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disturbances should spread within the confines of Russia,
determined to interfere. The leader of the Russian
army, Romanzov, proposed to Gonta an alliance against
the Poles, lured him and the officer next in command
into an ambush, and immediately delivered them to their
enemies. Then the Cossack army, which had been
deprived of its leaders, was surrounded, captured, and
fully eight thousand men were divided in crowds among
the cities of Poland for execution. Gonta and the other
chiefs were broken alive on the wheel, and all the
common men without exception were executed in different
ways. They generally preferred suffocation to hanging,
on account of its convenience, and to save the trees.
This is the subject which Shevtchenko, without going
out of his way for horrors, has presented, describing the
cruelties the oppressed were guilty of as fully as those
which were inflicted upon them, even to the extent that
this historic scene furnishes the background for the fate
of a pair of lovers.
His little pictures of society, which are usually idyllic
and emotional, are not wanting in marks of an energy
which sees life as it is at its worst. In one of the best,
“The Drowned,” he tells the story of a mother and
daughter who lived in a country village, and whose
ghosts now on moonlight nights are seen hovering to
and fro over the steppes along the banks of the streams.
The mother was a Russian, proud and sensual, rich and
beautiful, a young widow, who held a court for her
admirers. She gave birth to the daughter secretly, and
put her out to nurse in a poor Little-Russian peasant
family. The daughter grew up, became an extraordinary
beauty, and when the mother finally took her home, she
received more attention in the rich house than the
mother. When the latter became possessed with jealous
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