHEVCHENKO'S UNFORGOTTEN JOURNEY 73
what they are doing with me." The real stumbling block in
St. Petersburg to Shevchenko's final release was the tsar's mother,
Alexandra Fedorovna. She objected to it because she could not forgive
the poet for comparing her in one of his poems to a "shrivelled mush-
room." Her objections were at last overcome. Unknown to Shevchenko
as yet, the family of Count Tolstoy, in St. Petersburg, celebrated the
news of his release with a bottle of champagne. The Count's daughter
later wrote that "we all ran about the house and rejoiced that they had
freed Shevchenko." However, it was not until months later that the
news reached the poet.
In the meantime, in order to relieve the mental strain that tor-
mented him, the poet started, in June 1857, to keep a diary, which he
wrote in Russian. He sensed the coming of liberty for himself and for
others. He heard a rumour, which was based on truth, that the new
tsar had appointed a committee to look into the possibility of abol-
ishing serfdom. For Shevchenko this would be an even greater prize
than personal freedom. But he did not know then that the day of peas-
ant liberation would not come until 1861. Everything proceeded at a
snail's pace. Some letters, books, and best wishes, as well as small
sums of money sent by friends, were reaching Shevchenko almost every
week. The poet made plans for the future, such as devoting his art to
engraving, and he promised to review Kulish's book, in which his poem
"The Servant Girl" was published anonymously. In a letter to his friend
Kukharenko, to whom he sent a new poem, he wondered whether he
"had grown older in the last ten years of imprisonment." He added: "I
shall go crazy from constant waiting." His diary, which he wrote for
himself and not for publication, has a pleasant air of intimacy. It is full
of sharp observations, of a mood of expectancy and frustration, inter-
spersed with wit and anecdotes. The author poured out his hatred of
the military men whom he was about to leave for good. They were an
uncouth and drunken lot, dehumanized by barrack life. In his descrip-
tion of them the most frequently used word is vile. However, in one of
the first entries, he wrote this about himself having lived in such a hell:
All this inscrutable misery, all kinds of degradation and profana-
tion passed and, as it were, touched me not. They did not leave
any trace on me. Bitter experiences passed by me as if they were
invisible. It seems to me that I am just the same as I was ten years
ago. Not one feature in my inner self has changed. Is this good?
Yes, it is. At least it seems so to me. And I am grateful from the
bottom of my heart to my almighty Creator that he prevented
74 GEORGE LUCKYJ
the terrible experiences from touching with their iron claws my
convictions and my youthful religious beliefs.
However much he praised his Creator, Shevchenko's life was his
own creation. The privations of his youth had hardened him so that he
could withstand almost anything. In his diary he related his dreams in
great detail. They were mostly of his old Ukrainian friends, but also of
his days in the academy. He wrote that he wanted to return there and
devote himself to engraving. In this way his art would be available to
people who could not afford to have original pieces of art. He liked to
read while drinking tea from a favourite copper teapot, but he was also
eager to meet any new interesting people who might visit the port city.
In the meantime, he wrote, "It is sad, indescribably sad. I cannot sleep
at night and I am full of anguish."
Even stronger than his fondness for his teapot was his attachment to
his diary. In writing it the poet found consolation and solitude, which
"after ten years of barrack life is like a true paradise." A somewhat
similar sentiment was expressed a little later by another exile, the great
Russian novelist Fedor Dostoevsky in Notes from the House of the
Dead (1860). At the same time Shevchenko's diary revealed the real
man without the poet's mask. No great creative effort was needed; yet
the random notes were all the more valuable. As one scholar later
wrote: "a great poet rises in these pages as a great man." The immedi-
acy of the self-portrait is startling.
Shevchenko was aware of the temptation to strike a pose, but he
resisted it: "The devil whispers into my ear: write whatever you want,
lie as much as possible." Satan was defeated by what became a rather
photographic but nevertheless very revealing account. The diary
records the poet's innate fearlessness and outspokenness. After all, he
was still in captivity, yet he was bold enough to scold the military
establishment, the imperial order, and Tsar Nicholas himself, whom,
after Herzen, he called "Hindrance" (tormoz). Not only did he not
hide his political views, he flaunted them. Ten years of penal servitude
had left him unrepentant. The poet proudly noted, "I told myself that
they will not make a soldier out of me. And they didn't." His deep
Christian beliefs told him to forgive his torturers: "In the depth of my
soul I forgive my tormentors and only ask almighty God to save oth-
ers from abuse by these half-human creatures." Free to roam in the
neighbourhood of Novopetrovsk, Shevchenko penned the following
impression of a Russian village:
SHEVCHENKO'S UNFORGOTTEN JOURNEY 75
The Great Russian village is, as Gogol said, a heap of grey logs
with black openings instead of windows, forever dirty, forever
wintry. You won't see a green twig anywhere, only in the distance
impenetrable green forests may be seen. There is here a strange
antipathy to the charms of nature. It is quite different in Ukraine.
There, a village is full of hospitable houses in the shadow of
cherry orchards. There the poor muzhik is surrounded by nature.
Oh, my beautiful and pleasant native land! Will I soon breathe
your fresh, life-giving, and sweet air?
It was in solitary prayer that the suffering poet often found his con-
solation. But his visits to a Russian church were not always very
successful. The best religious meditation was only possible in seclu-
sion. While sitting on a rock far from the barracks he concluded, "I
owed my gratitude to almighty God for allowing me to walk along this
thorny path without wounding myself or losing my human dignity."
Another political prisoner, Fedor Dostoevsky, who served his sentence
a little later than Shevchenko, observed through one of his characters
that "it is impossible for a convict to be without God."
Shevchenko's meditations in solitude were not devoted only to God.
He thought a great deal about his own life and destiny. Aware that he
had the talent to speak for the oppressed, he wondered if this task
could be accomplished. After all, nothing might be left of him for
future generations. He might simply be annihilated by the tsar's ruth-
less regime. On the other hand, some inner voice told him to be of
good cheer, to hope that all his privations would pass and that his
work would survive. Without realizing it he was a Romantic poet par
excellence, sure of his immortality. One of the books someone had
loaned to Shevchenko was a work on aesthetics by a Polish writer, Karl
Libelt. He read it carefully, responding often quite critically to the ide-
alistic view of art. He was impatient with Libelt's rather rarefied and
lofty tone. "For a man endowed with divine feeling," wrote the poet in
his diary, "such theories are empty phraseology, even worse, charla-
tanism. If only these lifeless theorists of aesthetics would, instead of
theories, write a history of art, then this would be of some use." Did
not this impatience with theory foreshadow our own scepticism about
much of the modern academic word-spinning of today?
Armed with permission to leave Novopetrovsk Shevchenko took a
boat to Astrakhan, a major port on the Caspian Sea, at the mouth of
the Volga River. On August 6, 1857 he recorded his impression of the
city: "a large heap of stinking dung. What is the reason for this dis-
gusting filth?" He could find no answer, although he guessed that
76 GEORGE LUCKYJ
Figure 8: Self-portrait (1851)
SHEVCHENKO'S UNFORGOTTEN JOURNEY 77
"there could be some political or economic mainspring for it." He
could not buy a sausage or fresh fish, although "Astrakhan supplied
half of all the sturgeons to the huge Russian tsardom." He also failed
to find a bookstore. After a week in this unattractive port, the poet
boarded the ship Prince Pozharsky, which was to take him up the Volga
to Nizhny Novgorod.
Just before boarding, a rich Russian merchant, Sapozhnikov, offered
the poet a place in his cabin. Shevchenko accepted and gave his ticket
to a poor traveller who could not afford the price. The atmosphere was
much more congenial. Some passengers became quite friendly. They all
talked, played cards, and at night listened to a former serf, Panov, play-
ing the violin. "Three nights in a row this recently freed miracle worker
lifts my soul to the creator of eternal harmony with the captivating
sounds of a marvellous homemade violin. He elicits from his own
instrument the bewitching melodies of Chopin's mazurkas."
Shevchenko's favourite composers were Mozart and Rossini. Under the
influence of music, for which the poet had a real passion, a sombre
prophecy of industrial revolution came into his mind:
Great Fulton and Watt! Your young child, growing by leaps and
bounds, will soon devour the knouts, the thrones, and crowns
swallowing up diplomats and landowners, playing with them like
a schoolboy with candy. What the encyclopedists started in
France will be fulfilled throughout the entire planet by your
gigantic child of genius. I prophesy this without a tremor.
The banks of the Volga unfolded in their majestic natural beauty.
They were "steep, picturesque, and fascinating." So much so that the
poet was forced to neglect his journal. Yet he recorded even that. On
August 31, the boat stopped at Saratov and Shevchenko visited the
town. He managed to find the house where the mother of his good
friend Kostomarov lived. They talked of the good old times in Kiev
and the visitor left her one of his poems. The city itself left a bad
impression. "Everything here smells of Russia — that is of back
bacon, burning, and abomination." The voyage past Simbirsk and
Kazan was uneventful. The poet read, conversed with fellow passen-
gers, and listened to a certain Nina Alexandrovna's account of the
contents of Byron's Don Juan. The liberal-minded captain of the
Prince Pozharsky showed Shevchenko copies of Russian publications
that Alexander Herzen, the incorrigible dissident, was issuing in
London. The poet avidly read the banned journals and, again in sheer
78 GEORGE LUCKYJ
defiance, drew a portrait of Herzen. On September 19 the travellers
spent the last evening playing cards and drinking champagne. After
almost a month they had reached the port of Nizhny Novgorod, which
was enveloped in fog.
On the first day of his stay in Nizhny Novgorod Shevchenko
received some good and also some bad news. His arrival was greeted
by progressive-minded citizens who welcomed the ex-prisoner. But at
about the same time he was being welcomed, the man who offered him
his apartment, Nikolai Brylkin, told him that the police were looking
for him. It turned out that, according to the chief of the police,
Shevchenko had taken the wrong route in coming here and that his
orders had been to go through Orenburg. What was to be done now?
His new friends, very sympathetic to him, advised him to tell the police
that he was sick. A doctor was found to give him the necessary certifi-
cate and the poet was allowed to stay in Nizhny Novgorod. His health
had, indeed, been severely undermined by the privations of long exile.
Shevchenko was enraged by these attempts to keep him from venturing
to St. Petersburg. "These are true executioners," he wrote to
Kukharenko, "ten years of slavery was not enough for them." Finally,
he was allowed to stay in the city for the next six months. There was
nothing else he could do. During that time he continued to write his
journal.
Perhaps the mood of the citizens of Nizhny Novgorod was
strengthened by the liberal atmosphere of Russia upon the accession
and coronation of Tsar Alexander II. In any case Shevchenko, as a vic-
tim of the previous regime, was lionized and invited to visit the best
houses and families. They included such high officials as Constantine
Schreiders, aide to the governor-general. Many Russian officials at that
time were hoping for the abolition of serfdom and other reforms.
