This volume has a second title page, facing the English one, and it is not in Russian.
It is in Ukrainian. Taras Shevchenko · Vybrani tvory · Poeziya ta proza — selected works, poetry and prose — Ilyustratsii z oryhinaliv T. Shevchenka, illustrations from originals by T. Shevchenko. And at the foot, the publisher's own name in Ukrainian: Vydavnytstvo Prohres, Moskva.
Every other volume in this strand, including Progress's own later Shevchenko of 1979, carries its facing title page in Russian. This one is in Ukrainian, down to the publisher's own name. That tells you what kind of book it is before you have read a word, and the editorial note inside confirms it:
This volume has been prepared especially for the 150th anniversary of the birth of Taras Shevchenko. Sponsored by the Ukrainian Shevchenko Jubilee Committee, the book aims to comprehensively acquaint the English-language reader with the life, works and ideas of the great Ukrainian poet.
This is a jubilee edition, made in Kyiv's interest and printed in Moscow, for the hundred and fiftieth anniversary in 1964. It matters, because it produced the most scrupulous piece of editorial apparatus this series has met.
Taras Hryhorovych Shevchenko (1814–1861) was born a serf on an estate belonging to the Engelhardt family. He was a house-boy and then apprenticed to his owner's painter in Petersburg. In 1838 his freedom was bought: Karl Bryullov painted a portrait of the poet Zhukovsky, the portrait was raffled for 2,500 roubles, and the money bought a man.
Kobzar followed in 1840, and Ukrainian literature had its national poet.
In 1847 he was arrested with the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius, a Kyiv society for a federation of Slav republics and the abolition of serfdom. His sentence was the heaviest of the group, because of the poems found on him: service as a private soldier in the Orenburg garrisons, with an instruction added by Nicholas I in his own hand that the prisoner be forbidden to write or to paint. He served ten years.
He was released in 1857 and died in 1861, a week before the emancipation manifesto was read in the churches. He is buried, as he asked, on a hill above the Dnieper at Kaniv.
Most volumes in this strand carry a commissioned foreword that tells the reader what to think. This one carries a foreword too — "The Bard of the Ukraine", by Yevhen Kyryliuk, the leading Shevchenko scholar of the period, who would write the foreword to Progress's 1979 edition as well. The translators are credited individually, and one name is worth noting: the diary is translated by John Weir, the Canadian-Ukrainian communist and translator who spent much of his life carrying Ukrainian literature into English. But the volume also carries something rarer: a set of General Editorial Remarks that explain what the editors did and where they failed.
They are candid about the shortfall:
It will not detract from the successes achieved in this undertaking to state quite candidly that the translations still fall short of the rare richness of Shevchenko's poetry.
They are candid about an omission — "Unfortunately, it has not been possible to include one of his plays" — which is more than the 1979 volume manages about the several things it leaves out.
And they state plainly the fact about Shevchenko's two languages that the later edition leaves for the reader to notice:
All of Shevchenko's poems included in this volume were written in the Ukrainian language and are either translated directly from the Ukrainian or have been checked with the original. Shevchenko wrote his autobiography, his novels and his diary in Russian and the translations were made from that language.
That is the whole linguistic situation of a colonised literature in two sentences, set down without embarrassment. The poetry is in the mother tongue. The prose — written in exile, for the only market that existed — is in the imperial one. The 1964 editors tell you which is which and translate accordingly.
Then there is the transliteration policy, which is the single most Ukrainian-conscious paragraph in this entire strand:
Ukrainian names have been retained as they are pronounced, except in cases where a different spelling is already established in English.... The absence of a separate letter for the "g" sound in the Ukrainian alphabet has presented some difficulties. Ukrainians usually sound "h" where Russians, English and others use "g"...
Editors in Moscow in 1964, preparing a book for English readers, stopping to explain that Ukrainian has h where Russian has g and choosing to follow the Ukrainian. It is a small thing and it is not nothing.
The selection is large and the shape of it is the argument.
