Selected Works

Progress issued five volumes of nineteenth-century verse and prose in one series, and four of them head the half-title page Russian Classics Series: Turgenev in 1974, Saltykov-Shchedrin in 1975, Lermontov in 1978, Gogol in 1980. This volume, of 1979, reads only Classics Series. Somebody in Moscow, preparing the Ukrainian national poet for foreign readers, decided he could not be filed under Russian classics, and did not put Ukrainian in place of the missing word either. The category was simply widened until it had no nationality left in it.

Taras Shevchenko was born a serf in 1814 and bought out of bondage at twenty-four with money raised by selling a portrait. Kobzar followed in 1840. In 1847 he was arrested with the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius, which wanted a federation of Slav republics and an end to serfdom, and was sent as a private soldier to the Orenburg garrisons under an order in the Emperor's own hand forbidding him to write or to paint. He served ten years, and died in 1861 a week before the manifesto emancipating the serfs was read out in the churches.

At the centre of the selection is The Caucasus, written in 1845 for a friend killed in the conquest of the mountains, and printed here in full: the strongest poem against the empire's colonial war produced inside that empire. The prose is here too, written in Russian because after 1847 a banned Ukrainian writer had no other market.

Progress Publishers, Classics Series, 1979. Foreword by Yevgeny Kirilyuk; translated from the Ukrainian, chiefly by Olga Shartse and Irina Zheleznova.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.