Shevchenko was to them a living witness of old injustices. Some of the
Russians the poet met had links to the Decembrists of the 1820s. They
too were returning from exile.
Meeting people did not stop Shevchenko from reading. "I have read
everything," he wrote to Anastasia Tolstoy, "that has appeared
recently. I regaled myself with it." Yet sometimes meeting people was
unpleasant. In the memoirs, an incident in Nizhny Novgorod is
described. When the poet was on one of his visits, met a former dis-
trict police officer who boasted that he had beaten the peasants black
and blue. Shevchenko, we are told, left the house in tears. Sometimes
the poet mingled with the crowds of peasants on city streets. On one
occasion he encouraged them to protest against the landlords. He
SHEVCHENKO'S UNFORGOTTEN JOURNEY 79
must have had some doubts as to whether the new tsar would be a true
reformer.
Shevchenko received some books that Kulish had published and was
very happy to read them. One of them was a Ukrainian primer for the
peasants. He himself planned to write one later. Education of the
common people was paramount in his mind. But, at the moment, the
poet was regaining some of his earlier inspiration. In February 1858
the poet noted in his diary that "he felt an urge to write poetry." Even
before that, at the end of 1857, he had written a short and then a long
poem. His poetic power was undiminished, and he wrote in Ukrainian .
The short poem, "The Idiot" contains four lines that later caused a
stir in Soviet Ukraine. The poem is a savage attack on Nicholas I and
his officials. The poet asks:
Yo« miserable crew, when will you breathe your last?
When shall we get ourselves a Washington
With a new and just law?
But some day we shall surely find him!
The name of the first American president was treasured by those who
cared for liberty. On several other occasions Shevchenko showed a keen
interest in America. In his diary he mentioned San Francisco and New
Orleans as great cities. And, after all, Robert Fulton, whom he elevated
in his meditation on the industrial revolution, was an American inven-
tor. In his Russian stories Shevchenko refered to Washington Irving
and other American writers. Later, in St. Petersburg, he befriended the
black American actor Ira Aldridge, who excelled in the role of Othello.
Shevchenko left a portrait of him.
The long poem, one of his best, was called The Neophytes. Set in
ancient Rome, it portrays the lives of the first Christians. Underlying
this story there may be found a recreation of the tsarist regime in
Russia with the despot Nero-Nicholas I prominently displayed. It is a
philosophical poem rather than a satire and it has a deeply Christian
message of love and regeneration. If the poet preached revolution, it
had to be a spiritual one.
To cap his pleasant sojourn in Nizhny Novgorod Shevchenko
wrote, in February 1858, a beautiful lyrical triptych "Destiny,"
"Muse," "Fame," which he recorded in his diary. In "Destiny" he
proudly asserted, "We two have never left our pathway rough...and
none can find one grain of falsehood that we've left behind." He is no
less confident in the poem "The Muse:"
80 GEORGE LUCKYJ
You watched above me everywhere, and on
Each day, my star, immaculately shone.
Even the steppe, that place of desolation,
In my far exile knew your approbation;
Yes, even there, your beauty was revealed
Like some unfading flower in a field.
Finally, in "Fame" the ending shows a new optimism, even buoyancy:
Let me, my precious one,
Nestle against you when the day is done,
And snug beneath your wing, my fortune made
Turn me to slumber in refreshing shade!
Shevchenko always regarded his talent as a divine gift. He was still
in possession of it after years of incarceration. His faith in himself as
a poet had been renewed, and he would continue to write lyrical and
revolutionary poetry without fear. What was more, the restoration of
his Muse was also a reaffirmation of his destiny (dolia). Like a
Cossack, in a popular song, he was "not without a destiny." What pre-
cisely it meant was demonstrated in the last episode of his stay in
Nizhny Novgorod.
His long poem, The Neophytes, Shevchenko dedicated to Mykhailo
Shchepkin, his old friend from Ukraine. The actor made a special trip
to visit the poet in Nizhny, and his visit was a truly unforgettable expe-
rience for both of them. The poet described it as "six days of a full,
joyful, and reverential life." Shchepkin had a very close association
with Ukraine and the two men could talk freely as two former serfs
who had overcome their destiny. While in Nizhny Shchepkin appeared
on the stage at the local theatre. Another non-Ukrainian who at that
time attracted Shevchenko's attention was Maria Markovych, whose
Ukrainian short stories were sent to him by Kulish, who, however, was
afraid to visit Shevchenko. Maria wrote under the male pseudonym
"Marko Vovchok" and became one of the first great prose writers in
Ukraine. She was the wife of Opanas Markovych. He was a member of
the Brotherhood of Sts. Cyril and Methodius, and shared
Shevchenko's fate after the arrests of 1847.
The local theatre had a good repertoire of Russian and foreign
plays. Shevchenko attended them regularly and it was there that he met
a young actress, Katerina Piunova, who was 27 years his junior. He met
her not only in the theatre, but at the homes of mutual friends and
then at her apartment. In January 1858 the poet published a favourable
SHEVCHENKO'S UNFORGOTTEN JOURNEY 81
review of Piunova's acting in the local paper. However, the actress was
not pleased with it. Perhaps she sensed that behind the reviewer's
praise was a deep feeling for her, which she did not reciprocate. The
infatuation of a forty 44-old man for a 17-year old girl soon led to an
embarrassment. Shevchenko proposed and was rebuffed. His fantasy
of Katrusia, the lovely young actress, was shattered. The poet even
tried to intervene with her parents, but to no avail. The entry in his
diary records his deep disappointment: "I saw her as a guardian angel,
my future wife... and she placed me in a most unseemly position." For
weeks he could not forget the intense disappointment. Years later,
Katerina Piunova, in her memoirs, wrote that her parents were at fault
for stopping this "courtship" and that she "could not value the great
man properly, but I am proud that I did attract his attention." The
desire to get married, which re-emerged a few years later, shows both
the strong libido of the poet and, connected with it, his creative urge.
As Shevchenko's contemporary, Schopenhauer, whom the poet never
read, maintained, long before Freud, "the sexual passion is the kernel
of the will to live and to create." However, for Shevchenko, the imme-
diate response to his rejection was to drink more vodka than usual.
Drowning his sorrow in alcohol had now become a bad habit.
The forced sojourn in Nizhny Novgorod was coming to an end.
Shevchenko had all sorts of dreams about going to St. Petersburg, to
Ukraine, or even of "fleeing abroad." On March 5 he received permis-
sion to return to the capital after a successful intercession on his behalf
by Count Tolstoy. The journey to the heart of Russia was continued by
sleigh. On the way, he met his old friend Butakov, from the expedition
to the Aral Sea. Was it a bad omen? Not quite. Shevchenko's penal
servitude was over. It had started in despair, but it ended in hope.
82 GEORGE LUCKYJ
Part Four
Correspondence
EVE N A SUPERFICIAL READING of Kobzar will demonstrate
that Shevchenko, the founder of modern Ukrainian literature,
was much closer to the type of a poet-shaman and prophet than
the founder of Russian literature — Pushkin.
This is perhaps because Shevchenko sprang up directly from
the soil of his native and national culture. The lyrical hero in
Shevchenko's poetry is always accompanied by visions of magi-
cal initiations, journeys into the past and future, ancestors and
descendants. His images are those of a well, the tree of life or
death, the paths of good and evil, crossroads, birds, as well as
the moon, the sun, and the stars, the companions of historical
spirits, mythical heroes and prophets of the past....
The symbolic image of the well, which I chose, is multi-
faceted and I have concentrated on those aspects which lead to
the central idea through images of a suffering wanderer and a
sinful people who follow active or passive evil. Here one must
pay attention to the "well of past memory," the "well of cul-
ture" which symbolizes the collective national experience, the
"well of humanity" which nurtures the poet's creativity. Jung's
"collective unconscious" applies to these concepts, which point
to the source of poetic genius without offering any explanation.
Literary critics and scholars have pointed out many times the
"spell" or even "mystique" of Shevchenko's poetry. The prob-
lem is to find the key to this "spell" if contemporary science is
capable of doing so. The task is difficult because intellectual
study divides reality into different spheres (archaeology, history,
ethnography, folklore, linguistics, etc.). It also tends to search
for precise facts and their inter-relationship. A synthesis
remains elusive....
SHEVCHENKO'S UNFORGOTTEN JOURNEY 83
Shevchenko escaped all mono-models, systems and ideolo-
gies. He belonged to the seekers of "truth and knowledge" but
not within dogmatic verities. Hence today he is even more
"modernist" than the modernists....Shevchenko's correspon-
dence, his journal, the memoirs of his contemporaries, his own
Russian prose, as well as what he knew of science, theology,
and literature I have used as auxiliary material. These elements
of the poet's biography reveal his central core and should be
studied.
Leonid Pliushch, Taras Shevchenko's Exodus
84 GEORGE LUCKYJ
1
More than kisses, letters mingle souls.
John Donne
SHEVCHENKO'S TRUE PERSONALITY is best revealed in his corre-
spondence. More than 220 of his letters have been preserved. He was
also the recipient of at least 200 letters. A closer look at some of them,
assembled together, offers a unique insight into a fellow creature.
Most of his letters are written in Ukrainian. They represent the
"unedited" and unvarnished reflection of his personality. The poet's
spontaneity comes to the fore because of his complete disregard for
formality and etiquette. Words flow from his pen unhindered. In the
history of Ukrainian correspondence his letters are the first to be both
partisan and iconoclastic. His contemporaries adhered to conven-
tional usage; he was a recusant and non-conformist. Shevchenko
started writing letters in 1839 by addressing his brother, Mykyta, in
Ukraine. Writing from St. Petersburg, where he had finally become a
free man, studying at the Academy of Fine Arts, he wanted to re-estab-
lish contact with his family and his native land. He wrote with great
fervour after an interval of more than a year, although it was ten years
since he had left his native village. He proudly announced to Mykyta,
"I live here without bowing to anyone. I am not afraid of anyone
except God. It is a great happiness to be free, to do what I want...." As
a free man of meagre means he sent his brother some money. He also
implored him to write to him "not in Russian, but in our language."
