PERSPECTIVES: The miracle that is Shevchenko (02/28/99)

PERSPECTIVES

by Andrew Fedynsky

The miracle that is Shevchenko

The summer of 1970 in Ukraine was pretty grim. People were being arrested for "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda," books were banned and journals closed down. I was 22 and a year out of college when three buddies and I bought a van in Germany to travel into Ukraine on a camping visa. You knew you were in a totalitarian society the minute you reached the barbed-wire border. A team of militiamen spent hours going through our bags and taking our car apart. The pressure kept up the entire two weeks we were in Ukraine, with most people avoiding us, others following us, and everywhere; "Lenin Lives, Lenin Lived, Lenin Will Always Live!" Give me a break, I thought, but I didn't dare say it out loud.

Obsessively, we looked for signs of Ukraine - the real Ukraine, not the Intourist variety. Sad to say, the real Ukraine was hard to find, unless it was at your relatives' home and there people spoke in guarded voices, as if every word were being recorded. Like I said, it was grim.

On the two-lane highway between Kyiv and Lviv, we stopped at a gas station near Rivne, the only one, it seemed, for a hundred miles in either direction. Politely, we asked to fill it up, check the oil, etc. The three guys running the station were blown away. Who are you, they asked, where are you from, how much do you make, how is it you speak Ukrainian? Finally, one of them asked, 'Have you ever heard of Taras Shevchenko?" All four of us replied that, of course, we had. And he began to recite:

"When I die, then bury me in a mound
Amidst the spreading steppes,
In Ukraine, so dear to me..."

It was Shevchenko's "Zapovit" (Testament). He broke off and we continued:

"So the cultivated soil, the spreading fields,
The Dnipro and whirlpools
Will be there for me to see
And I'll hear the mighty river roar."

Well, that was it. Nothing was going to stop these guys from closing the only gas station on the highway so we could drink "50 grams." Hours later, after we'd shared not only vodka - lots of it - but also stories, jokes, poems and laughter, we were back on the road. Ukraine lives, we concluded. Shevchenko is the guiding spirit.

It's now nearly 30 years later and I have a son who's 8 years old. Right now he's busy learning a couple of verses to recite at the annual Cleveland commemoration of Taras Shevchenko's life. I used to do the same thing when I was 8. I'll bet a lot of you reading this article did too. For Ukrainians everywhere, Shevchenko, more than any other person who ever lived, defines Ukraine. You might almost say, he invented modern Ukraine - not by design, but by the drama of his life and the soaring lyricism of his verse: clear, beautiful poetry, inspiring enough to bridge the gap between communism and capitalism during the height of the Cold War.

Every Ukrainian knows the outlines of Shevchenko's biography: he was born a serf (kripak) in a village south of Kyiv in 1814. The village and, therefore, Shevchenko, belonged to Paul Engelhardt. Orphaned before he was a teenager, Shevchenko had to fend for himself, living out in the open for more than a year. Today we'd call him homeless. Finally, his master took him in as a house boy. When Shevchenko was 17, Engelhardt took him to St. Petersburg, the Russian capital. There, a group of intellectuals and artists was astonished by the intelligent, talented slave and in 1838 bought him his freedom. Shevchenko was 24. They then arranged for him to study at the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts and, without meaning to, changed the course of European history.

In 1838 Ukraine scarcely existed. There was little literature to speak of: an almanac of "Ruthenian" songs and folklore, a satire by Ivan Kotliarevsky, a play or two. That was about it. Most Ukrainians were serfs; most serfs were illiterate. The handful of Ukrainian gentry knew Russian. There was no market for Ukrainian books because there was no readership. The most prominent Ukrainian writing in 1838 was Nicolai Gogol, and he wrote exclusively in Russian. The only ones making money "writing" for a Ukrainian audience were the blind kobzars, the minstrels who wandered the countryside singing about Ukraine's faded past, the long-ago glories of Kozaks, their failed wars of independence and the bloody peasant rebellions against the ruling class.

Those were the stories that fed Shevchenko's imagination as he grew up, and they haunted him once he entered privileged circles in St. Petersburg. And so, instead of pursing a comfortable career as a society painter, Shevchenko poured his heart out in a torrent of poems based on those same stories. In his magnificent "Kobzar," Shevchenko spun beautiful images of the moon over Babylon, of storm-driven waves rising in mountains on the Dnipro, the sun warming then burning a little shepherd boy's skin. Invariably, he wove an angry analysis of Ukraine's tragic history into his verses.

For an illiterate peasantry, the flowing lines and colorful imagery were electrifying. Peter and Great and Catherine II were "executioners" who crucified Ukraine. The splendor of St. Petersburg was stolen, plundered from the ancient burial mounds the young Shevchenko saw dotting the steppes. The city itself was built on a foundation of Kozak bones. "Bury me, then rise up and beak your chains!" Shevchenko instructed.

This, of course, was powerful stuff and far more than the tsar was willing to tolerate. He ordered Shevchenko's imprisonment and forbid him to write. For another 10 years the former slave lived in exile and in servitude. His health broken, he died in 1861 at the age of 46, a week after the emancipation of the serfs in the Russian Empire.

Two years later, in 1863, sensing a rising tide of nationalism, the tsar banned the Ukrainian language altogether, but the damage was done. People could recite Shevchenko from memory. And, so for the next century and more of Russian and Soviet repression, Shevchenko loomed over every change in Ukraine, holding the political line for the millions of serfs, collective farm workers, political prisoners. If the Soviets put up a giant statue in Kyiv to celebrate the "reunification" of Russia and Ukraine, Shevchenko had a rebuttal ready, with Mother Ukraine herself denouncing the leader who had signed the fatal Pereiaslav treaty:

"Oh Bohdan, Bohdanochku, you foolish son
Had I known I'd have smothered you in your cradle."

No point in censoring that; it was committed to memory.

In 1991 when the referendum for independence was on the ballot in Ukraine, 90 percent of the people chose Shevchenko and repudiated the statue and what it stood for.

In the 159 years since Shevchenko first published his "Kobzar," Ukraine has been through a lot: world wars, forced famine, mass arrests, wholesale deportations, judicial massacres, Russification, censorship, hidden microphones, terror. When you think about it, it's a miracle that Ukraine exists at all, let alone is independent and now free to steer toward a better future.

The miracle was a long time coming. It began in 1814 with one of the most extraordinary lives in history. March is the month we traditionally remember the miracle of Shevchenko's life. Why not take out your copy of "Kobzar" and read a few lines? While you're at it, read Pavlo Zaitsev's biography of the bard. Help your child memorize a couple of verses. After all, you never know when a few lines of Shevchenko might come in handy.

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