A Half-Century of Greatness by Ewen Frederic; Wollock Jeffrey; Kramer Aaron

Author:Ewen, Frederic; Wollock, Jeffrey; Kramer, Aaron
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: NYU Press
Published: 2007-03-12T16:00:00+00:00

Taras Shevchenko was no novice in misfortunes. Attending divinities that minister at the birth of serf-children are scarcely generous, and the privileges with which they endowed him were the normal ones: the doom of a life of suffering, oppression, humiliation, resentments. But fortunately, they made one exception: they also conferred upon him that unpredictable gift—not always the most grateful or happy one—of genius. It was his primal misfortune to be born a serf, the son and grandson of serfs, and to spend the first twenty-four years of his life in bondage. It was his happy fortune that in time his talent proved a juicy bait to tempt his master’s greed and thus bring salvation to the young man. As for his servitude, it was neither simple nor single. He was born a Ukrainian or “Little Russian,” of a subject nationality, almost a colony, ruled by Great Russia. He spoke Ukrainian, or Ruthenian, a vernacular belonging to the Slavic branch of languages but regarded by the dominant Russians as nothing more than a barbarous jargon. Even the enlightened Belinsky shared this prejudice. Like all oppressed minorities, the Ukrainians too, if they had not sworn total allegiance to the Russian ruler, boasted of an erstwhile independence as a state, boasted of ancient Cossack glories and victories until subjugated in turn by Poles and then Russians, and prayed and hoped for redemption. Now, as a result of numerous Polish and other partitions, one portion of the Ukraine belonged to Russia, the other to Austria. Gogol had romantically described the life of the Cossacks, but had given little thought to the national consciousness of the Ukrainians or their aspirations for independence. Those Ukrainians who were moved by national sentiments regarded “Greater Russia” as inferior in both culture and historic past as compared with their own former centers of civilization, such as Kiev.

Of course, these notions were as yet far from the consciousness of the little serf-boy born on the estates of Count Engelhardt in the tiny village of Morintsi, government of Kiev, two years after the Napoleonic invasion…

On his own body, in his spirit, he came to know the meaning of serfdom—of hard labor, beatings, degradations, hunger and sickness. His early “education” in such a school guarded him, in the future, from any illusions about the happiness and tranquility that surround the bucolic life. Of the so-called benefits that Nature confers upon her denizens he was a qualified witness. That extreme glorification of Nature and Nature’s blessings, of which the Romantics were such fervent apostles and which was also, in part, Wordsworth’s creed, Shevchenko would have scorned, had he known of it. He could scarcely have understood that poet’s lines,

One impulse from a vernal wood,

May teach you more of man,

Of moral evil and of good,

Than all the sages can…

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