Listening to the native words he might cry a little, remembering his
home. This insistence on the native language was repeated in his sec-
ond letter to Mykyta, written four months later, in which he declared;
"Don't write to me in Russian because I won't read it." Primarily,
therefore, it is his native language that he values most. In a letter to the
writer Hryhorii Kvitka in 1841, the poet further indulged in his attach-
ment to Ukraine, recalling its natural beauty which he had experienced
directly and intimately. St. Petersburg, he said, was odious because of
its harsh climate. He begged Kvitka to send him some Ukrainian peas-
ant costumes, presumably so that he could paint pictures of them. The
SHEVCHENKO'S UNFORGOTTEN JOURNE Y 85
opposition between Ukraine and Russia is expressed chiefly in terms of
physical nature and language. He was even trying to write in Russian,
but he had no confidence whatever that he would succeed. His nostal-
gia for Ukraine grew even stronger when he wrote to Yakiv
Kukharenko, whom Shevchenko addressed as "otaman." He com-
plained to him that Russia was a "foreign land," referring to the
"cursed St. Petersburg" and regretting having written a poem in
Russian, "that stale language of the katsaps [pejorative for Russians]."
In a revealing sentence he confessed: "Apart from God and the devil
there is in our soul something terrible and heart-chilling...it is not my
fault that I wasn't born a katsap or a Frenchman..." This "terrible"
fate is precisely his Ukrainian birth.
Early in 1843 the idea of visiting Ukraine assumed paramount
importance. Writing to Tarnovsky in January of that year the poet
once more cursed "muddy St. Petersburg" and wanted to be in Ukraine
"before nightingales sing...perhaps I'll escape to you after Easter."
Shevchenko sent Tarnovsky his painting of one of his heroines,
Kateryna. He told Tarnovsky that the Russians regarded him as "an
enthusiast and a fool" and that he longed to be in Ukraine "even if I
am regarded as a peasant poet." Tarnovsky was one of the few
Ukrainians Shevchenko knew in Ukraine. He was anxious to visit
Tarnovsky's estate, Kachanivka, and paint there. Yet, while he felt an
overwhelming desire to return home, he had twinges of doubt. At the
end of February, 1843, he writes to Kukharenko that he might travel
abroad rather than to Ukraine, where he would "hear only crying."
The visit, as described here earlier, was finally undertaken and led to
the confirmation of his intense attachment as well as to a reassessment
of his native land.
Once in Ukraine, Shevchenko's expansive nature showed no
bounds. He literally wallowed in his Ukrainianness. A good example
of this may be glimpsed in a letter written from Yahotyn to the "wet
mug," Viktor Zakrevsky, brother-in-law of Hanna, with whom the
poet was deeply in love. In his letter Shevchenko praised the "company
of Bacchus," used four-letter words, and was thoroughly disreputable.
No wonder that Princess Repnina strongly objected to his association
with the "wet mugs" and warned him to avoid "these coarse people."
But this was an aristocrat's censure and Shevchenko ignored it. He was
in his element among the Ukrainian landowners, some of whom lived
very simply. Tarnovsky was an exception. The poet re-entered this
Ukrainian world with real abandon. He sang and drank with his
guests and felt happy in their cherry orchards. The link with his native
land was as physical as it was when, as a small boy, he was prevented
86 GEORGE LUCKYJ
by his mother from eating earth. The attachment of Ukrainians to
their soil (zemlia) is truly elemental. No wonder that Shevchenko
wrote to Hryhorovych from Yahotyn: "Now I feel well, very well."
Well enough to engage in another patriotic frivolity — the sending of
a jocular hetman's "universal" proclamation to Mykola Markevych on
January 22,1844.
This intense love of country was soon translated into action. As
Shevchenko set out to sketch various monuments in Ukraine he wrote
to Bodiansky that he wanted to "depict how people live now and how
they used to live." The intended project of publishing a series of
sketches called Picturesque Ukraine became a real obsession. The poet,
turned archivist, wrote to Tsertelev that "if God helps me to finish it,
I would be ready to lie down in a coffin, since Ukraine would then not
forget my miserable self." In the course of his expedition to historic
sites he discovered ruin and devastation, which hurt him bitterly.
"The Muscovites have plundered our Ukraine," he wrote to
Kukharenko, to whom he also sent these vitriolic lines of poetry:
The Hetmans will rise,
The Destiny will rise
In a golden tunic
And the Cossacks will sing.
Kukharenko, who was something of a showman, was treated by
Shevchenko as the last true descendant of the Cossacks. This love of
the Cossacks and their ethos, an essential part of Shevchenko's patri-
otism, was later lampooned by his friend, Kulish. The last letter,
written on February 1, 1847, to Kostomarov before their arrest, from
"the glorious city of Borzna," showed Shevchenko's devil-may-care
attitude to life ("I am still fond of drinking") but with more serious
patriotic intention towards Ukraine. He referred to the Cyrillo-
Methodian Brotherhood in these words: "I will not write to you of the
brotherhood since there is nothing to write about; we'll cry together
when we meet." A rather cryptic comment, but one that testified to his
direct involvement in this secret society aimed at Ukraine's liberation.
Exile exacerbated Shevchenko's ardour for Ukraine. Writing from
Orsk to Lazarevsky at the end of 1847 the poet complained that "I feel
so wretched, so wretched, that if it were not for the hope of seeing my
unhappy land one day, I would ask God to help me to die." The long-
ing for Ukraine "makes me cry." It overwhelmed his good memories of
St. Petersburg and turned him into a "refugee without a shelter."
SHEVCHENKO'S UNFORGOTTEN JOURNEY 87
Lyzohub's letters offered "words from my poor country." Yet gradu-
ally this distant, poor country became for the poet more than an object
of nostalgia. He feared that he might be forgotten in Ukraine and
greeted his faithful correspondent, Lyzohub, as his "only friend." He
complained to Bodiansky, in 1850, that "God has not given me a good
destiny (dolia). He did not allow me to end my life in Ukraine. My
tears overflow when I remember it." He did not know why he was pun-
ished so severely. In other words, doubts began to occur to him about
his mission as a Ukrainian poet. He was sure that he "would never see
his hapless Ukraine," and he would die in the barren Asiatic steppes.
This anxiety was born just as he was becoming aware of both his debt
to Ukraine and the gifts he had for her. He ended in deep despair. In a
letter to Artemovsky in 1852 he questioned the value of all reflection,
"which destroys hope, this universal, beautiful deceiver. I did have
hope, but then gave it up. I was not born for happiness, I was born,
grew up in servitude, and I will die a soldier. May the end come
quickly, no matter how it comes." It was, after all, his country, both
real and imagined, that kept him alive; in exile, he was ready to die.
Secretly, he hoped "to look but once on my friends on the Dnieper,
Kiev, Ukraine, before I die."
Meanwhile, the poet continued to write and receive letters and
praises but was often disappointed with the mail from Ukraine. He
even penned a poem about it. In his letters he remembered Dante's dic-
tum that "there is nothing worse than to remember happiness in times
of despair." He was worried, in a letter to Bodiansky, that he might
forget all he knew about Ukraine. However, from time to time his
gloom disappeared, especially when he received a good letter from
Ukraine. Replying to Kukharenko in April 1854, the poet transported
himself momentarily to Ukraine, remembering the good times and his
friends. He wrote with his usual abandon, full of folksy sayings and
colourful adjectives. Occasionally, he quoted songs and verse and
asked for more letters. He could not help recalling happy memories in
Ukraine, although he swore that they brought tears to his eyes.
Momentarily he cheered up when he thought of a new Ukrainian
translation that he could produce. The old creative urge was con-
stantly fed by native memories. He was very moved when his Polish
friend Zygmunt Sierakowski wrote him a letter in Ukrainian.
Shevchenko greeted the long-awaited news of his possible release
with enthusiasm because it opened the door to his return home. At
Easter in 1857 he wrote to Kukharenko and promised to visit him
soon. He established contact with Kulish and praised his new new
88 GEORGE LUCKYJ
publications. But this enthusiasm was soon dampened by bureaucratic
delays in obtaining his real freedom. Some instructions he received
were deceptive. At one point he was told that he could travel wherever
he wanted. The hope of returning to Ukraine, however, was soon
dashed. After being detained in Nizhny Novgorod, Shevchenko was
lucky to return to St. Petersburg. However, plans to travel to Ukraine
did not leave him. Writing in 1859 to his brother the poet said, "I can't
stay in St. Petersburg, it will smother me." And so, against many odds,
he travelled to Ukraine that same year.
The trip proved to be a disaster. Apart from revisiting the old places
Shevchenko was intent on achieving two practical objectives: buying a
piece of land on the Dnieper in order to build a house, and helping to
free his family from serfdom. Both ended in failure. He also proposed
marriage to a village girl but nothing came of it. Much of his time he
spent talking to peasants and inciting them to rebel even before the
tsar granted them freedom. He also attacked the church, an ally of the
tsarist establishment. As a result of all this, he was arrested and placed
not in jail but under police surveillance. Frustrated and utterly dis-
heartened, he left Ukraine and returned to St. Petersburg.
There are few letters from this unhappy period, and they are full of
bitter disappointment. Having accomplished nothing and having been
arrested for the third time crushed his dream, so carefully preserved
during exile, of the ideal Ukraine. Perhaps he was expecting too much.
In any case, his native land appeared beyond redemption. He found lit-
tle consolation in the words written to him by Maksymovych: "Even if
infrequently, send us word here to the banks of the Dnieper, where you
left most heartfelt memories during your visit. On the right bank of
the Dnieper you have become a mythical figure, already a source of
fables and legends equal to those produced in ancient times." What
would have pleased the poet even more had he known about it was the
fact that many students in Kiev and Kharkiv swore to continue
Shevchenko's work of enlightenment. Undoubtedly, he hoped that the
country to which he had dedicated his life and work would remember
him "with a warm, gentle word."
Second to his patriotism was his love of art. Very rarely did his let-
ters reflect his thoughts on his own work. But this, surely, is common
among poets and artists. What we find in Shevchenko's epistolary
store is a complex but unified aesthetic credo, which also reveals his
personality. His later responses to his beloved teacher, Karl Briullov,
were not entirely uncritical. True, at first he was, as were his contem-
poraries, swept by admiration for Briullov's large pseudo-classical
SHEVCHENKO' S UNFORGOTTEN JOURNEY 89
canvases. Briullov's credo, his belief in the sublime beauty of classical
art, was tempered by his determination to seek inspiration in nature.
Shevchenko remembered that his teacher "did not allow one stroke
without looking at a model." The models Shevchenko chose for his
paintings and drawings, outside of the required copying in the
Academy, came not from the classical heritage but from Ukrainian life.
His style remained classicist, but the topics that attracted him were
Ukrainian, except during his exile. Like Briullov, Shevchenko remained
hostile to contemporary German art, which tended to be idealist and
romantic in its search for "absolute beauty." He did not like the paint-
ings of Alexander Ivanov, who was under German influence.
Shevchenko's drawings and sketches were, on the whole, in the realist
manner. His role in painting was minor. He was a first-rate portraitist
and left many excellent watercolours and drawings. He was also an
illustrator and late in life was, out of deep conviction, practicing
engraving and etching (I'eau forte). In a letter to Aksakov, the poet
stated his artistic credo: "I am an adherent of everything beautiful and
noble on earth." Perhaps this rather vague conviction did not focus
him as a painter. Shevchenko's real artistic talent lay elsewhere.
