Full resolution (JPEG) - On this page / på denna sida - Impressions of Russian Literature - IV
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which a real war of extermination has by degrees been
finally reached.
No single person has been hit harder in this war than
Gogol’s contemporary Taras Grigorovitch Shevtchenko
(1814-1861), the greatest poet whom the Little-Russian
people have ever produced. While the other poets in
the Little-Russian dialect have built wholly upon the
popular ballads of the Ukraine, appropriated them and
carried them farther by adding individual personality,
European culture, and artistic style, Shevtchenko alone,
although he is poet of the people above everything, has
raised himself high above the level hitherto attained by
the Little-Russian literature.
Shevtchenko was born in a village in the department
of Kief, and was the son of a serf peasant who belonged
to a rude German landed proprietor, Engelhard. At the
age of eight he had a stepmother who tormented him,
and at eleven he lost his father. He was sent to school
to the parish clerk, a drunken scamp, who flogged the
boy and treated him cruelly, for fear that he, by his
rapid progress, would soon outshine him in knowledge
and deprive him of his bread. The boy ran away,
roamed about homeless for some time, and then came a
second time under instruction, this time under a servant
of the church who painted shrines, in order to learn the
art from him. This one also whipped him so inhumanly
that he ran away and took a place as a swineherd in
the village where he was born. Here his master’s
attention was drawn to the remarkable swineherd who could
read and draw, and he took him into his personal service
as bootblack and pipe-cleaner. When he was caught
copying pictures with a stolen pencil, on paper also
stolen, Engelhard had him punished with the knout;
that was at least suitable for a serf. Nevertheless, when
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