TARAS SHEVCHENKO: UNDYING GLORY

The farther we are carried by time from the epoch in which Taras Shevchenko lived and created, the brighter and more understandable his genius and grandeur as a personality, a poet and fighter.

Few other people have suffered as much as he did or have been able, under similar circumstances, to remain as answervingly faithful to their ideals, as tender and pure of soul and kind of heart.

Shevenko's was a tragic fate. Of the 47 years of his life, the poet spent 24 as a serf, 10 in exile and the rest under police supervision. As so many other advanced personalities of that period, he was tortured to death by czarism, by means of prison, exile and ruthless persecution.

Shevchenko's talent was multisided. He was a very sensitive lyricist, wrote immortal lyrical-epic and epic poems, plays and stories and was a gifted artist.

His literary heritage consists of a number of works in verse, several plays, nine stories and a diary.

His Kobzar, published for the first time in 1840, brought Shevchenko worldwide acclaim.

The poet's word played a decisive role in awakening his people's conscience and in the development of entire Ukrainian culture.

It was to poetry that Shevchenko gave his ever flaming ardor of a revolutionary and a fighter.

However, his first passion was the fine arts which lent some warmth to his orphan's childhood and sad youth. His heart remained drawn to the fine arts even in the years of poetic maturity and fame, which came his way so quickly. His love of the fine arts warmed and fortified his spirit in the gloomy years of exile. When already a very sick person, Shevchenko tirelessly worked in the graphic arts and, half a year before his death, was crowned with the laurels of an academician.

Shevchenko was an expert in the theater and an excellent musician. He was a herder when he was a small boy and found himself captivated by the sad tunes of the sopilka (fife). It was also at that period that he learned to recognize different birds from the way they whistled and sang somewhere in a wheat field or grove. These vivid memories of childhood, this memorized lively rhythm of the tongue of birds, beasts and the elements bestowed Shevchenko with his singularly charming verse, for true poetry is never artificial but sounds and affects one as Mother Nature herself.

April 22, 1838, was a very memorable date in his life. On that day, his landlord and feudalist, Baron Engelhardt, gave Shevchenko a certificate of freedom from serfdom, in exchange for a large sum of money. This money had been raised by his friends in a very special way. Professor Bryullov of St. Petersburg Academy of Arts had made a portrait of the distinguished Russian poet Zhukovsky. The canvas had then been raffled off. The proceeds - 2,500 rubles - had been handed over to the baron. As a free man, Shevchenko didn't break contact with the toiling masses. Until his dying day he was a true son of the Ukrainian people and, at the same time, a sincere friend of the working people of all nations and nationalities.

On his travels in the Ukraine, Shevchenko more than once witnessed the horrible scenes of landlords' arbitrariness and hotly protested against this evil, both with his pen and word of mouth.

Wherever and whenever he could, Shevehenko had an audience of people around him - at the bazaar, in a tavern, near the church or, if the workday was over, at someone's home. Each time, his impassioned words cleared and stirred the befogged minds of the masses, directed them along the road of struggle for liberation. He took each such opportunity to read his revolutionary poems, tell salty antiserfdom anecdotes and parables, recollect the country's heroic past, the people's struggle against the Polish magnates.

"The forces of the people are uncountable," said the poet-revolutionary. "They must be consolidated and then used at once to fight czarist autocracy and serfdom. Only thus can we win freedom and build a new, happy life."

"Artist Shevchenko, for writing revolting and extremely insolent poems.... shall be sent as a private to the Detached Orenburg Corps (Middle Asia - Ed.) .... authorities shall be notified to exercise the strictest possible control over him, least he should find a way of sending forth his revolting and pasquil writings," read the draft resolution of the chief, of the Gendarmerie Corps, submitted for approval to the czar. Obviously not fully satisfied by the text, Nicholas I added in his own hand, "To be placed under strictest surveillance; forbidden to write and to paint."

And so Shevchenko was made a private of the Imperial Army. The term of service was not specified, which actually made it a life sentence. The place of service was a desert in a wild outlying province of the Russian Empire. But worst of all, a man born to create was forbidden to do so!

Being a soldier at that period was much worse than prison. Nowhere else was an individual oppressed and humiliated as hard as in the barracks; nowhere else human torture flourished as much as in that army.

The poet's spirit, however, proved insuperable. Despite the royal forbiddance, Shevchenko wrote inimitable verse in the harsh years of exile and army drilling. It was filled with great revolutionary strength and undying courage. He wrote under inquest, locked in a damp barracks, behind the fortified walls of Orsk, in the sun scorched Middle Asian steppe, on a deserted shore of the Caspian Sea, in the remote fortress of Novopetrovsk. The Kobzar wrote his moving verse in a small notebook which he had made himself and kept in the leg of his boot.

His friends spent a long time soliciting in high places, trying to save the poet. Eventually, the government allowed Shevchenko to return from exile.

Outwardly, the Ukrainian poet had changed quite conspicuously, looking much older than his age. But in his diary he wrote, "It seems to me that I'm exactly the same as I was ten years ago. Not a single feature in my inner countenance has changed."

