Part 4

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_CHAPTER THREE_

THE POETRY OF SHEVCHENKO