Taras Shevchenko. "A man stands in the center of all the works of the poet ..."

The story of the difficult life experience of Taras Grigorievich Shevchenko has always attracted attention. A multi-faceted gifted person with different talents, he was able to develop them thanks to his indomitable pursuit of freedom, for which he struggled all his life, now gaining it, then losing it again.

March 9 marks the birthday of Taras Shevchenko, a poet and thinker, who is also known as an artist, prose writer, ethnographer and revolutionary democrat. The Presidential Library’s portal features a special collection Taras Shevchenko, which includes the writings and monographs of the writer, essays and articles on his life and work, as well as materials related to the perpetuation of his memory.

In an autobiographical letter to the editor of the People’s Creativity magazine, published in 1860 (it was included in the book by A. O. Starchakov “Shevchenko and the Revolution” posted on the Presidential Library’s portal), Shevchenko wrote: “I am the son of a serf peasant, Grigory Shevchenko. I was born in 1814, on February 25, in the village of Kirilovka (Morintsy), Zvenigorod district, Kiev province, in the estate of one landowner".

His master P. V. Engelhardt noticed the artistic skill of his 15-year-old "Cossack", who secretly painted, and allowed him to study with a portrait painter.

In 1831, Engelhardt with all the servants moved to St. Petersburg, and a new period in the life of Shevchenko began. He is a pupil of the artist V. Shiryaev, and as a journeyman-draftsman as part of his artel, he paints the Bolshoi Theater. Drawing sculptures in the Summer Garden, he met his countryman artist I. M. Soshenko, who introduced him to the circle of famous writers and painters who took a large part in the fate of the young serf artist.  

When Taras Shevchenko turned 24, he was bought from the landowner with the help of V. A. Zhukovsky and K. P. Bryullov, who organized a charity lottery to pay 2500 rubles for the freedom of a talented artist. Shevchenko not only received the right to study at the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts, but also turned to poetic creativity. Taras Grigorievich read books by Plutarch, Dante, Shakespeare, Heine, Schiller, studied history, took French lessons, attended the theater.

Shevchenko painted to order watercolors, was entering noble salons, revolved among St. Petersburg bohemians, made new friends - artists, writers, poets, scientists.

These years in St. Petersburg became the heyday of his poetic work. His famous collection “Kobzar”, poems “Gaydamaki”, “Katerina” and other works of different genres were published.

Many researchers of Shevchenko’s literary legacy, in accordance with the trends of their time, emphasized, first of all, his revolutionary democratic orientation.

Both poems, lyrics and the prose of this “national prophet” as the poet P. A. Kulish called him, are not only colored by sympathy for all the oppressed, but also filled with anger and hatred of their tormentors, faith in the inevitability of the victory of justice - as in historical past, both in the present and in the future. He himself declared: “... the first despot that I came across in my life, was settled in me, for life, deep disgust and contempt for all violence of one person over another” - these words are given in the book of A. O. Starchakov “Shevchenko and the Revolution”.

The sincere expression of these feelings in conversation and in works, membership in the secret political organization Cyril and Methodius Brotherhood could not doom the poet to persecution and imprisonment - at first there was an exile by an ordinary soldier to the Orenburg province with the personal order of the emperor “Under strict supervision, with a ban on writing and drawing”, - then to the Novopetrovsk fortification (today, the city of Fort Shevchenko in Kazakhstan), and two years after his release, he was arrested at home and deported to Petersburg.

His health was undermined. Shevchenko died at the age of 55 on March 10, 1861. At the site of his initial burial at the Smolensk Orthodox Cemetery in St. Petersburg, a memorial sign, a granite boulder with an inscription to which people bring flowers, is installed.

Both during Shevchenko’s life and after his death, contemporaries and critics treated his work, primarily literary, in different ways.

A. Ya. Efimenko, in an article of 1905 “In Memory of Taras Shevchenko” available on the Presidential Library’s portal, wrote: “Shevchenko’s poetry is a manifestation of national identity, and once a nation has realized itself as a cultural individual, it thereby provided for itself from disappearances...” Others, for example, G. D. Vladimirsky, emphasized first of all the universal, humanistic orientation of his work: “A man stands at the center of all the poet’s works, and this gives his humanism a special openness, a special force of impact". In fact, Taras Shevchenko’s creative legacy goes beyond all narrow definitions of how the soul of a person, the soul of a people cannot be limited to them.