His poetry was very different and it is on this subject that we find
curious meditations in his letters. He must have been flattered by many
favourable responses from the readers of Kobzar. One of them was by
Pylyp Korolov, a teacher of physics and mathematics in Kharkiv, who
wrote to the poet in 1842, "I love you as a brother or even more so,
because you were the first to sing about the Cossack glory, which is as
true as God's word, and about the freedom that has passed, and the
steppes and mohylas in Ukraine, over which a black eagle is circling...."
Non-Ukrainians, like Varvara Repnina, also recognized Shevchenko's
genius. She not only praised his poetry but offered advice:
Higher with your soul and genius! These should be your aims.
Freedom, native land, self-denial and love — all these you have
written about. Glorify them anew! These feelings are eternal. Do
not let the lyre slip from your hands, do not place it on the steps
leading to deceit, favouritism, and treason. Pray with your lyre,
strike the mighty chords and glorify the Creator and the mercy
of the Saviour....
However personal, this tribute was very genuine. Repnina also did
not hesitate to criticize Shevchenko's poetry. Another admirer was
Professor Osyp Bodiansky, who in 1844 wrote that he was stimulated
in his Ukrainian research by Shevchenko's poetry.
90 GEORGE LUCKYJ
Occasionally, Shevchenko's readers were aware that his works might
offend the authorities. In 1846 his brother Varfolomii warned him in a
letter that he might "lose his bearings" and say something "prickly." In
the same year, writing from St. Petersburg, Kulish examined
Shevchenko's muse very critically. He suggested many emendations in
the hope that "all Ukraine should have a poet who would say to the
whole world his mighty and harmonious word." Even in exile,
Shevchenko received a letter from Oleksandra Psiol, to whom his
poetry was religious and its creator a martyr for "everything sublime
and beautiful." A Russian writer Aleksey Pisemsky wrote to
Shevchenko in 1856 that he saw Ukrainians weep while reading his
poetry.
Yet what is quite startling is Shevchenko's occasional confession,
forced no doubt by the circumstances of exile, of what might be read
as a repudiation of his own poetry. Writing in 1850 to the Russian poet
Zhukovsky (a letter which was never mailed), whom he implored to
intercede on his behalf, Shevchenko declared that "I fully recognize my
crime and confess my heartfelt repentance." This could only refer to
his poetry, for a few lines further on he assures Zhukovsky that he
"never painted anything criminal." We know that, at about the same
time, the poet maintained in his verse that he was not at all penitent.
Yet, in 1853, in a letter to Artemovsky, he once more refers to his
"accursed verses which led me here." This time might have marked the
lowest point in his self-esteem as a poet. Similar "confessions" were
common among Soviet dissident poets languishing in camps. The
poet's critical attitude to his work was also influenced by the letters
from some of his friends. Lyzohub, writing soon after Shevchenko's
arrest, prayed that God would help him "to bear the cross" and be
thankful to God "even if you are not guilty, for He punishes those
whom he loves." A similar sentiment, implying Shevchenko's guilt in
writing his poems, was later repeated by Lyzohub. Could it be that,
momentarily at least, Shevchenko did feel guilty?
Yet the creative urge to write poetry in Ukrainian was not stilled
even during the period when Shevchenko, in exile, was writing Russian
prose. In a letter to Kozachkovsky in April 1854, he shows a real desire
to "translate the Lay of Ihor's Host into our most beautiful Ukrainian
language." In many poems hidden in his boots during his exile he
remained defiant. Shortly before his death he declared in a poem "I am
Walking at Night" that "I was lost in thoughts, / The very same
thoughts I had before." The temporary hesitation about his revolu-
tionary poetry, expressed in a letter to Artemovsky, may have revealed
another side of the poet. Did Shevchenko realize that every poet's
SHEVCHENKO'S UNFORGOTTEN JOURNEY 91
dreams must vanish? Does any poet realize that? Yet the very nature of
romantic poetry begs these very questions. For that poetry is, in
Shevchenko's own words, like "an oak grove...[which] takes on a
golden gown of purest white, then a costly mantle, and weary from its
labours, lies down for the night."
92 GEORGE LUCKYJ
2
In all our earthly paradise
No sight more wondrous greets the eyes
Than a young mother who is blest
With a small baby at her breast.
T. Shevchenko
SHEVCHENKO THE POET SPEAKS through his verses and
Shevchenko the man through his letters. His letters to and about
women reveal most about his inner self. In an early letter to Kvitka
(1841), Shevchenko offered to paint a Ukrainian woman for him, one
of Kvitka's heroines. Then in 1843, in a letter to Tarnovsky, he
described in some detail his own painting of Kateryna:
I have painted Kateryna when she takes leave of her moskalyk
[Russian soldier] and returns to her village. An old man is sitting
nearby, carving wooden spoons, and looks sadly at Kateryna.
She, a poor wretch, withholds her tears, and lifts her red apron
since, you know she [is pregnant]. The moskal races after his
friends amid clouds of dust. A little mangy dog is chasing him
and tries to bark. On one side there is a mohyla, with a windmill
on top, and then only the distant steppe....
The painting of Kateryna may be regarded as a tribute to
Shevchenko's young sweetheart, Oksana Kovalenko, who shared
Kateryna's fate. The theme of the seduced woman rarely left the poet's
imagination. The picture itself, of no great artistic quality, is one of
Shevchenko's best known. He wanted to depict a Ukrainian woman in
traditional dress, and Kvitka, who supplied him with some of women's
clothing, was insistent on that.
A separate chapter in Shevchenko's relations with women was in his
friendship with Varvara Repnina. It is best reflected in their letters,
many of which have been lost. Those that remain tell of the intensity
of this extraordinary relationship. At the end of November 1843
Shevchenko wrote her a brief letter with his impressions of her short
novel The Girl (Devochka), the manuscript of which she gave him in
SHEVCHENKO'S UNFORGOTTEN JOURNEY 93
Yahotyn. In a rather exalted mood he complained of his own misery
and loneliness and welcomed her compassion and sympathy, which,
although disguised, she expressed for him in the novel. He ended by
saying, "I pray to you, my good angel, and you have confirmed my
belief in the existence of saints on this earth!" In her correspondence
with Charles Eynard, Repnina mentioned this letter, which was writ-
ten after a recitation of Shevchenko's Russian poem "Funeral Feast"
(Trizna) dedicated somewhat fulsomely to Repnina. "Next day,"
Repnina wrote, "I did not see him...but I was told that he was gloomy
and distant and that he had left immediately after tea. I was with my
mother and Princess Keikuatova and I was handed a note — it was
from him....This was not a love letter, but an expression of reverence
for my spiritual anxiety and a belief that the weakness of his talent
made him unable to express his feelings upon reading my manuscript."
This letter of Shevchenko's might have reflected a turning point in her
relationship with him, which from then on, as far as he was concerned,
was just "sisterly." Repnina assumed the role of protectress perhaps a
little unwillingly, but resolutely, even passionately. "Don't be cross,"
she wrote, "at my constant preaching. I love you too much not to tell
you the truth. Forgive me." The hypersensitive princess confessed "I
am your sister, your most sincere friend, your accuser...! am telling you
as if you were my brother that I quite often saw you as I would never
have liked to see you."
In her letters to Eynard, Repnina confessed that, "Shevchenko has
occupied a place in my heart.... Not being fully conscious of it, I felt
jealous of the attention he paid to Hlafira." And later: "My attraction
to him increased more and more. Sometimes he responded with
warmth but never with passion." Finally: "If I had seen love on his
side, I would, perhaps, have answered it with passion...My feeling was
so strong that I forgot my Bible." Even more ardent were Repnina's
feelings in her novel, where Shevchenko appeared as Berezovsky (a ref-
erence to his frequent visits to Hanna Zakrevska in Berezovi Rudky).
At the same time, full of jealousy, Repnina painted him as a rather
complex individual:
He ate and drank as all mortals do. He could spend hours in idle
pursuits and vulgar talk and he seemed to like that. He could be
good to extreme weakness and thoughtless to the point of cru-
elty, indecisive and rash in his actions. One could not help loving
him. For those who really loved him, he was a source of worry,
ceaseless transitions from raptures to indignation, from sym-
pathy to coolness.... When reading his verses he became
94 GEORGE LUCKYJ
bewitching. His musical voice reproduced in his listeners the
deep feelings which filled him at that time. He was endowed with
more than talent, he was a genius, and his sensitive and virtuous
soul tuned his flute to lofty and sacred things.
No wonder that in her letters she directed him to the "right path."
In her long letter to Eynard, she described Shevchenko as "a child of
nature, without any concept of decorum; but he has tact, goodness,
and a high regard for everything holy; hence he is considerate, respect-
ful of his elders, and loved by everyone." Even Varvara's mother, who
insisted that her daughter tell her everything, could not help liking the
poet.
Varvara's high opinion of Shevchenko the poet was not unnoticed
by him. Here was a Russian princess praising his literary genius. No
ordinary flattery, but perhaps it was a Russian admission of his
Ukrainian talent. There is no doubt that under her influence he started
to write a poem in Russian. Perhaps, for a moment at least, it may have
seemed possible to him that he could contribute something to the
Russian poetic heritage. But there is strong evidence that this was only
a fleeting moment. His message was not meant for Russian readers.
His reading of Trizna in the Repnin's drawing room was but a diver-
sion or an act of youthful folly.
It was in her short novel about Shevchenko that Repnina made a
very moving confession. Both of them were rather moody and she
recorded these moods faithfully. She was tormented by Shevchenko's
liking for "bad company." "She saw Berezovsky as hanging over a
precipice, and she heard how people, prudent and worthy of respect,
maintained that if Berezovsky did not shed this ruinous habit, he
would undoubtedly perish in two years, forsake his poetic talent and
become an inveterate drunkard." She was also an acute observer of
herself: "She is 35 years old. What is an old maid? She is like a lyre with
broken strings, save only the string of Christian love." It was Varvara's
Christian faith that saved her. "I had terrible conflicts, agonizing
scenes," she wrote to Eynard, "but I came close to God, because these
scenes were often born of a sense of the beautiful and good." While
Eynard tried to reassure her, she knew that ultimately she was
"wretched, unkind, egotistically wistful, envious, jealous, un-subdued
to God's will, only wishing to be alone." It is noteworthy that when,
in an article in 1885, she read about her "mute (nemaia) love" for
Shevchenko, she wrote a letter to the editor and said that there was no
love, only a deep friendship. On Shevchenko's part, this sublimated
relationship lasted throughout his exile. He often corresponded with
SHEVCHENKO'S UNFORGOTTEN JOURNEY 95
his "never-to-be-forgotten (nezabvenny) friend." In her turn, she did a
great deal to alleviate his lot. After Shevchenko's death, Varvara
Nikolaevna lived for 30 years in Moscow.