On the very day of his arrival in St. Petersburg, Shevchenko paid a visit to the family of Feodor Tolstoi, Vice President of the Academy of Arts. He wanted to thank these people who had done so much to set him free. There, he met and made friends with the prominent British dramatic actor Ira Aldridge, a black American by birth, who had come to the Russian capital on a theatrical tour.

What made them close one to the other was their likeness in destiny and the deep-going interpretation of Shakespeare. Both loathed slavery and the whole system which divided people into the oppressors and the downtrodden. Both had suffered from the oppression that for centuries had been the lot of their people. Both had fearlessly embarked upon the thorny and winding road of life and had traveled long enough to reach their goals. Both were true masters of their vocations. Shevchenko understood Aldridge's stage personages better than anyone else and wouldn't miss any of his performances.

Aldridge frequented Shevchenko's home and the poet made his portrait. It turned out one of his most attractive canvases. The painted image looked exactly like the living prototype - clever, readily changeable, with an amused and even playful air, as though about to start dancing this very instant.

They sometimes met without the interpreter and found that they didn't need to speak, and when they spoke they understood each other. They read their favorite literary works in their mother tongues and sang their native songs. Then their souls met and embraced one another, their hearts beating in unison.

No, exile hadn't changed Shevchenko's spirit. His heart remained tenderly responsive to the grief of others, to the suffering of the oppressed and humiliated. Unfortunately, his health was not the same. Under mined by soldiering and hard climatic conditions, it gave way tragically early.

Still, the poet's physical death left untouched his literary life. Simple mortals are, in fact, remembered by two basic dates birth and death. Great personalities have only one date - birth. Shevchenko performed a Promethean feat, was meted out a Promethean punishment, and followed in the Titan's footsteps of immortality.

The genius of Shevchenko is the greatest accomplishment of Ukrainian culture. The poet laid the foundation of a new Ukrainian literature and the national literary language. His creations acquired worldwide importance.

His legacy is permeated with noble patriotism. His love for his Motherland showed, first of all, in his desire for a revolution to overthrow the feudal order, czarist autocracy, and to build a new life, based on the power of the people. Shevchenko's was the patriotism of a revolutionary. To him the happiness and freedom of his Motherland were in the happiness and freedom of the working people.

He was alien to any national narrow-mindedness. He fought for all humanity to live in one free family and called on all the nations of czarist Russia to unite for struggle against their oppressors.

He sired a revolutionary democratic trend in Ukrainian literature and was the first truly national poet whose works reflected, in all entirety, the moods and ideas of the toiling masses, their age-old dream about liberation.

The Kobzar's forerunners in Ukrainian literature criticized separate contemporary social phenomena, such as the landlord's humiliation of his peasants, the corruptness of officials, etc. In contrast, Shevchenko came out as a severe judge of the whole autocratic-feudal system, as an irreconcilable enemy of landlords and czarism. In his works, he portrayed a new positive hero, a fighter against the autocratic-landlord order, for happiness for the people.

Bent under the weight of social and national oppression which hung like a heavy dark cloud over him and his nation, Shevchenko sometimes suffered a spell of deep gloom. At times, this mood was unbearable and he let out a cry of despair. Yet, the leitmotif of his creations - his belief in his people and their ultimate victory, his love for life and for the working man - survived and prevailed.

People, nature, life and work were for Shevchenko an inexhaustible source of beauty. He was amongst the first in world literature to deeply feel the poetry of man's work and its beneficial effect on human beings in general.

The poet regarded work as a criterion of human dignity and morality. By his work, an individual asserts himself in others' eyes.

However, under serfdom and feudal rule, the attitude of the common folk to work as a source of joy is constantly defiled. In an exploiter society, the creative inspiration and beauty of man's work become hopelessly contradictory to man's status in that society. Shevchenko was very conscious of this divarication between physical exertion and beauty.

"Its very people witless grew
As dumbly to the fields they go
To do forced labor for their lord,
Babies at back, a hungry horde......

The poet raised his wrathful voice in accusation of the whole system of exploitation of man by man, because this system deformed the very foundation of human existence - work - and made it senseless, turning it into inhuman servitude.

Shevchenko convinced his readers that their Motherland could not be free and happy so long as it was a common occurrence that " wicked lords have forced the folk / To an intolerable yoke."

He was convinced that the liberation of the toiling masses was to be social in the first place. In other words, a working man had to free himself from the feudal yoke. Then the Ukraine would flourish, there would be "big villages" and there would be "happy folk" in those "happy villages" - but only on one condition: there should be "no trace left of landlords in the Ukraine."

Shevchenko revealed the hereditary exploiter nature of the Cossack starshyna - the brass hats, hetmans and other chiefs - and their successors - Ukrainian landowners, then commonly known as the "Small Russian gentry." They were one gang of robbers. The poet reminded the Ukrainian landlord that his fortune had been looted by his grandfather. He called landlords "false patriots" who were "prompt, to flay/ The hide off lowly peasant brothers" and "forced the folk/ To an intolerable yoke."

