Poetry
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Taras Shevchenko is celebrated as the Ukrainian national poet and a founder of modern Ukrainian literature.
A child of serfs, Shevchenko received a religious education before being discovered as a painter, leading to his emancipation from serfdom in 1838. After a few years of activity as a painter and poet in the early 1840s, Shevchenko was arrested by Tsarist Russian authorities for his revolutionary poetry and association with the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius, a secret society for the liberation of Ukraine. Subsequently, Shevchenko was ordered to be exiled to Siberia "under the strictest surveillance, without the right to write or paint" by Tsar Nicholas I himself. (He had earned the Tsar's enmity by writing a poem mocking his wife's appearance.)
Shevchenko returned to Ukraine following Nicholas I's death, but died shortly thereafter. Shevchenko's poetry continues to inspire those engaged in the struggle for Ukrainian independence, including the Euromaidan protests of the early 2010s and resistance against the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.
This edition collects Shevchenko's poetry in English translation, offering readers a window into the voice that continues to define Ukraine's national literary identity.
The source for this public-domain ebook is Standard Ebooks (standardebooks.org). Ebooks from other sources often have typos, inconsistent spelling, missing accent marks, and missing punctuation. Ebooks from Standard Ebooks are proofread line by line against a scan of the original printed pages, then proofread again from cover to cover. They are also formatted and typeset following a professional-grade style manual, resulting in new editions supporting state-of-the-art ereader technology: automatic hyphenation, popup footnotes, complete and consistent metadata, high-resolution and scalable vector graphics, and ereader-compatible tables of contents. All of this makes the finished ebooks accurate, functional, and beautiful, a pleasure to read. (Waking Lion Press is not affiliated with or endorsed by Standard Ebooks.)
Taras Shevchenko
Taras Shevchenko was born a serf in 1814 and was twenty-four before he was a free man. His freedom was bought in 1838 with the money raised by a lottery for a portrait painted by Karl Bryullov, and he went into the Academy of Arts in Petersburg as a student of painting. Two years after he was freed he published Kobzar, his first book of poems.In 1845 he was back in Ukraine, travelling for the Archaeographic Commission and describing old churches and monuments in the Poltava country - Lubny, Bahachka, Pereiaslav, Andrushi. Those are the roads his characters walk in this book. On 5 April 1847 he was arrested at the Dnipro crossing by Kyiv as a member of the Cyril and Methodius Brotherhood, and was sent to the Separate Orenburg Corps as a private soldier, under an order that he was not to write and not to draw.He served at the Orsk fortress, crossed the steppe with the Aral survey expedition, and from October 1850 was held at the Novopetrovsk fort on the Caspian, where he remained nearly seven years. He wrote nine novellas in Russian in the years of his exile. This is one of them, written there in the summer of 1855, and it was not printed in his lifetime.The 2003 editors of his collected works call the problem of upbringing the main subject of the book, and note that it is the first of his works to take up the educational ideas of the philosopher Grigory Skovoroda - who is also one of its characters. They point out, too, how much of the author's own life is in it: the Pereiaslav country he had described for the Commission, his time in Kyiv, and his first years of exile, at Orenburg and on the road to the Orsk fortress.He was released in 1857 and died at Petersburg in 1861, aged forty-seven. He was buried, as he had asked, on a hill near Kaniv, and The Twins first appeared in print twenty-five years later.
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