During the stopover at Nizhny Novgorod, when Shevchenko was
trying to get married, he courted a young actress, Piunova, without
success. There are no letters between them, but Piunova later wrote
that the poet was hardly "an eligible bachelor, wearing, as he did,
black coal-tarred boots, a coat of raw sheep-skin, and a simple lamb-
skin cap, which flopped down." The desire to get married, however,
became an obsession for Shevchenko in the remaining years of his life.
Despite his declining health and his drinking, he set out to find a
young wife. He wanted not only to have a companion but also to
father children. During his last journey to Ukraine, Shevchenko was
determined to find himself a wife. He met Kharytia Dovhopolenko, a
servant of his brother Varfolomii, and promptly offered to marry her.
As he had to leave Ukraine in a hurry because of police surveillance,
he continued writing to his brother about Kharytia. "I like Kharytia
very much..." he wrote to Varfolomii, "ask your wife to approach her
on my behalf.... Perhaps she will say that she is poor and I am rich and
proud. You tell her that I lack many things and sometimes don't have
a clean shirt. My pride and vanity come from my mother, a poor
serf.... I simply must get married, else sheer boredom will drive me
from this world." And later he was no less insistent: "Now, about
Kharytia.... You know that in my body and soul I am a son of our hap-
less people and I would not like to be united with the dog-like master
blood.... Kharytia took my fancy although I saw her only briefly."
Varfolomii Shevchenko did not agree with his brother. He felt that
Kharytia was not a suitable bride for the poet. Kharytia herself also
objected. In the end nothing came of it, but the episode illustrates
Shevchenko's desperate state. He also approached Maria, the wife of
his friend Mykhailo Maksymovych, with the same idea, that of find-
ing him a bride. He remembered his recent visit to Maksymovych's
home and wrote several times to Maria. There is even reason to believe
that he had fallen in love with Maria, who wrote him fond letters and
promised "to find a beautiful flower for our beloved Ukrainian."
Shevchenko said to a friend in reference to Maria Maksymovych: "If I
had a bride like that I would marry her and then die."
Shevchenko's pursuit of women was in stark contrast to the attitude
of his good friend Kulish who, in the late 1850s, was also involved with
several young women. Although already married, Kulish pursued his
various platonic relationships through letters. The women he was
attracted to (among them was Turgenev's lover, Maria Markovych)
96 GEORGE LUCKYJ
were not peasant girls but educated, middle-class women, even blue
stockings, whom he wished to educate further. Caught up in the wave
of the emancipation of women in Russia, which led Nikolai
Chernyshevsky to write a novel in 1863 about the "new woman," What
Is To Be Done, Kulish expected to find in a woman an enlightened
companion and comrade. He shied away from close physical contact
and cultivated an atmosphere of sophisticated romance. All this was
far from Shevchenko's intention. He wanted to find a loving, simple
peasant girl, whom he would marry and who would look after him.
Was there not in this contrast a reflection of Shevchenko's peasant ori-
gin, which meant so much to him?
This pathetic pursuit of possible young brides by an ailing man
could lead only to another disaster. It happened in 1860 in
St. Petersburg, when the poet became infatuated with a Ukrainian ser-
vant woman employed by a friend, Lykera Polusmakivna. The many
sordid details of this "courtship" (the poet caught Lykera in flagrante
with a butler) would have deterred anyone with less determination. As
in the days when he was a young student, Shevchenko tried to "sate his
passion." We know that he tracked down one of his earlier friends,
Amalia Kloberg, who called him "Chevchenko." His friends tried, in
vain, to protect him from himself. But, as always, he was headstrong
and unflinching.
As for the ancient Greeks, Eros was for Shevchenko an impulse
towards life, in opposition to Thanatos, the certainty of death. He
sought and failed to find a union with a woman in order to procreate.
Perhaps he regarded marriage and physical love as a talisman against
death. It is curious, by the way, that death did not become a huge exis-
tential problem for Shevchenko. There was no despair or anxiety
prompted by the thought of death nor Kierkegaardian "sickness unto
death" evident in either his poetry or his letters. For him, the meaning
of life was contained in its vitality, the view held by most peasants. Yet
a vital urge to create something beyond himself drove him throughout
his entire life.The deep anger he felt towards the powers-that-be was
transmuted into creative and civilizing poetry easily accessible to most
of his compatriots. In his love of his country, of his art, and of women
he revealed his inner self. Throughout, in spite of constant frustration
and pain, he showed a capacity for rebellion as the preservation of the
human spirit. In this he achieved what Goethe says of Faust:
For fate has put a spirit in his breast
That drives him madly on without a pause.
SHEVCHENKO'S UNFORGOTTEN JOURNEY 97
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Part Five
Homecoming
ON VASILIEVSKY ISLAND, in the depths of the Seventeenth
Line, a house enormous and gray looked out of the fog. A
dingy staircase led to the floors. There were doors and more
doors. One opened. And a stranger with the blackest of small
moustaches appeared on its threshold. Rhythmically swinging
in his hand was a not exactly small yet not very large bundle
tied up in a dirty napkin with a red border design of faded
pheasants.
The staircase was black, strewn with cucumber peels and a
cabbage leaf crushed under foot. The stranger slipped on it. He
then grasped the railing with one hand; the other hand (with
the bundle) described a zigzag. The stranger wished to protect
the bundle from a distressing accident, from falling onto the
stone step, because the movement of his elbow mimicked a
tightrope walker's turn....
Oh, you lines!
In you has remained the memory of Petrine Petersburg. The
parallel lines were once laid out by Peter. And some of them
came to be enclosed with granite, others with low fences of
stone, still others with fences of wood. Peter's line turned into
the line of a later age: the rounded one of Catherine, the regu-
lar ranks of colonnades.
Left among the colossi were small Petrine houses: here a tim-
bered one, there a green one, there a blue, single-storeyed one,
with the bright red sign "Dinners Served."
Sundry odours hit you right in the nose: the smell of sea salt,
of herring, of hawsers, of leather jacket and of pipe, and of
nautical tarpaulin.
Oh, lines! How they have changed: how grim days have
changed them!...
SHEVCHENKO'S UNFORGOTTEN JOURNEY 99
From over there rose Petersburg: there buildings blazed out
of a wave of clouds.
There, it seemed, hovered someone spiteful, cold. From over
there, out of the howling chaos someone stared with stony
gaze, skull and ears protruding into the fog.
All of that was in the mind of the stranger. He clenched his
fist in his pocket. And he remembered that the leaves were
falling. He knew it all by heart. These fallen leaves were the last
leaves for many. He became a bluish shadow....
The stone curve of the Winter Canal showed its plangent
expanse. The Neva was buffeted by the onslaught of a damp
wind. The soundlessly flying surfaces glimmered, the walls that
formed the side of the four-storeyed palace gleamed in the
moonlight....
A carriage was traversing that place. And an equestrian
statue stood out black and indistinct against the square.
Visitors to Petersburg pay no attention to this statue. A magnif-
icent statue!
The autocrat had raised this statue to his illustrious great-
grandfather. He lived in the rosy stone castle. He did not
languish long there. Between flurries of petty tyranny and fits
of nobleness, his soul was being torn apart....
Andrei Bely, Petersburg
100 GEORGE LUCKYJ
1
The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him
as affectionately as he has absorbed it.
Walt Whitman
IT WAS EARL Y MARCH 1861. The cold wind whipped up snow flur-
ries against the wing of the Academy of Fine Arts on Vasilievsky
Island. In a small two-room apartment in the Academy building sat
Shevchenko, utterly disheartened. True, he had just published a
Ukrainian primer for the peasants, and a few days earlier he had writ-
ten what was to be his last poem, but he was sick in body and spirit
and did not look forward to his birthday on the ninth of the month.
He was immersed in thought and recalled the last three years since he
had come back here from exile.
St. Petersburg gave him a warm reception. He was invited out a
great deal and met some leading Russian writers and critics. The
famous novelist Ivan Turgenev met the poet and described him as
"broad-shouldered, sturdy, like a Cossack....His head was almost bald,
his forehead high and his lips were covered with long mustaches." But
the Russian writer felt that Ukrainians had exaggerated the poet's
importance. The Russians often labelled Shevchenko a "peasant poet."
This patronizing epithet was hardly a compliment. But Shevchenko did
not yet know that another Russian critic, Apollon Grigoriev, disagreed
with Turgenev. He placed Shevchenko even above Pushkin.
Shevchenko, according to him, was "the last minstrel and the first
great poet of a new, great literature." In his personal life there were bit-
ter disappointments. In June 1860 Shevchenko met Lykera
Polusmakivna, a former serf, who was serving as a maid at the home
of one of his friends. He proposed to her but, as with Piunova, was
rejected. Following this disappointment the poet took to drink, which,
in the course of time, impaired his health. Shevchenko remembered
how Kostomarov had said that he "drank like an epic hero (bogatyr)."
Another bad memory was the ill-fated trip to Ukraine where, after a
few months, he was again almost placed under arrest.
Yet there were also good memories. His continued creative powers
produced fine paraphrases of the psalms, where his voice was that of
SHEVCHENKO'S UNFORGOTTEN JOURNEY 101
Figure 9: Self-portrait (1861)
102 GEORGE LUCKYJ
a Hebrew prophet, and the religious poem Mary.
You will be wrecked and perish, O Ukraine!
No trace of you will tarry on the earth!
Once you took pride in your prosperity
And luxury! Dear land and innocent!
Why does the Lord afflict you, why so harshly
Lay punishment upon you?
His old friends rallied around him and he became the toast of the
St. Petersburg literary society. Occasionally he even participated in
Russian social activity, when he signed a protest against anti-Semitism.
As an artist he devoted himself with some success to engraving. He
was still writing poetry and reflecting on his past life. Since his libera-
tion from serfdom in 1838 he had spent only three years on extended
visits to Ukraine. Three years in his homeland during 23 years of his
creative life. One can, therefore, speak of him as an emigre poet living
outside his native land. An American scholar, weighing the advantages
and disadvantages of this, wrote that "the emigre writer's past life in
the homeland, especially if it is distanced by time, somehow becomes
predicated upon the past glory of his people; both of those times were
happy times, and they were happy together. Even more characteristic
are instances where the energies moving both of these temporal planes
become fuelled by his imagination."
Shevchenko's place in literature was secure, but his disappointment
with life was intense. Serfdom in Russia had not been abolished and
his native land was still oppressed. The bond between him and his
country was stronger than ever. In a short autobiographical note in
1860 Shevchenko characteristically wrote "the history of my life rep-
resents part of the history of my country." His heart was heavy,
especially after the doctors told him that his heart and his liver were
slowly giving out. He also had rheumatism and a touch of malaria.
