Part 5

In estimating the greatness of the poetry of Shevchenko, we can never forget that he must be judged in two different spheres and on two different planes. He is first and foremost the poet of Ukraine, and his poems breathe the secret longings of every Ukrainian heart. He is the spokesman of his people and from his lips we hear in all their clarity and intensity the prayers, the hopes, the disappointments of the Ukrainians. No one of the other Ukrainian poets has equalled him in the understanding of his fellow countrymen and his people have accorded him the highest praise and honor that they can bestow upon a man.

At the same time, his sympathy and compassion range far beyond the boundaries of his own people and here he becomes a world poet, able to stand comparison with such writers as Pushkin and Mickiewicz, the great masters of Russian and Polish verse at their periods of greatest excellence. Far more even than they he expressed the sufferings of humanity, the evil of injustice and of wrong, the need and the inevitability of the triumph of right, of kindness, and of brotherly love. His poems in this sphere have a message for all humanity and are an appeal for a better, a truer, a more decent life for all men and women everywhere.

It is one of the mysteries of genius how the poor serf was able to develop into the magnificent poet that he was to become in after years, despite the blows that fate hurled upon him, of poverty, of suffering, of imprisonment and of ill health. Yet there is no royal road to genius and there is no predicting where or when a genius will be born. The world can only note it and give due acclaim to the man who is thus favored or cursed by fortune.

Let us look a little more closely at the work of Shevchenko in the national sphere. For centuries the free Kozaks had been holding up to view the principles of a free life and a free political organization on the steppes of eastern Europe. They had paid for their liberty with their blood. They had fought a losing fight, for disunity and factionalism had destroyed them even at the moments when they seemed the nearest to success and victory. Social classes had made an appearance among them. The Kozak officers had tended to turn themselves into nobles and to seek from outside powers the ratification of their claims. They paid the price for their ambitions and with them the people who might have stood out as a strong and self-contained band were thrown into serfdom. It was a long, slow process and with unfailing psychological truth Shevchenko put his finger unerringly upon the defects of the Kozak system. He traced the downfall of his country through the ages. He pictured it in its ruin and he never lost hope that someway, somehow it would rise again. He was not a soldier at heart. He was not a conspirator. He was not interested in the secret passwords, the underground existence, the spiritual isolation and discipline that must become the dominating features of the life of every revolutionist. In childhood he had learned why the Koliishchina had failed. As a kindly, loving soul, he could not excuse the ferocity of that movement which he painted so vividly. He had seen the failure of the Decembrist movement in Russia and of the Polish revolt in 1831 and he understood the lessons. Yet he did not waver in his belief. He did not express himself as to the manner in which Ukraine would become free. He was not a political theorist and did not speculate on the form of government which would then come. He was too cultured, too modern to believe that the old Kozak system could return, that the Hetmans could be reestablished and recover their power. But never for a moment did he give up his feeling of loyalty to his mother-country. Never for an instant did he mitigate or reduce her claims to independence. Full friendship and trust in the Moskals could only come when Moscow was ready to greet Ukraine as a brother with all the rights and obligations that that meant.

At the same time that he avoided political revolution, Shevchenko was a bold and defiant revolutionist in the ideal sense of the word. He was not satisfied with a revolution which would remove the tsars whom he hated and put other men in power with the same privileges. To him the goal of human life was freedom, brotherhood, democracy. He wanted a society which would not injure the unfortunate and the downtrodden, which would not be composed of hypocritical Pharisees and snobbish and ambitious and conceited rulers and wealthy roués, no matter what terms they applied to themselves.

It is here that Shevchenko far transcended Ukraine and her problems. Wherever there was a suffering soul, an oppressed woman or child, an enslaved man, the message of Shevchenko demanded unflinchingly that evil must be wiped out, that need and want and fear must be eliminated from the earth, and that greed and lust must be annihilated. In holding up these goals which are independent of and above national existence, which are in the realm of religion and of ethics, Shevchenko has a message for the entire world. His works are far more modern in their direct and simple speech than are those of most of his contemporaries. They cannot grow old or fade until those great ideals which we to-day call by the name of democracy and for which the world is fighting, are fully brought to reality. They are the dominant factors in man’s struggle to achieve civilization and on man’s success in obtaining them depends the future of peace and prosperity.