He gave his readers examples from the historic past, recalled most spectacular events of the people's liberation struggle, instilling in them true patriotism and a selfless desire to serve their nation. The idea of the Motherland, the idea of its liberation was constantly in the focus of his creative endeavors. He was the first in Ukrainian literature to speak out loud about the grandeur and splendor of the people's love for their native land as a symbol of their love for freedom. The images of mother and Motherland were sacred notions and he saw them as a single most precious whole.

Ardently in love with his people as he was, Shevchenko never conducted his patriotic activities to the detriment of other nations. What was more, his patriotism included a feeling of deep respect for the fraternal Slavic peoples. He sincerely wished his nation to live in friendship and unity with them. The exploiter ruling classes are the only ones interested in kindling the flames of national animosity, stressed Shevchenko, since it is on this discord that they build their prosperity and supremacy.

Akakiy Tsereteli, a prominent Georgian poet, was a student when he met with Shevchenko in St. Petersburg in 1859. "That was my first and last meeting with him" he recollected later, "and it has remained one of my brightest memories. It was from him that I first understood how one was supposed to love his Motherland and his people."

The outstanding Russian literary critic and revolutionary democrat, N. Dobrolyubov, noted that one found "such thoughts and feelings "in Shevchenko!s works "which, while belonging to the Ukrainian people, are understandable and close to each who hasn't completely maimed the worthiest human sentiments within himself.

Shevchenko was confident that the main thing in the aspirations of the working masses of different nations is that which unites them, and not that which disunites.

Everything progressive within a nation, Shevchenko thought, invariably constitutes a general human value. The national which does not go beyond the narrow Philistine outlooks loses its national character; it does not express the historical interests of the given nation.

The poet believed in the creative strength of nations, in their mutual sympathy. The range of humanism of the Ukrainian Kobzar enabled him to see positive features in other peoples, to understand their way of life and aspirations. The conclusion he arrived at was that peoples and nations can and must be friends. They are a single family, "children of the same mother."

In exile, the poet saw in his dreams the beloved Ukraine and her people in a fraternal union with the Russian nation and its advanced culture. Gogol, Pushkin, Lermontov and Saltykov Shchedrin were to Shevchenko "our" writers and pods, near and dear to the Ukrainian people.

All his life, the Kobzar remained true to the idea of the equality of nations and looked forward to their friendship and fraternity. in 1860, in his creative prime, remaining wholly and thoroughly national, he wrote on behalf of all tribes and peoples suffering in czarist Russia, that "prison of nations", these lines:

"And on our land, by faith retrieved,
No foremen shall be brought to birth,
Mothers and sons shall show their worth
And love shall reign throughout the earth."

National liberation struggle was for Shevchenko not only the overthrow of the old exploiter system, but also a road toward asserting a new, happy life. He envisioned the future as a beautiful ripe wheat field, full of happy tillers. He foretold:

"Then land and lakes with life will teen,
In place of narrow roads of old
On every side there will unfold
New highways, broad and sacred roads.".....

Shevchenko lived full of expectations of great social changes. He was deeply affected by the coming revolutionary events in Russia. He was convinced that true human happiness was unthinkable outside of social conditions which could help bring it about.

The poet dreamed of new social relationships when work to transform the land would bring people joy, well-being and happiness.

"To eager, toiling hands,
To ardent, toiling brains-
Send tilth of fallow fields,
Thinking and speedy sowing
And reaping of things sown
Send to the toiling hands."

By his creations, the great folk bard bestowed Ukrainian literature with a wealth of new themes and genres never seen before and made it a worthy contribution to the treasury of world literature.

Shevchenko's path was subsequently followed by most advanced Ukrainian men of letters, such as Marko Vovehok, Panas Mymy, Ivan Franko, Pavlo Hrabovsky, Mikhailo Kotsyubynsky and Lesya Ukrainka. They continued and developed his great traditions of realism, folk character, democratic orientation and humanism.

Modern Ukrainian authors highly value and respect Shevchenko's heritage and learn from it.

The great Ukrainian poet developed and systematized the vocabulary and grammar of the Ukrainian language which have since remained a norm and standard for writers, the press, the theater and so on. He borrowed from the general vernacular all which he thought was most essential and eloquent and revealed in his works the richness, flexibility and charming melodiousness of the Ukrainian tongue.

His role in the history of the Ukrainian nation and all mankind was artfully defined by Ivan Franko, one of his celebrated successors.

"He was a muzhik's son and became a ruler in the realm of spirit.
"He was a serf and became a giant in the kingdom of human culture.
"He was a self-taught man and showed professors and learned scholars new, bright and free roads....
"It was only after his death that Fate made him her best, most precious present-undying glory and everlasting joy which his creations shall again and again awaken in millions of human hearts."

YEVHEN SHABLIOVSKY, laureate of the Taras Shevchenko State Prize, corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences, Ukr. SSP.