Old age did not come to him gracefully, on the contrary it sapped
nearly all his energies. His apartment was cold and drafty and he was
barely able to make himself a cup of tea. His poem, written a few days
earlier, began:
Should we not then cease, my comrade Muse,
My dear neighbour, and make an end
Of versifying useless rhymes?
Shall we prepare a wagon for the time
When we must travel that longest road?
SHEVCHENKO'S UNFORGOTTEN JOURNEY 103
He was thinking of death when, on his birthday, Lazarevsky visited
him. The poet was sitting, not lying, on his bed, and was short of
breath. He asked Lazarevsky to write to Ukraine and seek help. Native
air would be better for him than foggy St. Petersburg. Soon Doctor
Bari came and diagnosed dropsy. The poet was now in intense pain and
could only say "thank you" when telegrams came with best wishes
from Kharkiv and Poltava. Then he dozed for a while. When he woke
up he asked Lazarevsky if it were possible to travel to Ukraine, where
he felt sure he would recover. Another physician, Dr. Krunevich, came
and found the poet's lungs filling with water. The night was full of suf-
fering, but the poet was still asking for some tea. At five o'clock in the
morning he got up but after a few steps fell dead on the floor.
The morning came, calm and radiant. They laid out Taras's body
on the bed. As was customary, a death mask was made of the poet's
face. Everything was being prepared for a funeral. This was an end but
also a beginning. No one was conscious of the moment's full gravity.
A poet was dead and his work was now offered to posterity. He had
built a myth of Ukraine that was to be passed on to "the living and the
yet unborn," as he wrote. This myth was not an ideological or politi-
cal construct, but was the outcome of his own being. He was not an
intellectual preaching to the people. His message was implicit in the
human material with which he was dealing. His own self, unknown
even to himself, was revealed there. There were deep layers in it, which
only decades later would be studied with new psychological tools.
There was, of course, a great danger that his life and work would be
misunderstood and simplified. That was unavoidable. Yet in his own
life he did foster a link not so much with ideas as with his own people.
Unwittingly perhaps he undertook the task of reviving their historical
memory and their human dignity. He wrote that they "should love
Ukraine in her dire time." These two — nation and humanity —
always went together. Not just a free Ukraine, but the rule of God's
law, bratoliubie (brotherly love) were his ideals. Man's dignity sprang
from the equality of all souls in the sight of their Creator. Now it was
up to those who were left to learn this central truth. If he was a
prophet, then what was his prophecy?
Even before the funeral, Shevchenko's Ukrainian friends had gath-
ered and decided to commemorate the poet by establishing a school for
peasant children. This initiative was later blocked by the tsarist
authorities. The friends also saw to it that the poet's personal posses-
sions were preserved for posterity. They obviously thought of
establishing a museum in his honour. The funeral was held on March
104 GEORGE LUCKYJ
igure 10: Shevchenko's grave
14 at the Smolensk cemetery in St. Petersburg. Present were the liter-
iry elite of Ukraine and Russia. Among them were Kostomarov,
iCulish, Dostoevsky, Nekrasov, and Leskov. An eyewitness later recalled
:hat the funeral was simple but impressive, free "from laurel wreaths
ind other theatrical paraphernalia." There were six eulogies. Perhaps
:he most eloquent was the one given by Kulish:
A poet such as Shevchenko is beloved not only by Ukrainians.
Wherever he should have died in the immense Slavic world,
whether in Serbia, in Bulgaria, or among the Czechs, he would
have been at home. You were afraid, Taras, that you would die in
a foreign place, among foreigners. This could not be! In the midst
of your large family you went to your eternal resting place. No
Ukrainian has had such a large family as you; no one ever
received a farewell like yours. There have been great warriors in
our native Ukraine; there have been great rulers. But you rise
above them all and your family is the largest. For you, Taras,
taught us that people were not made to be driven to their deaths,
cities and villages were not made to be mere possessions; you
taught us the sacred, life-giving truth.... Be confident, Taras, that
we will observe your testament and will never turn from the path
you indicated. Should we ever lack the strength to follow in your
path, should it ever become impossible for us to proclaim the
sacred truth without trepidation as you have done, then it would
be far better for us to remain silent and allow your great words
alone to speak the pure, unadulterated truth for all eternity.
SHEVCHENKO'S UNFORGOTTEN JOURNEY 105
An ardent admirer of Shevchenko, Kulish was also his first critic.
Several years later he warned his compatriots against the poet's "half-
drunken Muse," fearing that they would see in him only a nationalist
firebrand. Old friends, Kostomarov and Bilozersky, also spoke, as did
the representative of the Polish community. One Russian eulogy by the
poet Kurochkin was heard, and several Russian writers, notably
Leskov, left moving accounts of the funeral, testifying that the police
had stopped further speeches at the cemetery. It was feared that public
demonstrations might ensue. An obituary in Ukrainian journal
Osnova in St. Petersburg compared the dead poet's role with that of
Garibaldi. Herzen printed an obituary in his journal Kolokol in
London, and Turgenev wrote about "the great loss to the entire Little
Russian world." The echo of Shevchenko's death was very wide.
Katerina Yunge, the daughter of Shevchenko's friend Count Fedor
Tolstoy, was in Dresden at the time of the poet's death. At the requiem
mass she remembered him and remarked that it was a bitter irony that
he had not lived to hear the tsar's decree abolishing serfdom, which
occurred a week after his death.
The dead poet's close Ukrainian friends soon made an effort to have
the coffin moved to Ukraine, where Shevchenko wanted to "be buried
near the roaring Dnieper." Permission to do this was obtained in May,
and after resting for 58 days in St. Petersburg, the poet's remains were
to be taken to Ukraine. Finally, the coffin was raised, covered, in
Cossack fashion, with a piece of red cloth (kytaika) and moved along
the city streets to the railway station. Two Ukrainians, Oleksander
Lazarevsky and Hryhorii Chestakhivsky, guarded the coffin. On reach-
ing Moscow, the coffin was taken to one of the main streets, Arbat,
and placed for a while in a church. The coffin was taken from Moscow
to Ukraine by horse-drawn carriage. It passed Orel and Tula and
reached the Ukrainian border. From then on the cortege turned into a
popular demonstration. Thousands of people lined up and said their
farewells, and dozens of eulogies were spoken. There is a description
of the arrival of the cortege in Brovary, on the outskirts of Kiev:
The coffin was covered with wreaths on the carriage, driven by a
bearded coachman. The horses were walking with difficulty. One
wreath had a ribbon with a woman's writing on it: Farewell, you
dove-coloured eagle!
As soon as news of the approaching cortege reached Kiev, young
people and students came to meet it. At first the police did not allow
106 GEORGE LUCKYJ
the cortege to proceed through the streets, but later they relented. The
coffin was placed at the Church of the Nativity, far from the centre of
the city. The students unharnessed the horses and pulled the carriage
themselves through streets full of people. At street corners they recited
Shevchenko's poems. The police surrounded the church. The governor-
general forbade any speeches. In the middle of the requiem mass a
woman dressed in black placed a wreath of thorns on the poet's cof-
fin, which caused a stir. The wreath was removed by the police. There
was much discussion as to where the poet should be buried. Several
suggestions were made all choosing a place on the banks of the
Dnieper, which flows through the city. Yet finally Chestakhivsky pre-
vailed. He said that Taras had told him that he wanted to rest at Kaniv
on the Dnieper, not very far from Kiev. The coffin was transferred to a
boat where Taras's brother and sister joined the procession. The chief
of police at Kaniv ordered strict surveillance of the whole event. In
Kaniv, the local church, to which the coffin was taken was full of peas-
ants. Finally the place of burial was chosen on Chernecha Hora (The
Monk's Mountain). Students dug the grave. A sea of humanity
enveloped the scene. The grave was filled with earth, which was then
piled up on top until it made a high gravemound — the Cossack
tnohyla.
The burial of the poet had led to a spontaneous veneration of him
by all classes of the people. The custom established then was to
remember Shevchenko on each anniversary of his death, which was the
day after his birthday. This adulation, understandable as it was, gave
rise to a veritable cult of the poet, which solidified the national emo-
tion but undermined his true understanding by outsiders. The cult,
however, has survived to this day. The care of Shevchenko's grave at
Kaniv later became the task of the Ukrainian "Old Community"
(Stara Hromada) in Kiev. The memoirs of a leading activist Yevhen
Chykalenko lovingly describe the efforts "to erect an iron cross at the
tnohyla, which could be seen from the banks of the Dnieper for at least
20 kilometres." A separate house was built nearby for the caretaker of
the grave, which came to serve as a small museum. "A large park was
established on the slopes of the grave and stone steps were built lead-
ing up to the cross." Much later, in 1939, a large granite monument of
the poet at Kaniv replaced the cross. However, Shevchenko's long jour-
ney was not finished. Was he ever to be greeted by his "new and free
family"?
SHEVCHENKO'S UNFORGOTTEN JOURNEY 107
2
Spring again, and once more hopes
In the sad heart germinate.
Once more am I lulled by dreams,
Visions of a happier fate.
Lesia Ukrainka
IN THE POPULAR KIEV WEEKLY Literary Ukraine for May 11,1992,
a notice appeared on its first page announcing a new joint venture
between Ukraine and France. The aim was to make a new film about
Shevchenko as a possible French-Ukrainian co-production. A well-
known French film director, Jacques Durand, was coming soon for a
short visit to Kiev to discuss the idea with his Ukrainian counterparts.
He was to direct the film, while Ukrainian filmmaker Oksana Shepitko
was to be his collaborator and the film's producer. Academician
Makar Vovk was asked to be the academic consultant.
The brief announcement set Kiev's artistic community abuzz. Four
weeks later, with unusual speed for that part of the world, a prelimi-
nary meeting took place in the Kiev film studios among the three
people mentioned above. The host, Oksana Shepitko, introduced
Makar Vovk to the French guest who, as a former communist, had
learned Russian. The three talked in Russian, thus avoiding the neces-
sity of a translator. Jacques Durand, now in his fifties, had been to
Kiev before during the Soviet era. He loved the sprawling city, which
reminded him a little of Paris. Durand had had some dealings with the
Dovzhenko Film Studios, the pre-eminent Ukrainian filmmaking
group named after Oleksander Dovzhenko, whose name was well
known in France. The French critic Georges Sadoul called his movie
Earth "one of the 12 best films of all time." Durand was now visiting
an independent Ukraine and hoped to make a film about Taras
Shevchenko, whose biography in English he had just finished reading.
