Taras Shevchenko (1814 - 1861) was a Ukrainian poet, painter, engraver and political figure, born into serfdom and freed at the age of twenty-four. [1] His collection Kobzar established the modern Ukrainian literary language and gave decisive form to Ukrainian national identity. [2] Imprisoned and exiled for a decade for his writing and political associations, he is regarded as the founding figure of Ukrainian literature.
Early life and emancipation
Taras Hryhorovych Shevchenko was born on 25 February 1814 in the village of Moryntsi, in the Kyiv region of the Russian Empire, as the property of the landowner Vasyl Engelhardt. [1] Both his parents died before he was twelve, and he was put to work as a household servant. His employer, recognising a use for his drawing, apprenticed him to painters in Vilnius and then in Saint Petersburg.
In the imperial capital his talent came to the attention of the Ukrainian artist Ivan Soshenko, who introduced him to the painter Karl Briullov and the poet Vasily Zhukovsky. To raise the price of his freedom the two organised a lottery of Briullov's portrait of Zhukovsky, and Shevchenko was emancipated in 1838. [3] He entered the Imperial Academy of Arts as a student of Briullov.
Kobzar and early writing
In 1840 Shevchenko published Kobzar, a slim collection named for the itinerant blind minstrels of Ukraine who sang to the bandura. Written in the vernacular at a time when Ukrainian was widely treated as a dialect unsuited to literature, the poems drew on folk song, historical memory and the experience of serfdom, and their reception transformed the status of the language. [2] The long poem Haidamaky, on the peasant uprisings of the eighteenth century, followed in 1841.
Returning to Ukraine, Shevchenko worked for the Kyiv Archaeographic Commission recording historical monuments and joined the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius, a secret society advocating the abolition of serfdom and a federation of Slavic peoples. [1] He also wrote poems, circulated in manuscript, that attacked the imperial order and the empress directly.
Arrest and exile
The brotherhood was betrayed in 1847 and Shevchenko was arrested. He was sentenced to service as a private soldier in the Orenburg garrison on the eastern edge of the empire, and Tsar Nicholas I personally added a prohibition on writing and painting. [3] He spent ten years in the fortresses of the Kazakh steppe and at Novopetrovsk on the Caspian, evading the ban where he could by concealing small notebooks and taking part as an artist in surveying expeditions to the Aral Sea.
Released after the death of Nicholas I, he was permitted to return to Saint Petersburg in 1858, his health broken. He resumed work as an engraver, and in 1860 the Academy of Arts conferred on him the title of academician in recognition of his etchings. [1] He died in Saint Petersburg on 10 March 1861, days after his forty-seventh birthday and a week before the decree abolishing serfdom was proclaimed. In accordance with his poem Zapovit, or "Testament," his body was carried to Ukraine and buried on Chernecha Hill above the Dnieper near Kaniv.
Legacy
He is honoured in Ukraine as the country's foremost cultural figure, and his birthday is marked annually; monuments to him stand in cities across Ukraine and in the Ukrainian diaspora worldwide. [2] His visual work, comprising more than eight hundred paintings, watercolours and prints, is studied as a significant contribution to nineteenth-century art in its own right. [3]