The poems run from "The Bewitched" and "Katerina" through Haidamaki entire — including "Gonta in Uman" — to the late lyrics and "Testament". There is "The Caucasus". There is "A Dream", the satire on Nicholas I's court. There is "To N. Kostomarov", written to a fellow prisoner of the Brotherhood.
Then, under PROSE: the Autobiography, the novel The Artist, and the Diary.
Then apparatus most Progress volumes do not attempt: General Editorial Remarks, a section called The Historical Background, and forty pages of notes.
That last inclusion deserves comment. The Historical Background exists because, as the editors say, "a number of Shevchenko's poems here included are on Ukrainian historical themes and others contain references to the past of the Ukraine", and they judged it better to give the history in one place than scatter it through the notes. An English reader in 1964 could not be assumed to know anything about the Hetmanate, the Zaporozhian Sich or the Koliivshchyna, and this edition simply tells them.
It also tells them something else, and here the ideology is visible:
The second largest of the Slavic nations of Europe, the Ukrainians are historically, linguistically and culturally close to the Russians and Byelorussians. All three Eastern Slavic nations developed from common ancestors, the ancient Rus, who a thousand years ago established a great and flourishing early feudal state with Kiev as its capital.
That is the standard Soviet formula of the three fraternal East Slavic peoples descending from Kyivan Rus. As history it is defensible in outline and heavily freighted in use: a shared origin is a fact about the tenth century and an argument about the twentieth. A reader should register that the historical sketch preceding these poems begins by establishing closeness, and that the poems themselves are frequently about the opposite.
Shevchenko wrote his life in the third person, and it is funnier than anyone expects.
Taras Shevchenko, the son of a serf peasant, Grigory Shevchenko, was born on February 25, 1814, in the village of Kirilovka, Zvenigorod district, Kiev Province, on the estate of the landowner Vassily Vassilyevich Engelhardt. When he was going on eight years of age, having lost his father and mother, he found refuge with a church sexton in a school as his pupil-drudge.
The sexton discovers the boy can read, and puts him to work:
The sexton, realising that his pupil-drudge had the ability, used to send him in his stead to read prayers for the souls of serfs who had passed away, for which he paid him every tenth kopeck in remuneration.
Every tenth kopeck. And then the orphan takes his revenge, in a sentence that is worth the price of the volume:
But despite such flattering attention from his strict Spartan teacher, on one of the many days and nights when the Spartan teacher and his friend Iona Limar were dead drunk, the pupil-drudge, baring the buttocks of his mentor and benefactor, without a twinge of conscience gave him a good dose of the rod. Having avenged himself to the full and purloining a book with pictures, that very night he ran away...
An eight-year-old serf orphan flogs his drunken schoolmaster, steals a book with pictures in it, and runs. Shevchenko tells it about himself, in the third person, with "mentor and benefactor" placed exactly where the sarcasm will do most damage.
This autobiography is not in Progress's 1979 Shevchenko. It is one of the reasons to have this edition.
The other reason is the diary, and its first entry should be read by anyone who wants to know what a ban on writing actually costs.
Nicholas I had ordered that the prisoner be forbidden to write or to draw. Shevchenko obeyed for ten years. On 12 June 1857, with release in sight, he began a notebook — and this is the first thing he thought worth recording:
The first remarkable event to be entered in my notes is that while trimming this first notebook for those notes, I broke my penknife. The event would seem too trivial to be mentioned as something extraordinary in this motley book. If that incident had taken place in the capital or even in a sizable provincial city, it would not, naturally, have found its way into my memorandum book. But it occurred in the Kirghiz steppe, i.e., in the Novopetrovsk fortress, where for a literate person, such as I, that item comes dear; and what's most important, it cannot always be acquired even for a considerable sum of money.... Now it is clear why in the Novopetrovsk fortress the loss of a penknife is an event that deserves to be recorded. But let them be — both the fortress and the knife; soon, God willing, I will break out of this boundless prison.
The next day he explains why the diary does not cover the ten years:
I ought to have started my journal when I was first pressed into the armed forces, namely, in 1847. By now it would have been an exceedingly thick and an exceedingly boring notebook. Recalling those past ten sad years, I am heartily glad that the happy thought to provide myself with a notebook did not strike me at that time. What would I have jotted down in it? It is true that during those ten years I saw things gratis which not everyone manages to see even for money. But how did I see all this? As a prisoner sees a gay marriage procession through a grating.