He would have to rely heavily on his Ukrainian colleagues. Oksana
Shepitko, a striking-looking brunette, was one of Ukraine's most
promising filmmakers. Her peasant origin did not prevent her from
becoming a fine artist; on the contrary, it led her art to some native tra-
ditions. She knew, as she sat there in the studio, that she would have to
108 GEORGE LUCKYJ
guide their French guest to the heart of the film's topic. But she was a
little nervous when, after the introductions, she plunged into a discus-
sion by asking Durand how much he knew about Shevchenko.
"I have just finished an English biography about him," answered
Durand. "He had a fascinating life, just the kind to make a good film.
But tell me, would it be true to say that through his poetry, some of
which I have read in French translation, he actually created Ukraine?"
Shepitko and Vovk were startled. What did he mean — "created"?
Ukraine had existed long before Shevchenko. Makar Vovk, a bearded
academician, felt that he should ask for clarification.
"What do you mean, monsieur, by asking if the poet had created
this country?"
"Please call me Jacques, and I will call you Makar and Oksana if I
may," replied Durand. "I meant: did his poetry lead to the independent
Ukraine, which you now have?"
"Yes, of course," both Makar and Oksana were quick to agree.
"Your question goes deeper than that," continued Makar. "Some
scholars believe that Shevchenko is unique in world literature for hav-
ing awakened the national consciousness of an entire people. The
British historian Seton-Watson even wrote that 'all Ukrainian nation-
alism can be traced back to Shevchenko's poetry.' This may be true,
but, unfortunately, such a one-sided interpretation of Shevchenko as a
national prophet may obscure a great deal of his poetry, which is uni-
versal rather than national." Makar paused, he did not want to lecture
Jacques on Shevchenko's poetry. In any case, he would be more con-
cerned with the poet's life.
Oksana felt compelled to intervene since the word "nationalism"
had been mentioned, and she knew that in Western Europe this word
had recently, especially after the events in Yugoslavia, acquired a neg-
ative connotation. "It would be simplistic," she said agreeing with
Makar, "to reduce Shevchenko to being a nationalist. Besides,
although he never used the word nationalism, Shevchenko defended
not only national but human rights. He never appealed to tribalism,
this lowest form of nationalism. Perhaps to some Ukrainians he is a
nationalist rabble-rouser, but this was not his true message, which he
summed up best in the word bratoliubie (love of one's fellow man)."
She also felt strongly that apart from patriotic poetry he had written
some very good lyrical poems. She remembered one stanza in its
Russian translation by Boris Pasternak and recited it for Jacques's ben-
efit. It was a meditation on destiny:
SHEVCHENKO'S UNFORGOTTEN JOURNEY 109
Where art Thou, Destiny, ah where?
My soul is stirred by none!
If Thou begrudgest me fair fate,
Lord, send a ruthless one
1
.
"This is not to disregard his role," interjected Makar, "as a politi-
cal factor. After all, the first Ukrainian political party, RUP
(Revolutionary Ukrainian Party), was formed in 1900 out of a student
group that called itself "Taras Brotherhood." Under the colonial pol-
icy of tsarist Russia he became the obvious flag-bearer for ordinary
people and intelligentsia alike. Relatively few important poems by
Shevchenko were published in his lifetime. Indeed, almost immediately
after his death the prohibition of Ukrainian publications intensified.
In 1863 the notorious "Valuev circular" even denied the existence of a
Ukrainian language. Then, in 1876, the tsar signed the so-called Ems
ukaz, which banned all Ukrainian publications in the Russian Empire,
except for collections of ethnographic material. This draconian mea-
sure was in force until 1905. After delivering his brief lecture, Makar
stopped, somewhat embarrassed that he had to stress facts so well
known to every Ukrainian. "Yes, I have read about the tsarist oppres-
sion of Ukraine," agreed Jacques. "But what was Shevchenko's fate in
the Soviet era? After all, they did not ban him."
Makar felt that a further lecture was in order. Perhaps this former
French communist imagined some kind of liberation for the poet
under the Soviet regime. He continued: "It is interesting to observe the
behaviour of Soviet forces after they conquered Ukraine in 1919. At
first the Red Army soldiers trampled Shevchenko's portraits and
banned his works. But very soon the Soviets changed their tune, not
wishing to antagonize the Ukrainian population. Shevchenko was
returned to his place of honour, but new, Marxist interpretations of
his work were advanced by the Communist Party. He was now
regarded as a son of the working people, a rebel against tsarist oppres-
sion. In the 1920s some solid Shevchenko scholarship developed in
Ukraine despite the watchful eye of the Party. But the 1930s saw the
onset of Stalinist policies, which led to the wholesale decimation of
scholars. Their deaths numbered in the hundreds. In 1934 the
Communist Party published its 'Theses' on Taras Shevchenko, declar-
ing him to be a 'revolutionary democrat,' and a realist. The poet was
reduced to a mouthpiece of the 'enserfed peasantry,' who 'showed ele-
ments of narrow-mindedness and religious superstition.' Tacitly, this
devout Christian was assumed to be a precursor of Bolshevism. At the
same time books were published that fabricated evidence purporting
110 GEORGE LUCKYJ
to show the beneficent influence on Shevchenko of Russian radical
thinkers with whom he had little in common, and some discussed
Shevchenko's 'atheism.' From that time on, until the collapse of the
Soviet Union, this perverted view of Shevchenko prevailed in Soviet
Ukraine. Only rarely did good scholarly works appear, and even then
they were written sometimes by Russian scholars and writers, like
Zaionchkovsky, who published a definitive study of the Brotherhood
of Sts. Cyril and Methodius, and by Marietta Shaginian, who discov-
ered the relationship between Shevchenko and Hanna Zakrevska.
Soviet Ukrainian editors of Shevchenko's works did not hesitate to
censor some of his poems that were unpalatable to them. Sometimes
lines about God were omitted from his Testament." Makar stopped,
feeling that he was being carried away by a subject so close to his heart.
Oksana listened silently. She felt that perhaps enough had been said
during this, their first session. She suggested, therefore, that they move
to another room where a small repast (perekuska) was being prepared
for them. Jacques and Makar did not object. Soon they once more sat
down, this time around a table full of canapes, with some wine glasses
awaiting them. There was the inevitable smoked sturgeon pate,
Ukrainian black bread, and Crimean wine. Time went by quickly in
pleasant conversation about the city of Kiev, which Jacques was anx-
ious to explore. He had recently seen an album of pictures of the 19th
century streets of Kiev and was surprised to note that many shop signs
were in French. Oksana promised to take him out to see how these
streets looked now. She reminded him that a French firm, Pathe
Brothers, opened the first shop in Kiev selling films in 1907.
Two days later a chauffeur-driven car from the film studio picked up
Jacques Durand from the Intourist Hotel on Hospital Street and
brought him to a cafe in the Podil district in Kiev. Oksana Shepitko
was already waiting for him. With her were two Ukrainian writers, one
of whom, Oleh Zymaruk, might possibly write the scenario for the
film. Jacques offered Oleh a Gaulois. Oleh, who knew some French,
asked if the name of the cigarettes was connected to the phrase esprit
gaulois and was told that it was. The group of four settled in an
uncrowded corner of the cafe. Refreshments and drinks were brought.
Jacques promised to try some Ukrainian brandy — horilka.
Conversation soon centred on the film. Jacques asked if
Shevchenko's poetry was still admired in Ukraine. Was he to view the
poet as a 19th century bard or as a poet whose tradition had lived on?
Oleh and his friend Roman both wanted to talk about it. Finally, Oleh
said that many 20th century poets emulated Shevchenko.
SHEVCHENKO'S UNFORGOTTEN JOURNEY 111
"During the Second World War," Oleh said, "the eminent film-
maker Dovzhenko wrote a scenario Ukraina v ohni (Ukraine in
Flames), which found its way into Stalin's hands. Stalin was so furious
when he read it that the film was never made. The original scenario
was inspired by Shevchenko's lines "they will wake in flames the plun-
dered Ukraine." For writing the scenario Dovzhenko was confined to
Moscow and not allowed to visit Ukraine. Then, in the early 1960s, a
talented though minor poet, Vasyl Symonenko, gained prominence
because his verse reminded readers of Shevchenko. Symonenko was
soon silenced. In his unpublished diary he wrote that Shevchenko cel-
ebrations were banned in Odessa because "it seems that someone here
is still afraid of Taras." Another Ukrainian poet, Vasyl Stus, who died
in 1985 in a concentration camp, was also compared to Shevchenko.
Shevchenko is omnipresent in Ukrainian life today.
Before Oksana could add something, Jacques asked a question:
"Was there ever a Ukrainian writer who disagreed with or criticized
Shevchenko?"
In reply he received a long answer from Roman: "The adulation of
Shevchenko was not universal. Mykola Khvylovy, the leader of the
national-communist group of writers in the 1920s, spoke through one
of his characters in the novel The Woodcocks: 'I have nothing in com-
mon with Taras Shevchenko, who castrated our intelligentsia. He
fostered the dim-witted slave-enlightener, whose name is legion.' An
even harsher condemnation of Shevchenko had come earlier from the
leader of the Ukrainian futurist poets, Mykhailo Semenko. He wrote:
'Man, I am embarrassed for you. Your Kobzar smells of wagon grease
and lard, the atmosphere you created is suffocating.' However, this
iconoclastic Semenko, who was attacking more the cult of Shevchenko
than the poet himself, later gave the name Kobzar to one of his own
collections of poems."
Sensing that Oksana wanted to say something, Jacques turned to
her asking how Ukrainian biographers regarded the main crises in the
poet's life.
She replied: "The field of biography in the Soviet era was domi-
nated by a stilted and one-dimensional portrayal of his life. The poet's
life story was almost never treated analytically. True, this story may
still appear as an example of great will power, so much accepted in the
19th century but so much disparaged today after the teaching of
Sigmund Freud. His image is that of a man driving, not driven.
Neurosis, as it is often perceived today as the actual force behind cre-
ativity, cannot be detected. Instead some people try to see a little
known relationship between the poet and the people."
112 GEORGE LUCKYJ
Jacques was interested in everything she said, for it gave him a
clearer picture of what he might do. They spent another hour talking
about Shevchenko, and Oksana promised to have another meeting
with Makar Vovk, who was anxious to provide Jacques with more
scholarly details. She explained that in many Soviet films about the
poet scholars had always watched for ideological purity and that this
habit might still be alive, even if the poet's life was now being de-
Sovietized. She thought it would be very refreshing to see Shevchenko
as a human being rather than a "friend of the working people" or a
"national bard." She was against all bardolatry. Jacques agreed with
her.
After leaving the cafe the four decided to walk along the Podil
streets. There were no shop signs in French, but those they saw were
freshly decorated. They passed the impressive Mohyla Academy,
which, Oleh explained, was the oldest Ukrainian university, dating
back to the 17th century. It was now "under new management." He
asked Jacques which buildings in Kiev he admired most and was told
that they were St. Andrew's Church and the Mariinsky Palace.
