The Man and the Symbol

(abridged)

Personality and reputation are not commensurate terms, for although they are obviously connected, the connection between them is not organic. A man may be greater or less than his reputation, and his reputation may grow or diminish in harmony with the fluctuating fashions of thought. Essentially a man's reputation is not a projection of his personality, as the branch is of the tree, but rather a reflection, like his image in a mirror, and this being so, it is determined by the nature of the reflecting surface – here the human environment – which is clearly subject to the influence of place and time. The career of Taras Shevchenko illustrates all these things, except the ebb of a reputation, for in the years since his death his fame has grown unabated with the turbulent growth of Ukrainian self-consciousness. Today he is still the symbol of his country's unslaked passion for freedom from tyranny in all its forms as he once became in the first flush of youthful ardour.

Ukrainian literature in its modern sense begins almost with Shevchenko in the first half of the 19th century, although its recorded beginnings go back to the introduction of the Cyrillic alphabet and of Old Bulgarian literature at Kiev in the 10th. The modern phase is represented before Shevchenko by Ivan Kotlyarevsky, whose language, unlike that of earlier Ukrainian authors, exclusively reproduces the contemporary vernacular. This was also used by another outstanding precursor of Shevchenko - Hryhoriy Kvitka-Osnovyanenko, as well as by an entire school of Kotlyarevsky's imitators, all of whom focused their attention on depicting Ukrainian life and manners. The careers of Shevchenko's two precursors overlap into the Romantic period, but neither had the temperament to profit by the emancipating effect of the new literary fashion. And so it fell to Shevchenko to express Romanticism, especially its later phase, in Ukrainian literature.

The advent of Shevchenko was sudden and startling and carried the more responsive of his compatriots off their feet in a wave of fervent admiration. Such a poet had not been known in Ukraine before. His vivid, singing, emotional verse, both lyrical and narrative, had a familiar ring and movement, for it was the language of Ukrainian folk-song with its recognizable epithets, subtle stressing, and simple charm of manner. And yet it was not folk-poetry, for the poet's personality shone through the words with an unmistakable radiance, and it was the personality of a man who loved his country not only in the aureoles and heroisms of its past, but even more in its contemporary state of abject humiliation. This man moreover was acutely aware of social and national injustice and was not afraid to indict his people's enemies and to make them feel the sting and lash of his tongue.

Shevchenko, as a man of letters, was known to his contemporaries by two books of verse – The Minstrel (Kobzar) and The Haydamaks (Haydamaky). Only a small part of the first, as it is now constituted, appeared in 1840, two years after his emancipation from serfdom by purchase through the kind offices of his Russian friends Zhukovsky and Bryullov. In content it is partly lyrical and partly narrative, while The Haydamaks (1841) is wholly narrative; in tone both are predominately lyrical. Both draw on native folklore as well as on the Romantic balladry of Western Europe, and there is a great deal in them that come from the poet's own experience whether direct or vicarious. Thus, for his Haydamaks, Shevchenko made use of his grandfather's eyewitness stories of the peasant revolt of 1768 (koliyivshchyna), imbuing them with the vitality of passionate memory. An expanded edition of The Minstrel came out in 1860, and since Shevchenko's death early in the following year other writings of his have come to light. The core of Shevchenko's literary art was and remains his Ukrainian verse, and the impact of this on his contemporaries and on succeeding generations is usually explained by reference to its "national" character (narodnist '). His poetry has been equated with Ukrainian folk-songs (pisni) and folk-ballads (dumy), because they share a common vocabulary and style. The Russian critic K. Chukovsky avers in one of his pre-revolutionary essays that his collation of the verse of The Minstrel with equivalents in Maksymovych's edition (1843) of Ukrainian folk-songs has persuaded him that there is not a line of Shevchenko's poetry which cannot be paralleled from the folk-songs. This seems to be an exaggeration at best, although there can be no doubt that Shevchenko's verse is permeated with elements of folk-speech. Dobrolyubov, the Russian radical, reviewing the second edition of The Minstrel (1860), drew a parallel between Shevchenko and Koltsov and found that the former had closer and firmer ties with the common people.

Although Shevchenko never married, love played a significant part in his career, and several of the women he was attracted to were the subjects of his pictures, for Shevchenko was a portraitist as well as painter of landscapes and historical canvasses. To understand him completely, as we must, it is necessary to study his work in that other field of art which he made his own. Here the influence of Karl Bryullov was of capital importance, even if it did not rise, except in the earliest phase, to the plane of inspiration. Shevchenko's careful and accurate draughtsmanship, his attention to detail, and his ability to seize and reproduce a slightly stylized likeness were all the results of Bryullov's precept and example. But the static quality of Bryullov's Classical art found no reflection in Shevchenko's practice. Between 1838 and 1847 Shevchenko passed through his period of apprenticeship to art, working mainly at the St. Petersburg Academy. By 1840 he was already illustrating books with engravings, and his subsequent visits to Ukraine provided him with practice in portraiture and with fresh impressions. 1847, when he was exiled to Orenburg, was a critical year in his life. Yet what seemed at first like catastrophe to the artist was not without its blessings in the long run.

We began this essay with an attempt to detach Shevchenko from his reputation and we have considered him apart from it. Let us now consider him as a symbol, for this is one of the forms which a man's reputation may invest. All Shevchenko's literary work is closely bound up with his love and longing for Ukraine. It is only in the concrete visual detail of painting that his thoughts seem at times to be completely removed from his native landscapes and memories. Now it is the patriotic aspect of Shevchenko's work, especially of his poetry, which first endeared him to his compatriots and has since made him the personification of the Ukrainian's thirst for liberty and independence. One might interpose here that the patriot Shevchenko, say, the celebrated "Testament" (Zapovit) of 1845, in which he calls on his own to bury him and to rise and break their chains, and, echoing a passage of La Marseillaise, "to spatter freedom with evil enemy blood", – that this Shevchenko is only a fragment of a much larger whole, that his patriotism is only one aspect of his many-sided personality.
Shevchenko’s patriotism is that of the artist who is primarily a man of feeling. With him it is not a shibboleth, but a profound emotional experience. Nevertheless it has binding power and it can serve, as Shevchenko knew well himself, as a call to arms. Study of those lyrics in which he speaks of his country not merely as an object of longing, but as the future home of his liberated compatriots, shows that he tried to project his sense of national equity into the future and to visualize this as an age of personal freedom in the homeland. So we find him, in his "Friendly Epistle to My Compatriots" (1845), urging them not to seek freedom and brotherhood abroad, but in their native Ukraine, in their own homes, where they will find "their own truth, strength, and freedom", and imploring them to create a new age by embracing one another in brotherhood.

(Matthews W. K. The Man and the Symbol [Electronic Resource] /

W. K. Matthews. – Forum Magazine. –№ 77. – March, 1989. –

Режим доступу: http://www.infoukes.com/shevchenkomuseum/articles.htm)

2. Read the text again and answer the questions.Substantiate your ideas using the information from the text.

1. What are the author’s thoughts about the connection between reputation and personality?

2. Does the author try to attach Shevchenko to his reputation?

3. Why does he consider Shevchenko to be a symbol?

4. What peculiarities of Shevchenko’s literary work are mentioned in the article?

5. What was the influence of Karl Bryullov on Shevchenko as a painter?

6. What is Shevchenko’s patriotism according to the article?