Taras Hryhorovych Shevchenko

Taras Hryhorovych Schevchenko was born on March 9 [O.S. February 25] 1814, the village of Moryntsi, Kiev Governorate (now Cherkasy Oblast, Ukraine). He died on March 10 [O.S. February 26] 1861, Saint Petersburg. He was a Ukrainian poet, novelist, artist, ethnographer. Since 1860 he was also an Academician in the Russian Imperial Academy of Art.

Shevchenko’s literary heritage, in which poetry plays a central role, in particular the collection of “Kobzar” in the Ukrainian language, is considered the basis of Ukrainian literature as well as, in many respects, of the modern literary Ukrainian language.

Most of Shevchenko’s prose (novels, a diary, many writings), as well as some of the poems, are written in Russian, and so many scholars refer Shevchenko’s work to Russian literature in addition to the Ukrainian one.

Born in the village of Morintsi in the Zvenigorod District of Kiev Governorate, he was orphaned at the age of 11. He was taught to read by a village precentor. Taras would draw at every opportunity.

Shevchenko went with the aristocrat lord Engelhardt to Vilna and then to Saint Petersburg.

During his stay in Vilna, having noticed Taras’s abilities, Engelhardt apprenticed Shevchenko to the teacher Jan Rustem, then in Saint Petersburg to Vasiliy Shiriaev for four years. There he met the Ukrainian artist Ivan Soshenko, who introduced him to other compatriots such as Yevhen Hrebinka and Vasyl Hryhorovych, and to the painter Alexey Venetsianov. Through these men Shevchenko also met the famous painter and professor Karl Briullov, who donated his portrait of the Russian poet Vasily Zhukovsky as a lottery prize, whose proceeds were used to buy Shevchenko’s freedom on May 5, 1838. In the same year Shevchenko was accepted as a student into the Academy of Arts, where he became an apprentice of Karl Briullov. The next year he became a resident student at the Association for the Encouragement of Artists. At the annual examinations at the Imperial Academy of Arts, Shevchenko was given a Silver Medal for a landscape. In 1840 he received the Silver Medal again, this time for his first oil painting, “The Beggar Boy Giving Bread to a Dog”. He began writing poetry while he was a serf and in 1840 his first collection of poetry, “Kobzar”, was published. Ivan Franko, a representative of Ukrainian poetry in the generation after Shevchenko, formulated his opinion in the following way: “[Kobzar] immediately revealed, as it were, a new world of poetry. It burst forth like a spring of clear, cold water, and sparkled with a clarity, breadth and elegance of artistic expression not previously known in Ukrainian writing”.

In 1841, the epic poem “Haidamaky” was released. In September 1841, Shevchenko was awarded with his third Silver Medal for “The Gypsy Fortune Teller”. Shevchenko also wrote plays. In 1842, he released the tragedy “Mykyta Hayday” and in 1843 he completed the drama “Nazar Stodolya”. While residing in Saint Petersburg, Shevchenko made three trips to the regions of modern Ukraine, in 1843, 1845, and 1846. The difficult conditions under which his countrymen lived had a profound impact on the poet-painter. Shevchenko visited his still enserfed siblings and other relatives, met with prominent Ukrainian writers and intellectuals such as Yevhen Hrebinka, Panteleimon Kulish, and Mykhaylo Maksymovych, and was befriended by the princely Repnin family especially Varvara Repnina.

In 1844, distressed by the condition of Ukrainian regions in the Russian Empire, Shevchenko decided to capture some of his homeland’s historical ruins and cultural monuments in an album of etchings (engravings) with the image, which he called “Picturesque Ukraine”.
On March 22, 1845, the Council of the Academy of Arts granted Shevchenko the title of an artist. He travelled to Ukraine again where he met the historian Nikolay Kostomarov and other members of the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius, a Pan-Slavist political society dedicated to the political liberalization of the Empire and its transformation into a federation-like polity of Slavic nations. Upon the society’s suppression by the authorities, Shevchenko was arrested along with other members on April 5, 1847. Although he probably was not an official member of the Brotherhood, during the search his poem “The Dream” was found. This poem criticized imperial rule, personally attacked Emperor Nicholas I and his wife Alexandra Feodorovna, and therefore was considered extremely inflammatory, and of all the members of the dismantled society Shevchenko was punished most severely. Shevchenko was sent to prison in Saint Petersburg. He was exiled as a private with the Russian military Orenburg garrison at Orsk, near Orenburg, near the Ural Mountains. Tsar Nicholas I, confirming his sentence, added to it, “Under the strictest surveillance, without the right to write or paint.” With the exception of some short periods of his exile, the enforcement of the Tsar’s ban on his creative work was lax. The poet produced several drawings, sketches and writings while serving and traveling on assignment in the Ural regions and areas of modern Kazakhstan. But it was not until 1857 that Shevchenko finally returned from the exile after receiving a pardon, though he was not permitted to return to St. Petersburg and was ordered to Nizhniy Novgorod. In May 1859 Shevchenko got permission to move to his native Ukraine. He intended to buy a plot of land not far from the village of Pekariv and settle in Ukraine. In July, he was arrested on a charge of blasphemy, but was released and ordered to return to St. Petersburg.