"You have good taste," said Oleh. "Both were designed by the
Italian architect Bartolomeo Rastrelli, who was born in Paris, and were
built in the 18th century under the imperial Russian regime." Jacques
asked Oksana what she was doing that night and, with some regret,
she told him that she had tickets to a comedy by Mykola Kulish, in
which a great deal depended on understanding the language. It would
be incomprehensible to Jacques. But, she said, they must one day go
together to a Ukrainian movie, which he could watch and possibly
enjoy without knowing the language.
The next session in the studio was held on Tuesday. All three,
Jacques, Oksana, and Makar, were delving further into the content
and form of the planned movie. Jacques asked how much Taras should
appear in it as the peasant that he, after all, was. Makar voiced a
strong objection: "The image of Shevchenko as a peasant," he argued,
"was encouraged in the 19th century. The Russians regarded him so.
The first Ukrainian socialist, Mykhailo Drahomanov, argued that the
poet was 'ill-educated and peasant-loving.' Nothing could be further
from the truth. To be sure, Shevchenko's behaviour with some of his
friends and his fondness, late in life, for being photographed wearing
a peasant fur hat might have given such an impression. But undeniable
also was his four-year-long education at the Academy of Fine Arts, his
wide knowledge of European literature, art, and music, and his keen
sense of world history. Shevchenko never turned his back on the peas-
SHEVCHENKO'S UNFORGOTTEN JOURNEY 113
antry, but he was not one of them. He is comparable to many Latin
American writers, who came from the people but rose to be spokesper-
sons for human rights."
Jacques continued to probe into the Ukrainian scholar's image of
the poet. Makar, who was in an expansive mood, obliged by talking
about his personal view of the poet and the way he might appear in the
film. Makar, whose wife was a musician, was always aware of what he
called the "musicality of the poet." This quality was found, first of all,
in his poetry, which has frequently been set to musical scores. His
verse, he argued, was supremely musical and this quality must be
reflected somehow in the film. The poet loved to recite his verse and
was a good singer. Makar got so excited about it that he quoted from
memory some lines from Shevchenko's lyrical follower, the poet Pavlo
Tychyna, who in 1918, during the Ukrainian revolution, wrote:
Upon a starry morning, lay you down
And place your ear upon the ground.
They come,
It seems they seek Kiev from the thorps and hamlets
Down highways and bypaths they skirt the hills.
To their hearts' pulse they beat the glad words out
They come, they come!
They come indeed!
And all like wine are laughing:
And all like wine are singing:
I am a mighty people,
I am young!
Lo, I have listened to your golden sound
And I have heard.
"This," Makar claimed, "is how Shevchenko should be perceived —
as a great lyrical poet. The populist image of the poet, which prevailed
in the 19th century, is obsolete. Shevchenko is a modern man, sensitive
to the music of the spheres."
Oksana was a little taken aback by this sudden poetic digression by
a member of the academy. She returned to her earlier argument:
"Shevchenko's self was formed by the moulding and remoulding of a
reality outside him. It implies a bond with others, primarily his own
nation. Yet one must not put a label on him — 'a peasant rebel' or a
'national poet.' One must perceive a real person. Even his 'political'
poems are not the cogitations of an intellectual, but, rather, they artic-
ulate popular beliefs and aspirations." She pointed out the fact that
114 GEORGE LUCKY J
even the Soviets failed to divest Shevchenko of his authority among his
people. Instead they tried to appropriate and reinterpret him accord-
ing to their wishes. "Shevchenko," she concluded, "must appear in the
film as both man and a poet. He compared himself to Robert Burns,
and some scholars have likened him to William Blake." Jacques lis-
tened patiently. After all, he was here to learn. He asked about the
women in Shevchenko's life. They would reflect, best of all, his human-
ity. Jacques had read about the "affairs" the poet had had with
Princess Repnina and with Hanna Zakrevska. He also knew about his
later, unsuccessful attempts to get married. What should he make of
all this?
Makar pointed out that the poet was not in love with Repnina, who
adored him, and that his relationship with Hanna Zakrevska was most
likely platonic. This would show a certain restraint and self-discipline
in a young man who was very susceptible to feminine beauty. He
reminded Jacques that love affairs in the middle of the 19th century
were carried on in a different style. Important, too, were Shevchenko's
strong, close bonds with many male friends, without today's connota-
tions.
Jacques listened to this and smiled. No, he was not interested in
"modernizing" Shevchenko's life to that extent. Makar tried to focus
interest on two of Shevchenko's important friends — Kulish and
Kostomarov. Both, especially Kulish, might be used in the film as foils
to Shevchenko. Incidentally, it was not Shevchenko's prophecy about a
free Ukraine that came true: the country was not liberated after a
bloody revolution with "the sprinkling of foemen's blood." Kulish's
prophecy, on the other hand, was fulfilled: the walls of Jericho came
tumbling down.
What he would aim for, said Jacques, was to re-create the spirit of
the 19th century but also the intense human drama of Shevchenko's
life, which transcends time. He was quite fascinated by the life story
itself and, on the screen, would let it speak for itself. And he was very
grateful to Makar and Oksana for their help. He also expressed a
desire to visit some of the places in Kiev where Shevchenko had lived.
At 11 o'clock on May 22, the trio met to visit Shevchenko's Kiev. It
was Friday, an ordinary working day for those who were still working.
The streets were crowded and the place had a very different look than
it had had in 1846 when Shevchenko described it as a "city of golden
domes crowned with orchards and poplar trees." The golden domes
and poplars were still there but no orchards. They started their tour at
Kozine boloto (The Goat's Mud) in the downtown area, where in 1846
Shevchenko had shared quarters with Mykhailo Sazhyn. The house,
SHEVCHENKO'S UNFORGOTTEN JOURNEY 115
now at No.Sa, Shevchenko Lane, was still standing. It had been con-
verted into a museum where they could see the poet's clothes, his
paint-brushes and pencils, as well as some old furniture. On the walls
were reproductions of his sketches of Kiev. Makar explained that one
of the sketches was of the Vydubytsky Monastery, where Shevchenko
had taken his friends for walks. The monastery was abolished on
orders of the Soviet authorities in 1937.
From there they walked to the corner of Khreshchatyk and
Bessarabka, where Shevchenko had lived in the house of the architect
Beretti. The house was no longer there, but the house opposite, where
Mykola Kostomarov lived with his mother, was still standing.
Shevchenko and Kostomarov often met there. As Makar explained it
was there that Kostomarov wrote his first impressions of Shevchenko's
poetry: "it tore the curtain of life." Khreshchatyk, Kiev's Champs
Elysee, was teeming with people. Even during working hours, but
more so in the evening, this street was a favourite place for what
Kievans called "strolling" (huliannia). Now the three Shevchenko
devotees were proceeding along Khreshchatyk in the direction of
Shevchenko Boulevard. It was famous for the chestnuts blossoming in
May. Oksana observed that, unfortunately, chestnut blossoms have no
fragrance.
They were well along the wide boulevard when they suddenly saw a
large group of young people, probably students, marching along, car-
rying a portrait of Shevchenko. They were heading towards the corner
of Shevchenko Boulevard and Volodymyrska Street, past the Hotel
Ukraina. Something was going on. At that moment Makar remem-
bered that it was May 22, the anniversary of the funeral of Shevchenko
in Kaniv, a day celebrated by many people. Oksana recalled that on a
similar occasion in 1964, when she was a teenager, police had dis-
persed the young demonstrators on the very spot where, in front of the
Shevchenko monument across from the university, they were gathering
for their celebration. She said that at that time a Canadian scholar was
visiting her father in Kiev, saw the police action, and two days later, on
May 24, witnessed a fire, allegedly set by the KGB, at the Library of
the Academy of Sciences, which adjoins the university. The Canadian
later reported it to the New York Times. On this particular day the
three looked on as the demonstrators, unhampered, strode up the
street. More people were joining them. Oksana could read some of the
placards they carried. One was a quotation from Shevchenko: Then
shall our day of hope arrive / Ukrainian glory will revive. These lines,
written almost a century and a half ago, now had a new meaning.
Taras's monument was covered with flowers. No one interfered with
116 GEORGE LUCKYJ
Figure 11: Shevchenko Monument at Kaniv (1939)
SHEVCHENKO'S UNFORGOTTEN JOURNEY 117
this outpouring of emotion. Although this was not a revolution, it was
the celebration of a collapse. There were fiery speeches and proclama-
tions. At the end, people with tears in their eyes sang the Testament.
Was this extreme emotionalism a demonstration of a national char-
acteristic, or was it just a special sentiment reserved for one man? It
was hard to say. Shevchenko's work, after all, is full of emotion. But
could it be that his message, in that particular form, was now spent,
that an independent Ukraine required something else? After centuries
of deprivation was Ukraine ready to shed the self-contempt and sub-
mission it acquired during her colonial past? These were Oksana's
thoughts as the three were swept into a public euphoria. Someone once
wrote, she remembered, that "the greatest test of Shevchenko's poetry
will come if and when Ukraine becomes a sovereign nation." Will his
image still be as vibrant once foreign domination has ended?
Even Jacques was affected by this outpouring of emotion. He asked
Oksana and Makar if this scene they had just witnessed would be
shown on TV that night and they said it would.
Makar was in a mood to offer more comment on the demonstration
and its relevance to the present moment. He hoped that in the age that
had just dawned in Ukraine the human aspects of Shevchenko would
speak to people more eloquently than the old mythic image. Even this
myth would have to be studied from a fresh perspective. To read him
now is not so much to relive the struggle for justice and liberty as to
find the strength to reflect on the meaning of life. And not just life in
Ukraine but among the human family.
Soon, the first exploratory visit of Jacques Durand in Ukraine
would come to an end. Before he left he wanted to visit Shevchenko's
grave at Kaniv. It would offer an opportunity to see more of the coun-
try. The three friends, for by now they could be called that, took a boat
on the Dnieper and in a few hours reached Kaniv. On the way they saw
much industrial waste as well as some lovely scenery. Slowly, Jacques,
Oksana, and Makar climbed the rather steep incline of the Shevchenko
Monument. A group of visitors to Shevchenko's grave stood around a
kobzar, who was sitting down, playing a bandura. The day was grey
and the mood of the people was sombre but not unhappy. They had
come here from all over Ukraine and from abroad. From the steps to
the monument they could see the mighty Dnieper and the neighbour-
ing green hills. A light breeze stirred the tops of the poplars. The sky
was overcast. The place had a certain aura of its own.
Oksana was fighting back tears. Jacques, too, was deep in thought.
Ukrainians, he realized, felt passionately about their poet. If he ever
made the film, he would have to put some distance between them and
118 GEORGE LUCKYJ