As a prisoner sees a gay marriage procession through a grating. That is the sentence, and it is worth all the forewords in this strand put together. The decade is not described because a man forbidden to write does not become a witness; he becomes someone watching other people's lives happen on the other side of a grating.
There is no sentence like it in the 1979 volume, because the 1979 volume does not print the autobiography and prints less of the diary.
Because what this volume prints, at length and uncut, keeps declining to be fraternal.
Katerina — dedicated, in gratitude, to the Russian court poet whose portrait bought Shevchenko's freedom — opens by telling Ukrainian girls that "Muscovites are foreign folk", and repeats it twenty lines later. The Caucasus takes the side of the mountaineers against the empire that is conquering them and ends by inviting the conquered to admire "Boundless Siberia" and "prisons — myriads!" A Dream — subtitled, flatly, A Comedy — takes the reader to the imperial capital to look at the Tsar. It carries an epigraph from the Gospel of John about "the spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive because it seeth him not", and it opens by sorting humanity into its occupations:
Each man on earth has his own fate, ... This one builds up, that one lays waste, And that casts greedy eyes O'er all the globe, to find somewhere A land not yet enslaved, Which he could conquer and then bear With him into the grave.
A land not yet enslaved, which he could conquer. That is the third couplet of the poem, and it is aimed at an empire the poet was a subject of. Manuscripts of A Dream were among the papers found on Shevchenko in 1847, and they are a large part of why his sentence was heavier than those of the other members of the Brotherhood.
And Haidamaki gives the 1768 rising in full, including the part where Shevchenko stops the poem to call what his own people did "the vengeance worse than hell" and asks, "Oh people! Will you e'er / Be satisfied with what you have?"
None of this is censored. It is all here, in a book sponsored by a Ukrainian jubilee committee and printed by the Soviet state's own house, with an introductory essay establishing how close the three East Slavic nations are. The volume contains its own contradiction and does not attempt to resolve it, which is more honest than resolving it would have been.
Progress issued Shevchenko twice in English, and this series reissues both printings, because they are different books.
This one, 1964, is the Ukrainian jubilee edition: Ukrainian title page, Ukrainian sponsorship, the autobiography and the diary, the historical sketch, the notes, and an editorial statement that explains its own decisions and admits its own failures.
The 1979 Selected Works is a Moscow Classics Series volume: Russian facing title page, a slimmer apparatus, and no general editorial remarks. It has one distinction of its own, and it is a strange one — four other volumes in that series head their half-title "PROGRESS · RUSSIAN CLASSICS SERIES", while the Shevchenko reads only "PROGRESS: CLASSICS SERIES". Somebody removed a word rather than replace it.
Between them the two printings record fifteen years of the same house deciding, twice, how to hand a Ukrainian national poet to English readers — once from Kyiv's side and once from Moscow's. Read the 1964 for the apparatus and the prose. Read the 1979 for the later selection. Read both for what the difference tells you.
A reader who acquires both Shevchenko volumes in this series will find a good deal of overlap in the verse and almost none in everything else, and the difference is not a matter of length.
The 1964 edition was made to answer a question: what would an English reader need in order to understand this poet? Its answer was an autobiography, a novel, a diary, a historical sketch of Ukraine from Kyivan Rus onward, forty pages of notes, a statement of translation policy, and an admission that the translations fall short. The 1979 edition was made to fill a slot in a series.
Neither is dishonest. But the earlier book treats its reader as someone who needs equipping, and the later one treats its reader as someone who needs introducing. That is a real change in what a state publishing house thought foreign readers were for, and it happened in fifteen years.
A serf bought out of bondage with the price of a portrait, forbidden by an emperor's own hand to write or draw for ten years, who produced the strongest poetry against empire written inside that empire in the nineteenth century.
And an edition made by people who cared enough to explain why they had put an h where a Russian would have put a g.