The Kobzar of the Ukraine/Who Was Taras Shevchenko
Who was Taras Shevchenko?
What "Uncle Tom's Cabin" did for the negroes of the United States of America the poems of Shevchenko did for the serfs of Russia. They aroused the conscience of the Russian people, and the persecutions suffered by the poet at the hands of the autocracy awakened their sympathy.
It was two days after the death of Shevchenko that the czar's ukase appeared granting freedom to the serfs. Possibly the dying poet knew it was coming and died the happier on that account.
But in still another way does this man's figure stand out. In the country called the Ukraine is a nation of between thirty and forty millions of people, having a language of their own—the language in which these poems were composed.
This has been, as it were, a nation lost, buried alive one might say, beneath the power of surrounding empires.
They have a terrible history of oppression, alternating with desperate revolts against Polish and Muscovite tyranny.
In these poems speaks the struggling soul of a downtrodden people. To our western folk, reared in happier surroundings there is a bitter tang about some of them, somewhat like the taste of olives, to which one must grow accustomed. The Slavonic temperament, too, is given to melancholy and seems to dwell congenially in an atmosphere misty with tears. But he gravely misreads their literature who fails to perceive the grim resolve beneath the sorrow.
In the struggle of the Ukrainians for freedom the spirit of this poet, who was born a serf, remains ever their guiding star.
