The Kobzar of the Ukraine/The Meaning of Serfdom

by Taras Shevchenko

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The Meaning of Serfdom

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Three or four days of every week the serfs—men and women alike—must labor in their master's fields for nought. What was left of the week, they were granted to earn subsistence for themselves and their families.

But that was not the worst. More bitter than labor was the fact that they were not their own, were chattels of their lord, who could sell them at his pleasure or gamble them away at cards.

He could beat them too, or kill them if he wished, without fear, for what advocate would take up the case of a penniless serf against the all-powerful aristocracy.

Hideous, too, was the glaring fact that young daughters of the serfs were regarded as the legitimate prey of the landlord and his sons.

In these later days the sins of the fathers have been visited in awful fashion on the descendants of these landlords. But can we wonder that in the writings of a poet whose childhood was poisoned by knowledge of such injustice, we find evidence of the growing avenging fury that later was to bring about such awe-inspiring convulsions in human society.

Through all of Shevchenko's verse there sounds the great theme of that contrast between the beauty of God's world, and the horrors of human cruelty.

"An earthly heaven me had from Thee; Turned it into hell have we."