Yet we would be very wrong to think that Shevchenko acquired his point of view only from his own meditations and ideas. The picture that is often drawn of him as a mere serf who somehow or other appeared in literature is far from the mark. Of course he had no formal education--but that was true of many of the scholars and gentlemen of the early nineteenth century. We often say of them that they acquired their knowledge and outlook on life through constant association with the outstanding men of a previous generation. This is obviously untrue of Shevchenko who was born a serf and passed his childhood under the harsh conditions of life in a poor Ukraine village, where he could only secure an education from the ignorant and inefficient clerks and chanters of the various village churches and they were hardly the proper instructors for a young and ambitious man. Yet somehow or other Taras Shevchenko acquired a real education which enabled him to meet on an equality many of the most distinguished men of his time, he won a real insight into the psychology of his people, and he mastered their language as no one else has ever done. There is needed far more study than has hitherto been undertaken as to the way in which he acquired knowledge and trained himself for his great work.

We can only dimly trace in broad outlines the process of his development. From his earliest boyhood he had ambitions to become an artist and his first teachers were the local ikon painters. From them he seems to have learned little except to read and sing the psalms, but he was so expert in this that his first master used to send him out to officiate at peasant funerals, when the master was too drunk to attend them himself. Of painting he could learn only how to draw and color the general types of saints that were to be found in the local ikonostases and the sketchy outlines of the details of hagiography and printing that were included in the cheap handbooks that served the rural workmen as patterns--and we must remember that at this period the art of ikon painting as an art was sadly on the decline. He also absorbed from his grandfather the latter’s memories of the Koliishchina and from the village a knowledge of the folksongs and of the dances and other traditional elements of the village culture. He had certainly read Skovoroda, Kotlyarevsky, and the other early masters of Ukrainian literature.

All this represented the full range of his possibilities until he appeared at the Engelhardt manorhouse and was taken with the young master to Wilno and Warsaw. He had not only picked up by this time a knowledge of the Church Slavonic but he had also a general acquaintance with both Russian and Polish and he probably used every opportunity to read what books were in the manorhouse exactly as he feasted his eyes upon the works of art that were there. Yet we must not lay too much stress upon this possibility, for in those days books were often more neglected than cherished and there were many great nobles whose libraries contained fewer books than windows.

Shevchenko’s opposition to serfdom and his irritation at being dragged from his homeland may have colored his own reminiscences as to the opportunities that he had for acquiring a knowledge of the cultures of the oppressors of his country. At the time he was far more interested in painting than he was in writing, and we are better able to trace the influences exerted upon his art than those upon his poetry. Yet his stay in Wilno was undoubtedly an important factor in his development.

At this time Wilno was the cultural centre of the movement for the liberation of Poland. Around the restored university there had gathered a group of talented young men who were ardent Polish patriots. Among them was Adam Mickiewicz who had been arrested and removed to Russia in 1824, just six years before the young serf arrived in the city. It was possible for him to be affected by the growing preparations for the Polish revolt of 1831 and his friendship with Dunia Haszowska undoubtedly did much to increase his already strong Ukrainian feelings. At the same time from her and from his teacher, Franciszek Lampa, he could hardly fail to become acquainted with the newer works of Polish literature and with the beginnings of the Romantic movement which was basing itself upon the newer German and English developments. He was probably already aware of the ideas of Schiller and Byron, before he went to St. Petersburg and there he was again subjected to the same type of influences in their Russian form.

During his work with Shirayev, he probably had little time to continue this self-education, although it is always hard to say exactly what he was reading or what opportunities the poor serf had to study. At all events with his meeting with Bryulov and his subsequent emancipation, he was brought definitely into contact with men who were familiar with Europe and who had known personally most of the great writers of the day in all the European literatures. Many of their works had appeared in poor and often anonymous Russian translations. Even translations of the stories of Washington Irving were appearing and an ambitious and intellectually eager young man, even with his limited opportunities, was able to assimilate a great deal of literary knowledge. Up to the present time there are no exhaustive studies of this type of Russian publications, for we can hardly call some of these translations by the proud name of literature. Many of the students of Shevchenko have sought to confine the influences upon him to Polish and Russian. In a sense this is true, for Shevchenko gives no sign of learning more than a few words in any non-Slavonic language, but it is equally false to neglect the possibility that the young man got to know the masterpieces of the world through such defective sources. Besides this, he was in touch with Zhukovsky, who was the outstanding student of European literature in Russia at the day and the foremost translator. The poet was a friend of Bryulov and it is not fantastic to suggest that the years of his stay in St. Petersburg both before and after his emancipation were used to good advantage to give him a knowledge of literature as well as of painting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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