Taras Shevchenko spent the last years of his life working on new poetry, paintings, and engravings, as well as editing his older works. But after the difficult years in exile his illness deprived him of too much energy. Shevchenko died in Saint Petersburg on March 10, 1861, the day after his 47th birthday. He was first buried at the Smolensk Cemetery in Saint Petersburg. However, fulfilling Shevchenko’s wish to be buried in Ukraine, expressed in his poem “Testament”, his friends arranged to transfer his remains to Moscow by train and then by horse-drawn wagon to his native land. Shevchenko’s remains were buried on May 8 on Chernecha Hill (now Shevchenko Hill) by Kaniv. Dogged by terrible misfortune in love and life, the poet died seven days before the Emancipation of Serfs was announced. His works and life are revered by the Ukrainians and his impact on Ukrainian literature is immense. Taras Shevchenko has a unique place in Ukrainian cultural history and in world literature. His writings formed the foundation for the modern Ukrainian literature to a degree that he is also considered the founder of the modern written Ukrainian language (although Ivan Kotlyarevsky pioneered the literary work in what was close to the modern Ukrainian in the end of the eighteenth century). Shevchenko’s poetry contributed greatly to the growth of Ukrainian national consciousness, and his influence on various facets of Ukrainian intellectual, literary, and national life is felt to this day. Influenced by Romanticism, Shevchenko managed to find his own manner of poetic expression that encompassed themes and ideas relevant to Ukraine and his personal vision of its past and future.

In view of his literary importance, the impact of his artistic work is often missed, although his contemporaries valued his artistic work no less, or perhaps even more, than his literary work. A great number of his pictures, drawings and etchings preserved to this day, testify to his unique artistic talent. He also experimented with photography and it is little known that Shevchenko may be considered to have pioneered the art of etching in the Russian Empire (in 1860 he was awarded the title of Academician in the Imperial Academy of Arts specifically for his achievements in etching.)

His influence on Ukrainian culture was so immense, that even during the Soviet times, the official position was to downplay strong Ukrainian nationalism expressed in his poetry, suppressing any mention of it, and to put an emphasis on the social and anti-Tsarist aspects of his legacy, the Class struggle within the Russian Empire. Shevchenko, who was born a serf himself and suffered tremendously for his political views in opposition to the established order of the Empire, was presented in the Soviet times as an internationalist who rebelled against the plight of the poor classes exploited by the reactionary political regime rather than a vocal proponent of the Ukrainian national idea.

This view is significantly revised in modern independent Ukraine, where he is now viewed as almost an iconic figure with unmatched significance for the Ukrainian nation, a view that has been mostly shared all along by the Ukrainian diaspora that has always respected Shevchenko.

There are many monuments to Shevchenko throughout Ukraine, most notably at his memorial in Kaniv and in the center of Kiev, just opposite the Kiev University that bears his name. The Kiev Metro station, Tarasa Shevchenka, is also dedicated to Shevchenko. Among other notable monuments to the poet located throughout Ukraine are the ones in Kharkiv (in front of the Shevchenko Park), Lviv, Luhansk and many others.

Outside of Ukraine, monuments to Shevchenko have been put up in several location of the former USSR associated with his legacy, both in the Soviet and the post-Soviet times. The modern monument in Saint Petersburg was erected on December 22, 2000, but the first (pictured) monument was built in the city in 1918 on the order of Lenin shortly after the Great Russian Revolution. There is also a monument located next to the Shevchenko museum at the square that bears the poet’s name in Orsk, Russia (the location of the military garrison where the poet served) where there is also a street, a library and the Pedagogical Institute named after the poet. There are Shevchenko monuments and museums in the cities of Kazakhstan where he was later transferred by the military: Aqtau (the city was named Shevchenko between 1964 and 1992) and nearby Fort Shevchenko (renamed from Fort Alexandrovsky in 1939).

After Ukraine gained its independence in the wake of the 1991 Soviet Collapse, some Ukrainian cities replaced their statues of Lenin with statues of Taras Shevchenko and in some locations that lacked streets named to him, local authorities renamed the streets or squares. Outside of Ukraine and the former USSR, monuments to Shevchenko have been put up in many countries, usually under the initiative of local Ukrainian diasporas. There are several memorial societies and monuments to him in Canada and the United States, most notably the monument in Washington, D.C., near Dupont Circle. There is also a monument in Soyuzivka in New York State, Tipperary Hill in Syracuse, New York, a park is named after him in Elmira Heights, N.Y. and a street is named after him in New York City’s East Village.

The town of Vita in Manitoba, Canada, the town of his short biography, was originally named Shevchenko in his honor. There is a Shevchenko Square in Paris located in the heart of the central Saint-Germain-des-Prés district. The Leo Mol sculpture garden in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, contains many images of Taras Shevchenko.

A two-tonne bronze statue of Shevchenko, located in a memorial park outside Oakville, Ontario was stolen in December 2006. It was taken for scrap metal; the head was recovered in a damaged state, but the statue was not repairable.
In 2001, the Ukrainian society “Prosvita” raised the initiative of building a Church near the Chernecha Mount in Kaniv, where Taras Shevchenko was buried. The initiative got a rather supportive response in the society. Since than many charity events have been held all over the country to gather donations for the above purpose. A marathon under the slogan “Let’s Build a Church for the Kobzar” by the First National Radio Channel of Ukraine collected 39,000 hryvnias (about US $7,500) in October 2003.