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.